Nine Days

by Paul Kendrick

  During his tax trial back in mid-May, when it appeared all too likely that King would face jail time in Alabama as a result of trumped-up charges, the traffic ticket had seemed like a minor annoyance at worst. King had difficulty even recalling the uneventful September 23 hearing in front of DeKalb’s judge Oscar Mitchell. But there had been some confusion between King and the elderly Black lawyer Daddy King had selected for him, Charles Clayton. King was sitting at the defendant’s table as Clayton was consulting with Judge Mitchell at the bench. Clayton motioned for King to come up and told him, “I’ve worked everything out.” It seemed to King that the old lawyer knew how to get things done in the county in which he had long practiced.

  King heard the judge say that because King had shown that the car he was driving’s tags had been updated, the improper registration charge was dropped. Mitchell then added, “But I would have to fine you for the charge on the driver’s license twenty-five dollars.” King was hardly listening, having been told by a longtime resident of the county that he had never heard of anyone being fined for driving with an out-of-state license. It was not even clear how long one had to live in the state before acquiring a Georgia license. When Daddy King interjected to ask Judge Mitchell, as he was on his way out, for a full hearing to completely clear his son and straighten out the license issue, the judge laughed and said, “I don’t have time, I’m going fishing.”

  After paying the fine for driving without a Georgia license, King considered the matter closed. He did not understand that with his lawyer’s instructing him to plead guilty, he was now on a year’s probation. This inattentiveness was unusual for King. The sentencing form read that King could “be put to work and labor in the public work camp … for the space of 12 months” if he violated the statutes of any municipality of Georgia. Since the end of slavery, work camps were a common form of imprisonment in the South for Black men found guilty of even trivial offenses.

  The look of surprise Lonnie saw on King’s face revealed to him that being transferred to DeKalb County was simply beyond his imagining. The pastor had profoundly misjudged the judge. It seemed Oscar Mitchell possessed a lively and deep sense of the finer uses of the law, and he was looking forward to having Martin Luther King pay a return visit to his Decatur courtroom.

  And now the energy that the students’ high spirits had provided King for five days was gone. He would have to face another long night in jail with no friends to lessen the sense of isolation. He also sensed the mood among the guards shifting, and they allowed themselves to show more animosity without the students there as witnesses. His visitors were cut off.

  On the outside, Daddy King was frightened. As he told a reporter, he was “worried about what they might do to [his] child when they got him in there by himself.”

  DAY 6: MONDAY, OCTOBER 24

  The deputy sheriff of DeKalb County showed up shortly after dawn and instructed the Fulton County Jail desk clerk to release King to him. But after King’s supporters informed Hollowell of the previous night’s shocking events, he had asked the Fulton County sheriff not to release King to DeKalb County. Hollowell, along with the attorney Horace Ward, was playing catch-up, struggling to figure out what exactly was going on.

  The deputy said he would be back the next day to claim King. Hollowell had no reason not to believe him, though he was still mystified as to why King was on a year’s probation over a minor traffic ticket. The word spread quickly that while the students were back in their classes that morning, King was still in jail—to the considerable frustration of Mayor Hartsfield, who feared the thirty-day truce would unravel through no fault of his own.

  For his part, while talking to reporters, King praised Mayor Hartsfield’s effort to broker a solution to the standoff over segregation. He thanked the mayor for getting the students freed, explaining that Atlanta was “a community trying honestly and desperately to adjust to inevitable change.” King even commended his jailers in Fulton County for how they had treated him, even if he let Black reporters know that some guards had been verbally hostile.

  Mayor Hartsfield appeared on WSB in Atlanta, interviewed in his darkened office with the shades drawn behind him, half his face in shadow, microphones held in front of him. He emphasized that “the officials of the downtown store where [King] was apprehended … have indicated that they do not wish to prosecute in the state courts Dr. King or any of the other students.” Rich didn’t want his store being the reason King was sent to state prison. Fear of an impending crisis was much ado about nothing, according to Hartsfield, because “we are of the opinion that [DeKalb] will accordingly in a spirit of cooperation with us withdraw the charges enabling Dr. King to go free of any charges in Atlanta or this county.”

  A reporter asked, “Mayor, did you receive a call from Martin Luther King’s brother saying in effect that if Mr. King is turned over to the DeKalb authorities that that would be a breach of the compromise reached with you regarding the sit-ins?”

  “No, sir, I have not received any such call, and I am quite sure that the Negro participants in this realize that we have done everything that we promised them and the existence or complications caused by an outside traffic case have nothing to do with this matter. We hope it is settled in a friendly way, however.”

  Another reporter spoke of Governor Vandiver saying that Kennedy told him over the phone that he did not wish to inject himself into the affairs of any state. “Have any further inquiries been made to you, sir, and who did make the inquiry to begin with?”

  “Well, I would not want to say who I talked to, talked with, in the Kennedy headquarters, but I did talk with them and they transmitted to me the friendly interest of Senator Kennedy, in a friendly solution of this matter, coupled with the statement that neither they, nor Senator Kennedy, had any desire to be put in the position of interfering. I told them that I understood that, and I considered their interest in this matter to be in perfectly good taste and good order, and such as I would expect from a friendly person towards Atlanta in any walk of life or any political party.”

  “Was that local or a national inquiry, sir?”

  “Uh, the, uh, conversations I had were over the long distance in Washington.”

  Hartsfield was primarily hoping to keep his city calm, even as he also communicated that he shared the concerns of King’s family and staff regarding the strange delay in the minister’s release. He believed, incorrectly, that Governor Vandiver had directly influenced Mitchell’s actions, but he put on a hopeful face. This was a little traffic charge, he argued; nothing bad was going to happen to King. But the gears of what passed for justice were grinding, no matter what Hartsfield said on camera.

  * * *

  All day Monday, an increasingly frustrated E. Frederic Morrow tried to get Nixon’s campaign director, Robert Finch, on the phone at his Nineteenth Street D.C. law office. After the gestures of friendship, the private conversations, and all the hard work he had done for Nixon, the Black adviser now felt locked out.

  His phone calls to Nixon weren’t going through, which was why he was reaching out to Finch, the man rumored to be Nixon’s best friend, if he had any friends at all. To Fred Morrow, it seemed urgently important to convey that the chance had arrived to turn around their insufficient Black outreach thus far and that it was Kennedy who seemed to be seizing the opportunity. If Nixon would act—and there was still time—the future that Morrow imagined for the GOP could still be realized.

  Morrow’s involvement with national Republican politics began in 1952 when the RNC’s Val Washington decided he needed a cadre of able Black operatives to realize his vision of bringing Black voters back to the GOP after the New Deal. He recruited Morrow, who was soon riding on Eisenhower’s campaign plane. Morrow acquitted himself well in the role, believing the GOP was simply a better vehicle than the Democratic Party for the aspirations of Black Americans—far from perfect, but not infected by southern leaders who made a mockery of that party’s appeal for Black support.


  Eisenhower’s team told Morrow there would be an opportunity in Washington for him after the campaign was over, so Morrow let his previous employer, CBS, know that he would not be coming back. Morrow came to D.C. with great anticipation. However, a White House job offer did not appear after he relocated to the capital, and he watched the inauguration in the cold. Eventually, Republican friends found him a job at the Department of Commerce. Two years later, Morrow was summoned to the office of the White House chief of staff, Sherman Adams. Morrow reported to the west gate at the White House, wondering what he had done wrong. Unapologetic about the broken promise of two years earlier, Adams offered him a newly created position at the White House: administrative officer for special projects. Morrow was in shock. Riding in a cab later in the evening, he heard his staff appointment mentioned in a radio news report, and he teared up with emotion, having achieved the breakthrough of becoming the first Black person to receive an executive position at the White House.

  The burdens of being a pioneer, its isolation and indignities, began to reveal themselves. Once Morrow moved into a room in the Executive Office Building, no secretary would accept the assignment of working for a Black man at first. It took five years for Morrow to get his formal commission, and though Eisenhower often attended the swearing in of his staffers, he did not come for this one. Morrow wrote in his diary, “The White House is a little embarrassed about me.” He loved Eisenhower nonetheless; the president was capable of small kindnesses such as sending Morrow a note after he had referred to himself at a meeting as a “guinea pig,” writing, “We are proud of you—and I assure you that never for one minute did any one of us consider you a ‘guinea pig.’ From the beginning you have merited and won our respect and admiration.” Morrow hung on through the 1956 election, pleased with the increase of Black support for the president, which suggested that his advocacy for civil rights within the White House was having an effect.

  Outside work, he was apprehensive of doing anything that could imperil the progress he was making. He did little socially, fearing that even an accidental stumble would allow people to gossip about his being a drunk. He and Jackie Robinson became friends, each understanding the pressure of being the first. Both summoned restraint when racist taunts came their way, and they accepted the loneliness that made their positions especially difficult. Instead of being asked for advice on how the administration could move toward equality, Morrow more often had to deal with the president’s belief that Black voters were not grateful enough for all that Eisenhower was doing for them. It was a conflicting position to be in, with many seeing him merely as window dressing—or worse, as a traitor for not pushing the administration hard enough. As much as Morrow resisted becoming the administration’s point man in handling the emerging civil rights movement, with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the brutal murder of Emmett Till the following year, Morrow faced an avalanche of letters accusing the president of indifference and he himself of being an Uncle Tom. Morrow struggled to awaken his fellow Republicans to this wave of change sweeping toward them, but it was even more difficult to tell them that they probably deserved the criticism—that the president was missing a chance to lead.

  Morrow believed Eisenhower was a good man, but when it came to the issue of race, Eisenhower made him “heartsick … the greatest cross I had to bear.” Something in Eisenhower usually resisted endorsing full civil rights action—his belief being that improvement came only with a change in the individual heart, something that no government could effect. (King disagreed, acknowledging once that a law could not make someone love him, yet “it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.”) Briefing Eisenhower before a speech to the National Newspaper Publishers Association, an organization of Black papers, Morrow prepped Eisenhower on talking points to avoid, but Eisenhower departed from his script onstage to talk about how “you people” needed “patience and forbearance” because there were “no revolutionary cures.” As he sat watching, Morrow recalled, “I could feel life draining from me.” Jackie Robinson, also in attendance, nearly jumped out of his seat in outrage but thought better of making a public rebuke.

  After Nixon met with Dr. King in 1957 and told President Eisenhower how impressed he was with the minister, a presidential meeting was arranged the following year with King, Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, and the Urban League’s Lester Granger. Despite the smiling photographs, Eisenhower was upset that the passing of the 1957 Civil Rights Act and his decision to enforce school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, had not seemed to satisfy them. It was reported that the president “wondered if further constructive action in this field would only result in more bitterness.” For King, it had not been a disaster, because he did not expect the old man to be a “crusader,” but it certainly made the openness of Vice President Nixon look even better.

  Morrow implored senior staff, “Some kind of gesture must be made by the White House to assure Negro citizens they have not been forsaken by their President.” Morrow tried to explain to Chief of Staff Adams that people could not be expected to be grateful for progress on attaining rights that should have always belonged to them. When Republicans did poorly in the 1958 midterms, Morrow told his party that they had not been doing enough work to turn out their Black supporters from the previous presidential election. He wrote in a memo, “In most of the states where the Republican Party took a drubbing, Negros hold the balance of power in any close election.” In none of these vital electoral states “has an earnest and sincere effort been made by Republican officials to appeal to the Negro voter or to offer these persons an opportunity to become an integral, vital part of the party.” In a 1958 survey, the two parties were viewed as being equal in caring about the welfare of Black people. Morrow said they had two more years to figure out a solution, and he was eager to do anything to help. He wrote, “I say emphatically and categorically there cannot be a Republican victory in 1960 until this situation is faced squarely and honestly.”

  To his mounting horror, Morrow’s frustrations with Eisenhower now seemed minimal compared with his being kept at a distance from Nixon during the campaign. He sensed Nixon was weighing an election-defining decision: whether to build on Eisenhower’s progress with Black voters or to fully commit to winning over white Democrats in the South. Morrow hoped Robert Finch could help him sway Nixon toward speaking out for King, which might in turn decide the larger question.

  Finch was a genial Californian with Hollywood good looks who had everything he needed to be president himself—except an instinct for the jugular. Perhaps that is why he had gravitated into the orbit of Nixon over the previous eight years, rising to the status of adviser, counselor, and eventually campaign manager, serving faithfully in multiple roles to further the political ends of his far more ambitious friend. But Finch’s unwillingness to bring out the knife was finally starting to affect his old bond with Nixon; he lost influence and status as the campaign went on, with Nixon increasingly serving as his own adviser.

  Even though he sensed that his ability to help was being ignored, Morrow felt that Finch was still worth a try. He dashed off a confidential letter to the campaign manager. He wanted to make sure Finch understood a simple fact: “Dr. Martin Luther King, leader of the student sit-in movement and idol of millions of Negros, is languishing in an Atlanta jail.” Though he was seeing something others were missing, Morrow was overestimating the complexity of the strategy guiding Hartsfield’s moves and, by extension, those of the Kennedy campaign. Not knowing the somewhat accidental fashion in which Wofford had intervened, Morrow warned, “The Kennedy forces have seized upon this unfortunate incident and have sent telegrams to the Mayor of Atlanta.”

  Anticipating what his opposite number on the Kennedy campaign, Louis Martin, was now realizing, Morrow saw that this situation could shift the election, writing, “This is a very smart move and the Kennedy forces are going to release this to the Negro press and other media so as to get credit for his hum
aneness and sympathetic understanding of Negro problems.” Morrow had fielded plenty of calls over the previous couple of days from Black Atlanta Republicans, from Calhoun on down, begging him to get Nixon to send a telegram of support to King or the King family. The White House staffer thought this move was an easy one, posing only a slight risk to the campaign. Such a visible gesture would balance out Kennedy’s supposed interest in the case and would confirm in the eyes of Black voters that Nixon was indeed King’s friend. Morrow saw the threat they faced from the other side if they did not act. In closing, he wrote that he hoped “a determination can be made at once.”

  Had Nixon acted within twenty-four hours of Morrow’s sending this letter, it would likely have been enough to blunt the later impact of Kennedy’s intervention in King’s case.

  It cannot be said that Nixon did not receive sufficient advice: George W. Lee, a Black Republican leader in Memphis, also begged Finch and others on the campaign to help King, writing, “It was Democrats who arrested Mr. King, and put him in jail … He is a martyr, a hero to Negroes.” The Nixon campaign was receiving telegrams from private citizens and NAACP chapters across the country begging him to act to save King. Both candidates resisted such pleas for nearly a week, but the difference would soon be that Wofford, Martin, and Shriver were daring enough to gamble the election itself.

  Earlier in the year, while the CRS was pushing Kennedy to meet with King, a civil rights group (which included King himself) had requested a meeting with the vice president. Nixon wrote to an aide, “Tell them that I would like to see them but that I am completely booked this week—or whenever they asked for.” Nixon’s calculated indifference—if not hostility—was but a sign of things to come.