Nine Days

by Paul Kendrick

  “He said what, Morris?” After Abram repeated himself, an aghast Wofford sputtered, “But Kennedy knows nothing about my call—I told you I was acting on my own.” His job, his reputation, had been placed in jeopardy. “I hadn’t checked with the campaign in asking you that.”

  Abram said, “The Mayor knows that, but it is a good agreement, and he wants to talk to you.” Abram handed the phone over.

  “This is Bill Hartsfield. Now I know that I ran with the ball farther than you expected, Harris, my boy, but I needed a peg to swing on and you gave it to me, and I’ve swung on it. You tell our Senator that he and I are out on the limb together, so don’t saw it off. I’m giving him the election on a silver platter, so don’t pull the rug out from under me.”

  “Well, you know, the Senator still doesn’t know anything about this.” Linking Kennedy to King without the candidate’s permission was a huge gamble. They were all playing with fire.

  “I’d guessed that, but you can get through to him before the press does. Okay? I’ve only just announced it to the radio and television.”

  Wofford pleaded with him; how could such an announcement be made so blithely, and this close to an election to boot? He rang off in disbelief. How was he going to tell the Kennedy brothers that he had inadvertently set in motion something so controversial, with absolutely no approval?

  He tried to recall any campaign radiophone numbers he had at his disposal; there was no time to go through Shriver. He knew Kennedy was somewhere in either Kansas or Missouri, and he eventually got through to Kenny O’Donnell in Kansas City on a walkie-talkie in a noisy parade car. Wofford stumbled through an explanation, and the aide barked, “Hartsfield said what? You did what?” over the noise of the crowd. It was the last thing they needed on a day when Nixon was accusing Kennedy of risking world war with proposals supporting the overthrow of Castro.

  Wofford was bombarded with a slew of profanities. They argued back and forth about how disastrous the idea of Kennedy’s being tagged as King’s liberator was, how badly Wofford had screwed up, and what to do next. Then the press secretary, Pierre Salinger, came on the line. They were losing time; their campaign would soon be inundated with reporters asking who had reached out to the mayor, who had told him that King should be released. Wofford urged a calm response, something bland and soothing—that of course Kennedy wanted the students safely released. Salinger rang off, almost too angry to respond.

  Abram was also on the phone trying to head off Troutman. Over the roar of Kennedy’s plane on the tarmac in Joplin, Missouri, he eventually got through to an aide and shouted, “If Senator Kennedy is asked anything about Martin Luther King, Jr., let him say nothing. Do not let him say that he has encouraged what has been going on in Atlanta, but for God’s sake, do not let him say he didn’t encourage it.”

  The campaign ultimately took Wofford’s and Abram’s advice, and after Salinger had consulted with Kennedy, the campaign released a quickly worded statement, saying almost exactly that. The mayor was right; he did indeed have a peg to swing on, and no one, not even JFK, could afford to whittle it down. News came over the wire from the campaign: “As a result of having many calls from all over the country regarding the incident in Atlanta, Sen. Kennedy directed that an inquiry be made to give him all the facts on that situation and a report on what properly should be done. The senator is hopeful that a satisfactory outcome can be worked out.”

  King’s name was absent from the carefully crafted understatement. Considering the pressure, it was a masterful job of some sort.

  * * *

  Hartsfield and Abram had their truce, and now they wanted the students out of jail. They worked toward this outcome until eight that night, calling Judge Webb and the prosecutor, securing the release of the twenty-two Black students held at the Atlanta Prison Farm, who had been charged under the city’s disorderly conduct statute, and finessing the day’s deal with the police department to avoid hurting morale. But King and thirty-eight students were still at the Fulton County Jail, having been charged under the state’s “leave the premises” law—making their release more complicated for the mayor.

  Just when they thought they could call it a day, they got word that King would not entertain leaving jail on bail—Hartsfield’s initial proposal—unless all charges were dropped. As Abram wrote, the minister would otherwise not be “legally vindicated, that the charge, under an unjust and unconstitutional law, would still be hanging over his head.”

  Hartsfield and Abram looked at each other. They should have anticipated that King would stubbornly refuse to do the one thing they needed him to do, something people were usually quite pleased to do—go home. Mayor Hartsfield arranged for Morehouse’s president, Dr. Benjamin Mays, to go to the jail to plead with King to take the deal that Hartsfield was working to make possible. Even when encouraged by his beloved mentor, King said he would not leave jail unless the charges were dismissed.

  Hartsfield and Abram realized they needed to speak with Dick Rich, to persuade him to drop the charges against King and the students who had been arrested at his store. Abram’s daughter had gone without lunch or dinner, but he reassured himself that she was learning a lot about politics that day.

  Together, Hartsfield and Abram drove north to Rich’s Buckhead home, situated atop a hill at the end of a long, winding driveway that cut across a well-manicured lawn. They walked up to the mansion, rang the doorbell, and were greeted by a truculent businessman in a dressing gown and slippers. It was late, and Hartsfield launched into the deal, telling his usually firm supporter that “Atlanta is getting a horrible image, a horrible image!”

  Rich nodded in a way that suggested this was Hartsfield’s problem to fix, not his.

  “Look, I’ve agreed to release the Klansmen.” No Klan members had actually been arrested, however—only a white counterprotester. “Their supporters are delighted. If you drop the charges against King, those happy rednecks will barely notice.”

  Rich was reluctant to budge, and they argued back and forth over whether he would be perceived as too lenient. Abram felt Rich was “in terror that his company would be charged with caving in to Black pressure, a public relations gaffe that could cost him millions of dollars.” Rich felt Abram and Hartsfield were pressuring him to do something that his competitors were not having to do, leaving him exposed. Abram found that Rich seemed to be missing the issue of racial injustice at the heart of the matter. At that moment—feeling hurt and offended that King had singled out his store—Rich was unmoved because, in Abram’s words, “he just wanted to sell shoes, furniture, and perfume.”

  Finally, Rich acquiesced. He said if the prosecutor would sanction dropping all charges, then Rich’s would have the cover it needed from the legal establishment. Rich would then tell others that he had dropped the charges because he did not want to “make martyrs out of them and King.”

  Hartsfield and Abram walked out of the mansion, exhausted and relieved. It was too late to go see the prosecutor, so they would regroup the next day.

  DAY 5: SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23

  As he returned from church in the morning, the prosecutor John Kelley—whom Abram called “a pleasant, rotund little man”—was amazed to find the mayor standing at his doorstep, along with Morris Abram and Dick Rich. It was quickly apparent that they were there to ask a favor—a large one, in fact. As it turned out, Kelley needed little convincing with such people on his porch.

  In Atlanta, a Sunday headline read, “Did Kennedy Man Ask King Release?” It described “small tempests in Atlanta and Washington over who was the ‘local representative’ and whether he in fact spoke for Sen. Kennedy.” Abram and Troutman both denied being the initiator of Kennedy’s supposed intervention, and Hartsfield would say only that the call came from Washington. Kennedy’s Georgia co-chair Griffin Bell said that none of the Kennedy campaign leaders in Georgia had ever been contacted about the matter, emphasizing, “We know that Sen. Kennedy would never interfere in the affairs of a sovereign state.
” The Democrats had long assumed they would hold Georgia, but could Nixon steal the prize at the last moment because of the backlash against the mysterious call? Bell, who later served as Jimmy Carter’s attorney general, tossed red meat to their Democratic white voters, adding, “King has violated a state law. He is charged with trespassing on private premises, has been offered bail, and refused it because he wants to be a martyr. He must stand trial and he will get equal treatment just as any other common law violator.”

  The identity of the person who had reportedly spoken for the Kennedy campaign remained a mystery, but the larger question of what effect this intervention would have on voters in less than three weeks persisted. Might it serve to inspire Black voters? A New York Times story that morning reported on a series of conversations from the previous week in which these voters expressed a lack of excitement about the choice they faced. One Baltimore lawyer said, “A lot of people I know wouldn’t care if both Nixon and Kennedy lost … [W]hat have the two parties really done on civil rights for the Negro? They both seem more interested in grabbing off the Southern white vote than the Negro vote.”

  Despite the vice president’s silence on King, not everyone was silent within the Republican ranks. At four packed Bedford-Stuyvesant church services, New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, and Jackie Robinson exemplified the sorts of promises that Republicans could make if they were bold enough. Rockefeller said, “When the great spiritual leader, the Rev. Martin King, finds himself in jail because he had the courage to love … we still have a long way to go in America.”

  * * *

  Troutman called Wofford, ostensibly to reassure him that his Georgia crew had things back under control. He began by saying, “Harris, you’re just fucking everything up—you’re screwing up my life.” Still, Troutman reassured him, “We’re gonna work it all out, don’t you worry anymore. But don’t interrupt my weekends anymore after this.”

  Wofford was glad to still have a position on the campaign. Sunday’s Journal-Constitution reported that Senator Kennedy had made a call from Kansas City the day before to Governor Vandiver, who was livid about King’s potential release. Vandiver later said that no such call had taken place. Regardless of whether contact ever occurred, it was made clear to Wofford that the CRS was to offer no further statements on the matter, nor do anything else for King. Wofford thought such silence was a fair trade for King’s release from jail.

  This understanding lasted barely forty-eight hours.

  * * *

  Almost no one seemed to notice an ominous cloud gathering just one county over. DeKalb’s judge Oscar Mitchell believed King’s sit-in arrest violated the terms of his suspended sentence and that his county had the right to take King into custody before Fulton County freed him.

  Perhaps only Daddy King, with his instinct for protecting his son, could have sniffed out future trouble. Daddy King understood the depravity people were capable of from his Stockbridge, Georgia, childhood. He witnessed the lynching of a Black man at the local mill by whites; he himself was beaten by a mill owner, and he had fought back against his alcoholic father’s abuse of his mother. He had escaped to Atlanta, where he set his sights on marrying Alberta Williams, daughter of the minister of Ebenezer Baptist Church. Becoming her husband and earning a theological degree first required a secondary education, so at twenty-one he endured the humiliation of restarting his studies at a fifth-grade level at Bryant Preparatory School. He willed himself through those classes, eventually making it to Morehouse and assuming the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church. He understood that his family could be taken from him by the Georgia authorities on the flimsiest of pretexts, but in this case his attention was diverted elsewhere.

  Daddy King had flown to Cleveland to fill in for his son at a preaching engagement. He spoke to hundreds about his son’s predicament, raising two thousand dollars for the imprisoned students and telling the crowd, “We must awaken the conscience of the white man. Our students are not afraid—they’ll fill the jails if they have to.” He said that his son told the students when they asked him to join them, “I have no choice since I believe in what you are doing.” He added that soon enough “we can sign our own Emancipation Proclamation at the ballot box, Nov. 8, by a wise vote.”

  DeKalb’s judge Mitchell had not seemed particularly interested in King when he appeared before him on the traffic charge, but he was now fully alert to recent events. The day after King’s arrest, he had issued an order that, on the coming Tuesday, King would need to convince him why his suspended driver’s license sentence should not be revoked. A news item Friday in the Constitution was headlined “DeKalb Seeks to Jail Rev. King,” and the Journal ran with “King Faces Year in Jail on Old Count.” But no one seemed to pay much attention to this new risk to King, including King himself, as if Hartsfield’s deal had resolved his legal troubles for good. Even Hollowell was not focused on such a threat.

  * * *

  At the Wheat Street Baptist Church in Sweet Auburn, the congregation celebrated Men’s Day. It was something of a coup to feature the famed civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall as their speaker. Burly and charismatic, Marshall was already a legend within the Black community nationwide. He was an NAACP man and believed in the power of the courts. Still, he was in Atlanta, so on that Sunday he avoided creating the appearance of a gulf between his courtroom strategy and the students’ activism in the streets. He had just returned from Kenya, where he had helped draft the future country’s new constitution, and he noted how much the American sit-ins inspired young Africans.

  In front of more than three thousand Black Atlantans, he boomed, “Stop spending your money where you are being insulted.” He called for something he termed “do it yourself integration.” The students promoted the event, and Marshall’s NAACP Legal Defense Fund worked behind the scenes to assist Hollowell’s efforts on the students’ behalf.

  * * *

  Later that Sunday, Coretta dressed and headed to Paschal’s to wait for her husband, where supporters of King and the imprisoned students had decided to celebrate their release—not knowing that King would not be joining them. Years before her frenetic life in Atlanta with a famous husband, she had first waited for Martin Luther King in the January rain on Boston’s Huntington Avenue. It had been a long journey from a rural Alabama childhood to the New England Conservatory of Music. White men burned the house she was born in to the ground when she was fifteen, and she had lived in constant fear that her father might be murdered after opening his own lumber mill. He lost the savings he poured into the mill when white men set that on fire, too. She left Alabama for Antioch College in Ohio before transferring to the New England Conservatory in Boston. Coretta was drawn to music and progressive politics and revered the radical singer Paul Robeson. She looked confidently to a life in music, until that first date.

  The theology student had confidently called her out of the blue, saying she had been recommended to him. She was initially unimpressed by her suitor’s small frame, but as they ate at a Massachusetts Avenue restaurant, “he grew in stature … his eloquence, his sincerity, and his moral stature.” From their first date, King believed she possessed everything he wanted in a wife, though Daddy King, having already singled out a different woman from their Atlanta milieu, took some persuading. For her, the decision to give up the independence of a career and return to the South, far from Boston’s relative liberties, to be a minister’s wife was not an easy one. Yet she loved King and believed in him.

  Their children, Yoki and Marty, as they called Martin III, were now just old enough to understand what was going on. On the way home from nursery school, the car radio broadcast a story about King going to jail. Yoki was in tears when they got home, and the two children asked their mother, “Why did Daddy go to jail?” Coretta had known this day would eventually come—one of the painful inevitabilities of their lives. It was difficult to explain that counter to what most children learn, going to jail could be an honorable thing. She simply said, �
��Your daddy is a brave and kind man. He went to jail to help people. Some people don’t have enough to eat, nor do they have comfortable homes in which to live, or enough clothing to wear. Daddy went to jail to make it possible for all people to have these things. Don’t worry, your daddy will be coming back.”

  Marty had an interest in airplanes. He asked, “Did Daddy go to jail on the airplane?” Hoping it would help soothe her son, Coretta answered, “Yes.”

  When Yoki was at Atlanta’s Quaker House, where the Kings had enrolled her in a children’s literature class, a white girl observed, “Oh, your daddy is always going to jail.”

  Yoki replied, “Yes, he goes to jail to help people.”

  * * *

  Driving the author Lillian Smith to Emory University Hospital for breast cancer treatment in May was a favor that changed King’s life—a dangerous act, in retrospect, because any Black man put himself at risk by being in the same car as a white woman.

  King had known Smith for years and found their friendship to be useful to the movement. Her books Strange Fruit and Killers of the Dream explored interracial romance and the immorality of segregation, earning literary bans throughout the South and even in cities like Boston. The postal service refused to accept her radical books as mail. Like Wofford, she was the rare white person who wrote to King during the Montgomery boycott to offer heartfelt support, inaugurating their friendship. Although she felt King was a bit overly influenced by his father, she said of him, “He is one of my friends and a most wonderful guy; if you only knew him you’d be sure the man is good, honest, sincere, sensitive and full of compassion and also well stocked with brains.” She predicted in a Saturday Review article that King’s Montgomery struggle would go down in history with Gandhi’s Salt March. After King’s Magnolia Room arrest, she wrote Dick Rich a letter threatening to cancel her account with him if he did not open his lunch counters to all.