The boycott’s impact reached far beyond Montgomery. It made civil rights a national moral cause, and King an international figure. In the ensuing years, he would be summoned with other black notables to the White House by President Eisenhower, would visit Ghana and India and make the cover of Time magazine. But he also developed an abiding sense of unworthiness to lead the cause, a fear that his career had peaked too soon, and a gnawing presentiment about his own fate. When a Hollywood producer once discussed how a movie about his life might end, King replied, “It ends with me getting killed.”
In the years after Montgomery, King often struggled to find his footing, or at least to top his first act. In 1959, he moved to Atlanta, where he at last assumed copastorship of Ebenezer with his father. Two years earlier he had founded what came to be called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an umbrella organization of black clergy dedicated to fighting for civil rights across the South. This caused considerable consternation for Roy Wilkins and the NAACP, which had been founded in 1909 and was the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights organization, one that had always believed the route to justice lay through carefully calibrated legal challenges to segregation. King’s tactics of direct action marked him as a dangerous upstart.
Indeed, King’s very prominence made him a figure of controversy for other movement leaders and white politicians alike. He may have led the mass meeting at the height of the Freedom Rides in Montgomery in the spring of 1961, but his refusal to get on the bus himself angered the young riders. So did his reason for declining: “I think I should choose the time and place of my Golgotha.” It was at this point that the activists of CORE and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began referring to King derisively as “De Lawd,” for the God character in the 1930s play The Green Pastures.
Among those Americans skeptical of King was John F. Kennedy. Despite his sympathetic phone call to Coretta King during the 1960 campaign, Kennedy would not meet with King himself until nine months into his presidency, on October 16, 1961, and only then after repeated importuning from Harris Wofford. At their meeting in the White House family quarters, King spotted a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation and urged Kennedy to issue a proclamation of his own, a “Second Emancipation,” declaring all segregation illegal under the Fourteenth Amendment. The president responded with politesse, asking King to propose a draft, but the idea went nowhere.
“Unlike the president’s relations with Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins, which were easy and sophisticated, there was always a strain in his dealing with King, who came on with a moral tone that was not Kennedy’s style and made him uncomfortable,” Harris Wofford would recall.
In fact, King’s whole Birmingham campaign in 1963 grew out of his determination to prick Kennedy’s conscience, to make him uncomfortable. In his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King couched his manifesto in ringing tones that surely struck the perpetually detached Kennedy as self-referential and overwrought. “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here,” King wrote. “Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their own home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so I am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town.”
For his part, King found Kennedy all too cool. On a walk after dinner at Wofford’s house the night of that first meeting with the president in 1961, he confided of Kennedy, “I’m convinced that he has the understanding and the political skill but so far I’m afraid that the moral passion is missing.”
* * *
BY THE TIME OF the June 22 White House meeting with King and the other leaders, Kennedy had at last demonstrated moral passion on civil rights. But his political caution in counseling against a march on Washington still prompted divergent reactions from his visitors, as they demonstrated immediately upon leaving the White House.
Speaking to reporters, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP was noncommittal about participating in any march. “That little baby does not belong to me,” he said. Just that spring, Wilkins had bearded King: “In fact, Martin, if you have desegregated anything by your efforts, kindly enlighten me.”
“Well,” King had replied, “I guess about the only thing I’ve desegregated so far is a few human hearts.”
Wilkins still favored “quiet, patient lobbying tactics” over street action. But he could hardly deny that John Kennedy’s own heart had apparently been one of those moved by King’s Birmingham campaign.
Indeed, black opinion on civil rights was no more monolithic than its white counterpart. There had been tensions between King and Wilkins dating all the way back to the Montgomery bus boycott, when King argued that the NAACP should provide even more financial support to the effort than it already was by paying the costs of the suit challenging Alabama’s transportation segregation law, and defraying the legal costs of the boycott leaders who had been indicted. Those tensions grew when King created the SCLC. Wilkins, the grandson of a Mississippi slave and nearly thirty years older than King, regarded the NAACP’s pursuit of strategic litigation, which had produced such landmark rulings as Brown v. Board of Education, as the key to success. The two men’s dueling approaches had met at last in Medgar Evers’s protests in Jackson, Mississippi, earlier that spring. Wilkins reluctantly joined that campaign and was arrested for the first time in more than thirty years of civil rights work. “We’ve baptized Brother Wilkins,” King told Stan Levison.
Despite their prominence, King and Wilkins by no means constituted the whole of the civil rights coalition’s leadership. For their part, James Farmer of CORE and John Lewis of SNCC, who had been instrumental in the Freedom Rides, looked askance at King and Wilkins as too tepid. King had tried to redeem himself with the Young Turks in the aftermath of the Freedom Rides by lending his support to a desegregation movement in Albany, Georgia, in late 1961 and 1962, but it had largely fizzled. Meantime, John Lewis regarded Urban League president Whitney Young as not really a movement figure at all but as the leader of a social service organization for northern urban blacks.
The one figure the whole group revered was the stately Philip Randolph, who had been meeting with presidents since Martin Luther King was in knee pants. He had first dreamed of a march on Washington in 1941, when he had threatened to bring a hundred thousand demonstrators to the capital to protest the lack of black hiring in the burgeoning defense economy on the eve of World War II. Only when Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to sign an executive order calling upon employers and labor unions to “provide for the full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries, without discrimination because of race, creed, color or national origin,” and setting up a Fair Employment Practices Commission empowered to investigate grievances and track compliance, did Randolph relent.
So when the march’s organizers next met at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City on July 2 to refine their plans, there was universal agreement that Randolph should chair the effort, with the power to select his own deputy. Randolph’s prestige was such that even Wilkins could not succeed in blocking his controversial choice: Bayard Rustin, a fifty-one-year-old black Quaker with a long record of support for leftist causes and a flamboyant quasi-British accent. Rustin’s opponents argued that his youthful flirtation with the Communist Party, his refusal to serve in the military, and his 1953 arrest in California on a morals charge for performing oral sex on two men in a parked car should disqualify him. (Robert Kennedy himself would call Rustin “an old black fairy.”)
But Rustin was an organizational genius, and Randolph trusted him totally. He had helped King organize the Montgomery boycott, and he later helped get the SCLC off the ground. Now Rustin turned his attention to the Washington march, which he estimated would cost $65,000 and draw a hundred thousand people. The date was fixed for August 28, a Wednesday, and the plan was for the bulk of marchers to arrive earl
y that morning and leave the same night, so as not to overwhelm the city. Any idea of a protest at the Capitol was scrapped in favor of a solemn procession in memory of Medgar Evers from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, where there would be a program of music and speeches. Lobbying visits to members of Congress would be closely supervised; all banners and placards would be created by the organizers, not individuals; and a large contingent of black New York City police officers would help serve as marshals. The sound system had to be top-notch, so that marchers could hear the speeches and heed instructions. No detail was too mundane, down to the need for chemical toilets. Years later, John Lewis would delight in the memory of Rustin’s declaring, “Now we cawn’t have any disorganized pissing in Washington.”
* * *
RUSTIN AND HIS COLLEAGUES were not the only ones busily organizing on behalf of the bill that summer. A broad coalition of the nation’s mainstream religious denominations was undertaking a strategic lobbying campaign of its own, aimed at moving the hearts and minds of white Americans—and their legislators—with pinpoint precision. Leading Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish groups—often coordinated by the umbrella organization of the National Council of Churches—plotted a crusade aimed at having maximum impact on Congress. Victor Reuther, a prominent Methodist layman and the brother of Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers, headed a planning group that suggested concentrating the legislative efforts on a limited number of states, especially in rural areas of the Midwest. Traditional civil rights groups were weak in such places—except in a handful of big cities—and the black vote nearly nonexistent, but churches were strong and well organized. As President Kennedy himself had noted, the support of senators from such states—many of them Republicans—would be vital in the fight for cloture.
So the church groups mounted a series of conferences and organizing workshops in states from Ohio to the Dakotas. Theologians and pastors joined forces with such movement figures as Clarence Mitchell, the chief lobbyist for the NAACP, to instruct local groups on how best to contact their congressional delegations by telephone, telegram, and letters, emphasizing the moral and religious dimension of the civil rights fight. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, an umbrella group that had been founded in New York in 1950 to lobby for a federal Fair Employment Practices Commission, moved its headquarters to Washington in July 1963 and began working closely with James Hamilton, the Washington representative of the National Council of Churches. Hamilton had joined the Council in 1958, and much of his early work involved such bread-and-butter issues as obtaining favorable tax treatment for churches and clergy. But as the 1960s dawned, the Council had become more involved in social justice issues, lobbying to improve wages and working conditions for migrant farm workers, for example. As religious activism on civil rights grew, Hamilton developed a mailing list of some five thousand state and local religious groups to whom he could now send periodic updates or urgent “action memos” on the status of H.R. 7152.
“The Middle West and on a bit into the Mountain States—that was the churches’ assignment,” Hamilton would recall, “because labor was in the East. So we had our work cut out for us there.” Perhaps the churches’ most powerful educational tool was the flood of horrifying news pictures from Birmingham and elsewhere. “I think people in the Midwest and in other areas began to see what the problems were, what’s happening,” Hamilton said. “The attitudes began to change.” But the churches themselves were also “working with a little more sophistication in terms of how the political process actually works than perhaps we had heretofore,” Hamilton added.
* * *
IF THE RELIGIOUS GROUPS found themselves waging an unlikely battle in the public square, Bayard Rustin and his fellow march organizers soon had an unlikely ally: John Kennedy himself. Unable to stop the march, the president determined instead to make sure it succeeded. When he asked aides who was really running it, and the answer was unclear, he replied, “Well, I’ll run it then.”
So as desultory hearings on his civil rights bill groaned on in the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, the president endorsed the march at his news conference on July 17, calling it a “peaceful assembly calling for a redress of grievances,” and adding, “I think that’s in the great tradition.” But he also issued a warning that the paramount goal now was the passage of his bill. “So I would suggest that we exercise great care in protesting so it doesn’t become riots,” he said. “And, number two, that those people who have responsible positions in Government and in business and in labor do something about the problem which leads to the demonstration.”
That same day, the District of Columbia coordinating committee for the march issued a memo soliciting help from churches to be used as assembly points and seeking some overnight lodging for marchers who would be coming from too far away to follow the preferred plan of arriving that morning and leaving the same night. There would be fifty-one assembly points around the city (one for each state, plus the District of Columbia). “Only those citizens who are committed to non-violence as a creative means of protest are urged to participate,” the memo warned.
On Capitol Hill, the politicians who were wrestling with H.R. 7152 girded for the invasion. Burke Marshall would later recall the congressional leadership as “scared to death of the march, just totally irrational.” If that was so, they did not let on publicly, instead insisting that the march would not influence their views. “I do not intend to be disturbed or dismayed by demonstrations and denunciations,” declared Everett Dirksen, who was still smarting that he had not received more black support in his 1962 reelection campaign in Illinois despite a long record of pro-civil-rights votes. His counterpart in the House, Representative Charles Halleck of Indiana, noted that there were strict rules and regulations governing activities at the Capitol and allowed that the drill team from Purdue University in his home district had recently been denied permission to perform there. And Representative William McCulloch of Ohio, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, whose support for the bill was crucial, insisted, “They’re not going to bluff me. Doctors, lawyers, everybody could start marching and there would be no end to it.”
At the Justice Department, Bob Kennedy assigned John Douglas, now the head of the civil division and the son of Paul Douglas, the liberal senator from Illinois who was one of the civil rights bill’s biggest supporters, to coordinate the government’s share of the planning. In twice-daily meetings over the next five weeks, Douglas worked with John Reilly, who headed the Justice Department’s office of United States attorneys, to sketch a battle plan.
As with Bayard Rustin, no detail was too small. Douglas worked with the UAW and the National Council of Churches to assure a respectable white turnout. King had led a peaceful march of 125,000 people in downtown Detroit on June 23, and Reilly went to school on the lessons learned there. “No cop under two years and no left-handers,” he scribbled in his working notes. (The ban on left-handers may have been intended to ensure proper coordination should nightsticks be needed, but it may also have been Reilly’s Irish slang for anyone not up to snuff.)
“Troops and cops should be talked to—smile—help,” Reilly continued. Among the endless questions to be resolved: “Time program starts. Who ends the program? Route to be taken to White House. Which gate do leaders enter?” The president had agreed to meet the leaders at the White House after the march, one more inducement to keep it peaceful. Yet another crucial matter: “Security of sound system. (Can we cut it off).” Liquor stores would be closed, and marchers urged to pack food that would not spoil in the August heat. And finally, a special demand from Douglas to the Washington police, who reluctantly agreed: no dogs.
“All this arranging and orchestrating was alarming to many of us at SNCC,” John Lewis would recall. “The sense of militancy, which was so central to most of our efforts, which was so much a part of our definition of ourselves, was being deflated. Civility had become the emphasis of this event. It wa
s becoming a march in, not on, Washington. The whole thing seemed to have been co-opted by the government—co-opted very deftly.”
In a bizarre example of just how far the administration was willing to go to stage-manage the event, Reilly’s notes urged administration officials to meet with an executive at the local Metromedia television affiliate in Washington, which was to broadcast a postmarch roundtable with King and other leaders. The panel was to be moderated by J. Richard Kennedy, an old friend of James Farmer and Philip Randolph. Kennedy was not only a novelist and the screenwriter of I’ll Cry Tomorrow, a weepy biopic about the alcoholic singer Lillian Roth, but also Harry Belafonte’s former business manager. And he was as well—totally unbeknown to Belafonte or the other civil rights figures—the Central Intelligence Agency’s principal source of domestic intelligence on the civil rights movement, and an old enemy of Stan Levison’s.
Reilly even suggested that J. Richard Kennedy “should be briefed on how J.F.K. and Pierre”—the White House press secretary, Pierre Salinger—“would like show to go—line questioning should take.” At the time, however, the press and public knew next to nothing about the nature or extent of the government’s involvement in planning for the march, and that suited Douglas, Reilly, and their Justice Department colleagues just fine.
In the midst of all this elaborate orchestration, a sour note sounded. In early August, Martin King took ten days’ vacation with his family at Clarence Jones’s house in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, and there the FBI wiretap soon picked up conversations that set J. Edgar Hoover’s blood boiling: salacious sex talk, intimations of infidelity, a loose, unplugged aspect of King’s personality that reinforced Hoover’s deepest doubts and suspicions. On August 13, the director sent a confidential two-page summary of the findings to Nick Katzenbach at the Justice Department, who passed it along to Bob Kennedy, who bucked it straight up to the president with the driest of cover notes: “I thought you would be interested in the attached memorandum.”
An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Page 12