Nine Days

by Paul Kendrick

  Nixon himself said in the 1960 preelection issue of Ebony, “I am convinced that the future of the Republican party today lies in pressing forward on civil rights. In any one of the ‘big six’ states (New York, California, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois and Ohio) our civil rights stand can make all the difference in the world. In the last election we lost the governorship of Pennsylvania by about 50,000 votes. A shift of just 5 percent of the Negro vote would have elected a Republican.”

  This was the Nixon that Martin Luther King knew, so the minister fully expected to hear from him. The vice president had spent many years building a reputation as a racial moderate, and now was the time to use it.

  * * *

  That evening, the Imperial Public Relationship Office, U.S. Klans, Knights of the KKK, released a statement that read, “Our God-given rights are being infringed upon. We are arising, showing we want our rights returned by the laws of God and the traditions of the Southland.” They pressed Governor Vandiver to deploy the National Guard to protect white Georgians from “the advancing Negro race.”

  Vandiver announced state troops were ready to move if Atlanta store owners requested them.

  DAY 3: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21

  Student protesters were back at Rich’s by 10:40 a.m. for a third day of action. Yet when they heard Klansmen were about to arrive at the department store, their leaders decided it was too risky to continue the sit-ins. Students jumped into station wagons to head to smaller stores not staked out by the Klan. Mostly female students picketed outside Walgreens, Kress, McCrory, and other stores. Seemingly every downtown block was full of uniformed and plainclothes police patrolling the streets, more interested in the protesters than the agitators intent on intimidating the students. Officers buzzed by on motorcycles, and police wagons circled the blocks, as if impatient to be filled. Tension increased in the city, with law enforcement leadership warning that a hundred more officers were in reserve, ready for deployment.

  Most downtown lunch counters had closed in order to avoid becoming the sites of sit-ins. Central Atlanta was so tightly wound that only two students managed to get themselves arrested that day. When asked how long his lunch counter might be closed, a business owner replied, “Indefinitely.” With stenciled signs, fifty students returned to picket outside Rich’s at 1:00 p.m., undeterred by the threat of the Klan’s presence.

  Students also kept up a twenty-four-hour prayer vigil near the entrance to the county jail. Ministers from the Atlanta University Center asked to give Communion to the jailed students but were refused. They also asked if they could gather the students for a jail chapel service, but were again told no, on the basis that spiritual counsel must be offered to individuals only—no mass meetings.

  In Chicago, the Daily Tribune read, “Flying squads of Negroes attempted to desegregate at least 11 downtown Atlanta eating places today but their efforts were thwarted by several closings.”

  Both SNCC and SCLC sent out increasing numbers of messages to sympathetic supporters like Harry Belafonte, Adam Clayton Powell, Eleanor Roosevelt, and numerous religious leaders. The students were mostly pleased by the response, especially when New York City’s mayor, Robert F. Wagner Jr., told reporters, “I know I speak for the people of our city when I say they are appalled at the news of the arrest of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a number of students who are doing nothing more than seeking to extend democracy.” On the other hand, a longtime rival of King’s within the Black Baptist world, the Reverend J. H. Jackson of Chicago, said while preaching in Jackson, Mississippi, “You can’t get anywhere just by sitting down.” He wanted less discussion of “racial integration” and more discussion of “racial elevation.” He felt integration would never happen “until we admit our shortcomings.” In years to come, Jackson would continue to be a thorn in King’s side.

  King’s fellow Baptist minister Wyatt Tee Walker quickly assumed an important role. King was the widely hailed saint, Walker the hidden enforcer, and his style, as he said, was to “run smack dab over you.” No one took Walker’s deference to King as a measure of his own lesser sense of worth; he often said the best way to know King’s greatness was to observe a man with an ego like his taking second place. While King’s friend Ralph Abernathy gave him comfort, Walker offered effectiveness on the street. He demanded, on day 3 of the sit-ins, that the U.S. secretary of state, Christian Herter, intervene in King’s case, while the NAACP asked Hartsfield to appoint a citywide biracial committee to address lunch counter segregation.

  * * *

  Mayor Hartsfield had seen enough of the growing commotion; it was time for him to step in. In his office at city hall, Hartsfield leafed with increasing irritation through a growing stack of telephone messages, letters, and telegrams from around the country imploring him to get King out.

  He had never felt so besieged by an issue, not even the bombing of a synagogue two years earlier. Everyone except the presidential candidates seemed to be offering him advice. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP called on him to “provide now the moral leadership necessary to bring about conversation between all affected to the end that justice shall reign in the city.” The mayor most definitely wanted to avoid any such public “conversation,” but in his usual sly way he concluded he needed to assemble a core of city fathers to gather around him the next morning.

  Hartsfield, of course, had no ability to release King, because the minister had been charged under a state, not a city, statute. Calls to Atlanta university presidents weren’t going anywhere; they felt as powerless as Mayor Hartsfield did. Dick Rich was having a small nervous breakdown, upset and anxious, still refusing to drop the charges against King and the students. Hartsfield was tired of looking impotent in this matter.

  Late Friday afternoon, Mayor Hartsfield sent messages to Black leaders that he wanted them around his table the next day to negotiate a halt to the protests while he brokered with downtown business leaders a desegregation agreement. Perhaps getting ahead of himself, he stated that a sixty- to ninety-day cessation of protests would be agreed to by all, and he offered himself as “an unofficial mediator.” He had such faith in his long-standing relationships with older Black leaders like John Wesley Dobbs, John Calhoun, and Daddy King himself that he thought he might manage to corral the crisis then and there. The old guard hardly supported these sit-ins any more than he did, and he figured the students might be growing increasingly eager to get back to their dorms and normalcy.

  What the mayor overlooked was that his “leaders on both sides” did not include the students leading the movement, none of whom had heard from him. Lonnie King, behind bars, was incredulous at the mayor’s proposal and the fact that he and Herschelle had not been consulted. He told a Journal reporter that Hartsfield was being “absolutely inauthentic. The mayor has talked to no student leaders. He cannot speak for us.” When the reporter talked to King, he said he would make no statement until the students had decided what they wanted to do. Lonnie said he needed to speak with the leader he left in charge on the outside, Otis Moss, but made clear that the protests would go on, “all day, every day, if necessary to achieve their ends.”

  The Reverend Otis Moss was, like Lonnie, older than most of the students, and this was apparent in the brotherly style in which he cared for them. Moss had earned his master of divinity degree from Morehouse the year before. Lonnie favored military efficiency, whereas Moss was more pastoral. Already beloved at the Atlanta church where he preached, Moss helped students through anguished late-night conversations where, in tears, they told him how their parents said to never come home again if they got arrested. He counseled them, “One day your parents will talk about this with the greatest pride and the greatest depth of appreciation you could ever hear.” The elegant, steady rhythm of his voice soothed them. Along with Bond, Moss sent telegrams to both presidential campaigns about King’s imprisonment but heard nothing back from either.

  Yet the Georgia Republican district chairman C. J. Broome linked one candidate to the students a
nyway, saying in the Constitution, “The actions of these unlawful demonstrators in Atlanta was inspired, motivated, encouraged and urged by Sen. John F. Kennedy.” The election was close in Georgia, and Republicans had a card to play. King was in prison, and the governor, mayor, and local judges holding sway just all happened to be southern Democrats.

  Moss felt the weight of responsibility on his shoulders as he directed telegrams to potential allies outside Atlanta. The next day, invited or not, he was going to city hall for negotiations with a mayor and an old guard who had been in power since before he was born. He was determined the student voice would be heard.

  * * *

  Trezzvant Anderson, a journalist for The Pittsburgh Courier—The Chicago Defender’s chief rival among Black papers—came to see King on Friday afternoon. Before joining the Courier, Anderson wrote a book about his World War II tank battalion, the 761st, and its journey from Omaha Beach across Europe. He had spent the past three years on an assignment hardly less perilous, roving the rural back roads of the South to places others would not dare go, tracking the growing civil rights movement.

  In jail, Anderson found a King unfamiliar to him, in short sleeves with no tie, rough stubble on his face. Though the minister struck a casual tone, he was far from at ease. When asked how long he expected to be in jail, King stated that he would stay “ten years if necessary.” King talked of threatening slurs he heard from guards, though a few were courteous. “On the whole, it’s as comfortable as jail can be.”

  Anderson wondered, “Do you actually intend to remain here in jail?” This new strategy still shocked the reporter; no sane Black person would willingly sacrifice themselves before a white judge and jailer. (Today, photographs of civil rights activists sitting in prison cells are so ingrained in the culture that the novelty of this tactic can be hard to appreciate.) King replied, “We will positively stay in jail unless the lunch counters are desegregated before our trial. If that should take place, then we will reconsider coming out. This is our self-suffering to arouse the community conscience.”

  “Won’t your being in jail work hardship on you, with regard to your speaking engagements and other activities?”

  “Yes, indeed, it will be a hardship on me and the organization. I was to have been in Cleveland on Sunday for a big fundraising meeting sponsored by the Ministers’ Alliance, which had guaranteed us from $7,000 to $10,000. I had looked forward to it, but when the students called me at the last minute to go with them, I felt I had a moral obligation to take part, since this was what I had been preaching.” King said, “I had to practice what I preached.” He added, “But this was the great cause, and something had to be done about it, now.”

  King brightened when he started talking about the students there with him, saying, “It’s a great and inspiring experience. I have never seen such willingness and cooperation from students like this. Why, do you realize that presidents of five college student bodies are in jail here, and two college queens. There are many honor students, too.” King had the reporter talk to these students, giving them full credit for initiating and leading the sit-in.

  Lonnie offered a flattering portrait of King by saying, “When we called him and asked him to go with us, he didn’t hesitate a moment. He is a truly great man.” The message might have been for the greater good of the movement, if not entirely accurate. In the end, King had indeed said yes; there he was, in the same predicament they all found themselves in.

  * * *

  The candidates were face-to-face in New York for their fourth and final debate. Each knew his opponent well; they first shared a stage together as freshmen congressmen in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1947, eating hamburgers at a diner afterward and riding the train back to D.C. while talking of baseball and defeating communism. Kennedy even gave Nixon a thousand-dollar contribution from his father for his Senate race, and later an invitation to his wedding, which the vice president missed only because of a rare opportunity to golf with the president. Nixon went to see Kennedy in the hospital when he was near death following back surgery and was heard to say, with tears in his eyes, “Oh, God, don’t let him die.” Kennedy thought less of the friendship with the socially inept Nixon, while Nixon genuinely imagined Kennedy was his friend, though JFK did respect Nixon’s considerable mind. The most powerful prize stood between them, and as Kennedy predicted, their relationship would not survive the competition. Nixon held on to a residual sense of camaraderie, telling himself they were still friends. It would take a while for him to realize how badly the campaign’s stresses had damaged their bond.

  Students like John Lewis and Lonnie King had seen nothing in earlier debates to suggest that either man was bold enough to stand up for them. There would be nothing tonight to change that for any student watching from outside jail—no recognition at all from either candidate of the sit-ins. The focus that night was foreign policy, and Castro, Cuba, and communism dominated the discussion. But in this last debate, a Nixon who seemed far more assertive did say, “Let’s talk about civil rights; more progress in the past 8 years than in the whole 80 years before.” If he became president, Nixon declared the nation would be “a splendid example for all the world to see of democracy in action at its best.” Still, the student activists found very little in either man to sway them.

  John Lewis said of the election, “I didn’t care for either man, nor did most of my friends. In fact, none of us cared much about the presidential race at all.”

  DAY 4: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 22

  Harris Wofford watched his children, Daniel and Susanne, run in the fall morning sunlight in his garden. That Saturday was a time for much-needed play with his kids, especially because there might not be much more family time until after the election, a little over two weeks away. He and Louis Martin were working frantically, especially now that Shriver had decamped to Chicago to help ensure victory in excruciatingly close Illinois.

  The Woffords had moved to Hollin Hills, a model development community off the parkway near Alexandria, Virginia, where other young, highly educated, liberal families lived on the edge of woods. He planted his own willow trees in the yard, but the house was a rental, and he did not know if he would see them grow. The point of the morning was to get away from the office, and Wofford loved being with his children, yet his mind kept racing back to work, especially having heard on the radio that morning of Klansmen parading openly in Atlanta. He felt guilty: “What the hell? Martin’s been in jail for three days, and I’m the civil rights guy, and I haven’t done a thing.”

  As his children played next to him, Wofford sat confounded. Why was he working at the CRS if not to help people like King, who, moreover, was a friend? What were he and Louis Martin thinking?

  Wofford would appear as a perplexing figure in the eyes of many over the years. Seemingly born on a path to conventional success, he instead developed an uncanny sense of when and where the door of history might crack open. Of all the causes that Wofford gave his heart to, King’s mission was most essential to him. A fascination with Gandhi was the foundation of their bond, though they had both come to his teachings on their own. When they finally met at an event in New York, Wofford proposed raising funds to help King visit India, which eventually happened in 1959. Wofford was drawn into the tight world of King advisers, a rare white voice in their midst. The fact that Kennedy had hired a member of his brain trust raised King’s estimation of the Democrat’s campaign.

  Wofford’s admiration for Gandhi exemplified his engagement with the idea of internationalism, a long-standing interest of his. When he was eleven, his Johnson City, Tennessee, grandmother took him on a yearlong world tour. With World War II about to erupt, they witnessed Mussolini shouting from a balcony over a torchlight parade through Rome and later hid in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity to escape nearby gunfire. But it was seeing Gandhi walking down a street in Bombay, surrounded by his followers, that inspired Wofford’s lifelong devotion to the Mahatma’s teachings. He and Clare would return to I
ndia in 1951, publishing a book together called India Afire. Just after Gandhi’s assassination, they traveled in his steps throughout India, and Wofford was struck by how many people posed the question of how Gandhi’s teachings might be applied to America’s own problem of racial discrimination. Back home, Wofford pondered the potential of this idea. When he did succeed in raising money for King and Coretta to visit India in 1959, he did not join them, instead remaining at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

  While he was immediately drawn to King, the same could not be said of his first encounter with John F. Kennedy. They met after World War II at a party in Greenwich, Connecticut, the host thinking Wofford might hit it off with the congressional candidate. She informed Wofford, “If old Joe has his way, Jack will be President of the United States.” About to enroll as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Wofford tried throughout the afternoon to engage the Navy captain almost nine years his senior, while Jack ravaged the spread of food, accompanied by two young women. When Wofford thought he had Kennedy’s attention, he, in his earnest way, put forward several minutes of political insight (Wofford’s speaking style gave one the impression of a romantic radical from the nineteenth century, replete with classical allusions). Jack replied to Wofford’s speech by saying, “Right now, I’ve got my eyes on tennis,” and wandered off toward the courts with the two women.