Lawson had tried to arrange a meeting with King, but she downplayed any eagerness on JFK’s part, whereas Wofford stressed the urgency of bringing the two men together. With Wofford and Shriver supervising Black outreach and Frank Reeves having been hired in the summer of 1960, Lawson sensed that she was being edged out. Lawson said she felt doubly marginalized as a Black woman in the Kennedys’ overwhelmingly white male circle, and she reacted with understandable frustration to two white men taking over issues related to the Black community. She also resented Frank Reeves, a lawyer she thought had gotten involved in the campaign only for the title and the status it conferred.
To ease the tension between Lawson and Reeves, Shriver decided in August that Reeves would henceforth travel with JFK, introducing the candidate to local Black leaders, while Lawson would retain the title of chair of the CRS back in D.C., though it was now Martin who was, in Wofford’s eyes, “the heart organizing and directing the whole operation.” Reeves sensed the shift, too, realizing that Louis Martin was “more and more the strong man in the national campaign staff operation.”
The circumstances under which Reeves came to King’s cell were convoluted. Earlier in the week, King tested the genuineness of Senator Kennedy’s recent helpfulness by asking if the campaign would help investigate an incident that had happened during an SCLC gathering in Shreveport, Louisiana. Reeves immediately made plans to assist the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, who had been arrested and had several important SCLC documents stolen from him. On an even more troubling note, one of the SCLC’s field secretaries had been shot at in his car on Saturday, the bullet just missing his head. No arrests were being made. The Kennedy campaign’s plan was to have Reeves, a Howard law professor, speak with King to gather more information, though there was an ulterior motive: Reeves could also use this as an opportunity to secure an endorsement from King. Flying to Louisiana, Reeves took a detour to the Atlanta airport, where he was supposed to meet Dr. King Wednesday afternoon for this discussion.
Arriving at the airport, Reeves went to the lounge and waited, but King did not show. He called King’s office and discovered that the minister would certainly not be making their meeting: he had just been arrested at Rich’s department store. Now in Atlanta for no purpose, Reeves phoned Wofford to tell him King was jailed. Wofford and Reeves agreed that it was imperative for the campaign to respond, both for King’s sake and for the campaign’s own. Reeves agreed to stay in Atlanta for the time being.
Once Wofford received news of King’s imprisonment from Reeves, he and Martin convened an emergency meeting. The last thing they wanted was some twist in the national narrative less than three weeks from Election Day, but none of the ideas they explored seemed quite right: either the downsides for Kennedy were too great, or the gestures themselves seemed half-hearted.
It was always difficult for the CRS to get anything approved, as Martin found out soon after he joined the campaign. Back in the first weeks of autumn, Martin had proposed that Kennedy telegram Nixon to demand a strong statement on integration. Shriver’s question in response was, as always, “How many votes will this idea win or lose for us?” Martin insisted that such action would gain them more votes than it would cost, so Shriver determined that they would call Kennedy together from his room at the Mayflower Hotel. Around midnight, Shriver started to pitch the Nixon telegram but then stopped short, saying, “Wait a minute, Jack; let me put Louis on the phone. Maybe he can explain what he has in mind.” Then, realizing Kennedy had no idea who he was talking about, Shriver added, “This is Louis Martin, a newspaper man from Chicago who is working with us.”
Kennedy welcomed Martin to the campaign, and the latter began to describe his idea. Kennedy, however, quickly cut him off, saying, “You don’t know that sonofabitch like I do.” Kennedy explained, “Instead of answering directly, he will curve, and come back with another question. I don’t think we can pin the bastard down that way.” Far from being hurt by Kennedy’s immediate dismissal of his idea, Martin loved the senator’s decisiveness. After Martin put down the phone, Shriver said, “Now you see why he’s a leader. His mind is sharp.” Martin not only agreed but now saw that his telegram idea would have, in the hands of the cagey Nixon, rebounded on them.
On the first day of King’s imprisonment, the only conclusion Martin and Wofford reached was that the CRS would have to keep abreast of the situation, because Kennedy’s inner staff was not paying the slightest attention to events in Atlanta. At the Atlanta airport, Reeves phoned the SCLC’s Wyatt Tee Walker. Walker, despite the fact that new sit-ins were breaking out all over the city, invited him to his home to talk about what was going on. Reeves rented a car and drove over. The two men decided it was not a bad idea for Reeves to talk to King in prison that night.
Reeves was older than King and had been born in Montreal. He attended Dunbar High School in D.C., followed by Howard University and Howard Law School, and then joined the NAACP’s Brown v. Board of Education effort. Reeves had nothing but respect for King’s courage, although his own tactics were closer to those of Thurgood Marshall: showing laws to be unconstitutional in the courts, instead of taking direct action to reveal their fundamental immorality.
When Reeves arrived at Fulton County Jail, he announced he was an attorney from Washington, which was true, leaving unsaid he was not actually King’s appointed defender. He was surprised by the respectful reception he received, but he assumed that the Fulton County authorities believed him to be from the Justice Department. They did not want yet more federal officials poking into Georgia business.
King was busy being interviewed by reporters; Reeves waited his turn, eventually being taken in to see the prisoner. Reeves asked King, “What, if anything, could we do?” King replied that at this point his deepest concern was for his wife and that he would appreciate anything the Kennedy campaign could do to reassure her. King offered no specifics about what form this reassurance might take. They talked for a short time, with King’s reluctance to side with either Kennedy or Nixon still holding firm. Soon, Reeves returned to the airport to head to New York City to rejoin the campaign, forgetting about helping Abernathy in Louisiana.
Speaking to Wofford that evening, Reeves suggested that Kennedy send a telegram to Coretta Scott King. Though this proposal would at first be ignored, it would later play an important role in events that followed.
* * *
Harris Wofford’s sincere desire to protect King had first developed during a late-night car ride three years earlier. He offered to drive him and Coretta from an Omega Psi Phi conference in Baltimore to Washington, D.C., hoping to give his wife, Clare, an opportunity to meet a man he found fascinating. Their relationship would deepen in the coming years, and King later joked that Wofford was “the only lawyer who would help me go to jail instead of using all the tricks of the trade to get me out of jail.”
Speeding south along a dark Maryland highway toward Washington, the four of them talked about the future. It was Coretta who said something that the Woffords never forgot. In an anguished tone, she suddenly unburdened herself from the back seat: “I’ve had this nightmare that keeps coming back that at the end of this road he has chosen, he is going to be killed.” Coretta had a great-uncle who had been lynched. Growing up in Marion, Alabama, she knew that when it came to white bigots, “they will do anything.”
King turned around from the front passenger seat and said, “Corrie, I told you to get that out of your head, and think what we can do while we’re alive. I didn’t choose this, they asked me to chair the bus boycott, and I said yes.” King softly sang a spiritual that went, “And the Lord came by and asked and my soul said yes.”
On October 19, however, King’s predicament didn’t yet seem especially dangerous to Wofford. King was jailed in a city controlled by a relatively sympathetic mayor, William Hartsfield, who deemed Atlanta “too busy to hate.” King himself seemed confident, though he was steadying himself for the possibility of a long stay.
It turned ou
t everyone was looking in the wrong direction.
* * *
Before being assigned to their cells in the segregated east wing, King and the students were stripped and searched, forced to surrender any valuables. Guards offered them their first meal: liver and onions, creamed potatoes, bread, salad, chocolate cake, and coffee without cream or sugar. The students figured that this relatively hospitable treatment must be on account of Dr. King’s presence. When the guards pushed King’s food to him, he declined. He told reporters who managed to interview him in prison that night that he was “fasting today in a spiritual act of self-purification, to prepare [himself] for what lies ahead.” Other students who were moved with King to the Fulton County facility had no such reservations; as one exclaimed, “It’s the first food I’ve had since breakfast. We couldn’t eat the slop they gave us at noon at the City Jail.” On the women’s side of the jail, they were given beans, gruel, and other food they found terrible. Some barely ate at all over the next several days. Come morning, the women would be served spoiled buttermilk to drink; only pregnant women were served fresh milk.
King did a television interview with Atlanta’s NBC affiliate, WSB-TV, his tie undone and suit jacket off, explaining how his fasting was different from a hunger strike, though he said he would consider one if it would help focus people on the plight of Black Americans and desegregate stores in the Deep South. He told reporters, “Maybe it takes some degree of suffering to change the attitudes of this very pressing national issue,” and, “As Negroes, we must bear our crosses to save the soul of America.”
King gave credit to the students, reiterating, “I did not initiate the thing. It came into being with the students discussing the issues involved.” He said, “I felt a moral obligation to be in it with them. I had been in on this thing from the beginning, and I felt that when the actual moment came when somebody got arrested, I should be in on it.” He was determined to reinforce to the students that they might have to endure more jail time than they had anticipated: “Whatever length of time it is, we’ll stay. We have repeated that no one signs bond for us. We know it takes a good deal of struggle and sacrifice to attain any objective, and we are willing to do whatever is necessary.”
The reporters departed, and King was ushered back to his cell. It would be a long night. As King’s friends would learn over the years, he maintained a “war on sleep,” particularly when imprisoned. He found excuses to talk for as long as his companions could stay awake, almost as an endurance contest. He would, when alone, pray and pace, as if surrendering to sleep would be a defeat. But for now at least, he had the company of four other students in his cell, including Lonnie King, who was impressed by how “convivial” King was. They had known each other long enough for King to drop his formal persona, and the minister sang and joshed along with his younger cellmates to pass the time.
As evening fell, reporters fanned out to solicit reactions to the day’s events. On Hunter Street, a service station owner said of the arrests, “It is a means of showing the world that we intend to fight for our rights, even if it means sitting in jail. His [Dr. King’s] taking part tends to inspire the students.” There were rumors in the Black community that the Klan planned to hold marches. At city hall, Mayor Hartsfield knew these demonstrations would be waiting for him to deal with in the morning. Some two hundred college students had somehow paralyzed municipal courts, closed businesses, dominated newspapers, daunted city police, irritated local judges, and overfilled the jails. With the fourth presidential debate taking place in two days, Lonnie King seemed well on his way to achieving his goal of propelling the Atlanta sit-ins into the national news.
* * *
One county over, Judge Oscar Mitchell sent word to the authorities that King was a wanted man: he still had a suspended traffic sentence. King himself was unaware that he was under probation. As the lights went out that night, he had no idea that his arrest had now placed him in much greater danger than before.
DAY 2: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20
Hundreds of students assembled with signs in hand to picket downtown Atlanta, their resolve seemingly strengthened by the arrests of the day before. At the helm of these protests was A. D. King. The students hit sixteen establishments, starting at 10:30 a.m. This time, those opposed to the sit-ins were waiting for them, with groups of Klansmen assembling at two dime stores to harass the students. The Klansmen wore their white robes without hoods, because the state had passed a ban in 1951 on masking faces in public with the Klan in mind. Police patrolled in greater numbers than they had the day before, their attention focused mostly on the students.
A.D. and twenty-four students went to the Terminal, Atlanta’s railway station and one of the busiest hubs in the South. When the group arrived at the Terminal Station restaurant, three students entered and sat down at the lunch counter before the staff could close the door. A.D. and the others remained in protest outside the establishment.
Life as the younger brother of Martin Luther King Jr. and second son of the formidable Daddy King was not easy for A.D. He was less likely than his brother to stand up to his imposing father, lacking M.L.’s inner security and confidence.
A.D. struggled with alcoholism while attempting to complete his higher education and follow the family path into the ministry. Aware that he would likely always live in the shadow cast by his brother, he tried to live up to the family’s expectations as best he could without jealousy. The two brothers genuinely understood each other’s travails, and A.D. had a knack for lovingly piercing King’s solemnity and prophetic poise.
As A.D. and the rest of the students waited outside the Terminal Station restaurant while the three students inside were denied service, Captain R. E. Little arrived to arrest yet another King. After Little told A.D. to move on because he and the students were creating a disturbance, they refused to do so and were willingly arrested. Soon they found themselves standing before Judge Webb.
A.D. announced that he was the spokesperson for his group of students and said that they “had no intentions of creating a disturbance … they just wanted to eat” at the station restaurant. Judge Webb sternly informed the students that they were “immature and unwise.” Looking at the young King, barely older than the students he led, the judge went on to complain, “One of your troubles is you always have a spokesman. Maybe you’re listening to the wrong persons.”
Donald Hollowell raced to Judge Webb’s courtroom for the second time in as many days despite being busy representing two Black students, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, whom the University of Georgia was refusing to enroll. Twenty-five more Black protesters ended up in jail that day (as well as a white counterprotester), with three taken to join Lonnie and company under the same Georgia trespassing law, and the other twenty-two being sent to the city’s prison farm—where they would have to labor in the fields—for disorderly conduct under the city’s statute. These students would be staying in what one described as “modern slave quarters.” There was no natural light, only a few fluorescent bulbs, so it felt as if they were being housed deep underground. A pungent combination of urine, vomit, and perspiration overwhelmed the smell of disinfectant. The bench was showing little indulgence toward the students being sent there.
Even under such pressure, the students seemed to be holding firm; the real question now was who would break first: the mayor’s office, the courts, or the city’s increasingly tense business leaders?
* * *
More than half of the students waking up that Thursday morning in Atlanta’s jails were women. Having heard stories of white guards raping Black female prisoners, Herschelle Sullivan and other leaders set up a rotation in advance so at least one student was always keeping watch during the night. Over at the Atlanta Prison Farm, the student Norma June Wilson listened as a white male guard set his gun down and raped a woman prisoner who was in the bunk bed under her.
What Atlanta women protesters endured is part of the story of sexual violence suffered by Black women
at the hands of white men throughout the civil rights movement. In this terror, guards asserted power without accountability over women protesters who were left physically vulnerable. Before Rosa Parks resisted arrest on the Montgomery bus, she was a trained activist who investigated the systematic rape of area Black women for the NAACP.
In the Fulton County Jail, which felt much safer, the women started the morning by singing hymns and movement songs before praying together. Their prayers were not so much for themselves as for all those on the outside. To pass the time during the day, the women practiced dance steps, played games and did puzzles, read well-worn romance comics, exchanged jokes, and tried to study. A few had textbooks, but the jail mostly prevented books from being brought to them, making the tedium more unremitting and causing them to fall further behind in their studies. The students who had been held at the Tower the night before were relieved to be transferred to the Fulton County Jail, where they joined King and most of the students. When rumors that the famed NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall might be assisting with their defense began circulating—by coincidence, he was scheduled to speak in Atlanta that weekend—the students screamed for joy. It was, as Ann Ashmore recorded in her diary, “19 girls skipping and singing with all the gusto usually exemplified at a football game after a long sought after touchdown.”
Nine Days Page 8