Nine Days

by Paul Kendrick

  Wofford absorbed the details of the DeKalb disaster, and though he tried to reassure Coretta, he had no real comfort to offer. Her assertion that King was in mortal jeopardy meant that the stakes were now too high for playing political games. They would have to do something, whether the Irish Mafia on the Caroline was on board or not.

  Wofford wished he could say more to her, believing JFK was now working Georgia contacts on her husband’s behalf, but any public revelation of southern white Democrats helping Martin Luther King behind the scenes would harm the best chance they had for freeing him. Wofford simply said that they were “doing everything possible.” He knew it was insufficient. They had not begun to explore what was possible.

  After putting down the phone, Wofford turned to Martin. He briefed him on Mrs. King’s conversation with Belafonte and what was going on in Atlanta. His partner was equally disturbed and needed no persuading that King was indeed in serious trouble. When Martin had heard a younger King speak at the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel in 1956, the editor wrote, “Can civil rights in some form become a world issue? How I wish I could take a peep at the future.” That future was now at risk of being foreclosed.

  The two struggled again to draft a statement Kennedy could make. But they realized they were hitting the same old wall. For two workaholics, Wofford made a startling suggestion: Would Martin like to go get a late afternoon beer to clear their heads? Martin took him up on the offer. Escaping the office, they went over to their nearby mainstay, Harvey’s Restaurant, the bright red sign of the D.C. fixture beckoning them. Harvey’s was next door to the Mayflower Hotel, where Shriver had stayed before heading back to Illinois, and the three of them had often convened there after twelve-hour workdays, staying until the staff turned out the lights. Then they would either head back to the office or just collapse in Shriver’s room. It was during such long nights that Martin and Wofford saw another side of their driven boss, watching Shriver meditate, kneel in prayer, read radical Catholic theology on his hotel bed, and quote Gerard Manley Hopkins before finally falling asleep.

  Over their beers, Martin pondered, “What do we do now? What do we do to help get King out?” Was there something that they were not considering?

  Wofford said, “Who cares about public statements? What Kennedy ought to do is something direct and personal, like picking up the telephone and calling Coretta. Just giving his sympathy but doing it himself.” He said, “If these beautiful and passionate Kennedys would just lose their cool for once and show their passion, maybe Jack would do something like just calling her.”

  “That’s it, that’s it! That would be perfect,” Martin responded. “That would really make ’em, if he would call them on the phone it would make a huge impact.” He said, “That’s the most beautiful thought I’ve heard. You don’t know what that would do for her, and people like me.” They decided to find a way to get this idea to Kennedy.

  Martin’s sudden enthusiasm was galvanizing after days of restraint. They talked into the evening, imagining such a call from different angles—how and when best to do it, the risks involved, what strategy would be required. Getting through to Kennedy would not be easy, however, given how skeptically Wofford was viewed within the campaign. They phoned Shriver, intending to ask who the best person to present the idea to Kennedy might be, but they did not reach him. Their boss was busy arranging Kennedy’s tour of the Chicago suburbs, scheduled for the next day. Impatient, Wofford tried calling Kennedy himself, then other aides. He waited, but received no reply. The last few days had confirmed to the rest of the campaign that Wofford and the CRS were a nuisance to be ignored.

  It was getting late, and Wofford was still worried about Coretta. The idea came to him that a temporary proxy for Kennedy could be the former Connecticut governor Chester Bowles, Wofford’s partner in writing the civil rights plank of the Democratic Party platform at the convention and a fellow liberal whom he could count on. Getting Bowles on the line, Wofford explained the situation and asked, “Mrs. King really needs some word from afar that would encourage her. Why don’t you call her?”

  Bowles, though barely on the edge of the Kennedy circle, had gravitas. He responded, “Wonderful. I’ll call her, and as a matter of fact, I’ll have Adlai Stevenson call her. He’s here for dinner, and we’ll both talk to her.”

  “That’ll be wonderful; that’ll help.”

  Wofford had at least gotten something done. He would keep trying to get their idea to JFK in the morning. Everything was moving fast.

  DAY 8: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26

  It was around 3:30 a.m. In the pitch-black, no sign yet of dawn, Martin Luther King was, for once, deep in slumber, having at some point that night lost his battle against sleep.

  There was the metallic grating of keys, and then his cell door opened.

  Guttural shouts: “King! King! Wake up!” He thought he was still dreaming. “King, get up, put on your clothes.” He was slow to move, and the guards insisted, “Did ya’ hear me, King? Get up and come on out here. And bring all your things with you.”

  His jailers kept their flashlights in his face. They told him to stand up and dress, and they grabbed his wrists and handcuffed them. Then the guards pushed him out into the dark corridor.

  It was hard not to succumb to the panic. King knew all too well the long history of Black people being led toward an extrajudicial death in the dark of night, the fiction of their resistance an easy excuse. If they could toss the mangled body of a child as young as Emmett Till in a river, what were they about to do to him? His lawyer Hollowell represented the widow of James Brazier, a Black man who was pulled over by the police in Dawson, Georgia, without cause; when Brazier continued to protest this, he was taken from his prison cell and fatally beaten.

  As they emerged into the parking lot, King saw a police car waiting for him. Exhaust fumes trailed into the chilly Georgia night. The guards knelt to bind iron shackles around King’s legs that could be attached to the floor of the car. When the shackles were clicked shut, he now had chains on both his ankles and trailing from the manacles on his wrists. The guards were treating him like a dangerous criminal.

  As he tried to find a comfortable position in the back of the car, the next threat he had to deal with was a German shepherd in the back seat. These dogs were trained to lunge, but luckily King’s back-seat companion did not do so. King was raised with dogs and liked them. Maybe this huge animal somehow sensed that.

  The two white men settled into the front seat, and within five minutes of his being awakened, they pulled away from the jail into the darkness beyond Decatur. He did not know it then, but the two officers were from the Georgia State Board of Corrections.

  Every time King shifted in discomfort as they drove along the bumpy Georgia roads—wherever they were going, there were no expressways—the dog growled. As the night wore on, King heard the officers muttering to each other. They never spoke to him about where they were headed.

  With the guards not speaking to him, King was hit by the desperate feeling that he might never see anyone he loved again. His family might never know which roads he was driven along that night, nor the truth about his eventual fate. King said later, “That kind of mental anguish is worse than dying.” He described it as “hell on earth.”

  With each mile they traveled, King grew hungrier and thirstier, and he silently prayed. After some hours, he figured that if they were not going to kill him, then they must be heading for the infamous state prison where he was to serve his four-month sentence. He had never been to Reidsville, had no sense of how one could get there or how far away it was. He knew only that it was in the piney backwoods very far from the comforts of Atlanta. He had a dim idea that the distance to Reidsville must be more than two hundred miles, so he simply held on.

  King’s first clue as to where they were heading came near the three-hour mark, when they were around Dublin, Georgia, and he heard the officers make a remark that led him to believe Reidsville was indeed the
intended destination. On that long night, the sun did not rise until the last half hour of the ride. Just after it did, some four hours into the journey, they arrived in Tattnall County—finally in sight of the long, austere, WPA-era Georgia State Prison building, an incongruous sight amid the endless miles of rural farms that surrounded it. The looming jail was built here for a reason; it was far from all but the most desolate towns. Above its entrance was a frieze of muscular men engaged in hard labor, a not-so-subtle evocation of the fate of those imprisoned inside. When they finally arrived, King did not feel any particular relief, such as he had experienced when he had reached the Montgomery jail years earlier. This time he was, as he later told Coretta, “exhausted and humiliated.”

  Unshackled to finally stretch his muscles after the long ride, he was put through fingerprinting, a review of his criminal record, a medical exam, and a short meeting with the chaplain. King stayed silent as guards led him into a narrow cell and had him dress in the prison uniform: white with dark stripes down the legs. Guards gave him two pairs and instructed him to put on the older one. R. P. Balkcom, the forty-five-year-old hard-nosed warden who had worked at Reidsville for nearly two decades, informed King that he would be held in solitary confinement for between ten and twenty-one days while the prison determined what duties he would be assigned. Balkcom told the minister that he did not yet know whether he would labor on a prison farm or perform road work.

  Meanwhile, whispers went between cells: “King’s here.”

  * * *

  Governor Ernest Vandiver had achieved his lifelong dream of leading Georgia and was not enjoying it nearly as much as he imagined he would.

  He had suffered a heart attack in March, at age forty-one. Nineteen sixty had been the most difficult year of Vandiver’s life. He had worked (and schemed) his way to the Georgia governor’s mansion, and once he got there, it appeared that the federal courts’ willingness to indulge Georgia’s resistance to Brown v. Board of Education was finally coming to an end. Not that his white voters would accept such an explanation, hostile as they were to Brown. They expected him to keep stalling, as his predecessors had.

  Vandiver wanted to tinker with the state budget, enact government reforms, and improve the treatment of the mentally ill, all while keeping matters of race hidden away as they were in the rural world of Lavonia, Georgia, where he’d grown up. The times would not cooperate. Emboldened Georgians like Lonnie King would not allow the old racial hierarchy that Vandiver believed in to endure.

  He had no one to blame but himself for his predicament in relation to white expectations, given his promise that integration—in the schools, especially—would never happen. That traditional political ploy now looked like an impossible promise, unless he shut down the entire school system of the state of Georgia. That is what he had said he would do if forced to, before ever allowing mixed schools. Parents were on edge, not knowing whether their children would be going to school. The white response to potential integration was likely to be violent. Vandiver felt besieged by both Black student activists and the KKK, failing to distinguish morally between the two. It was a dilemma for an ambitious southern politician who preferred stability over civil rights. The possibility of a foreshortened political career loomed.

  Vandiver thought of himself as a good and moderate man. By nature, he was not a demagogue like gubernatorial peers such as Alabama’s John Patterson and George Wallace, though he was no more sympathetic to King than they were. When King moved back to Atlanta, Vandiver announced, “Wherever M. L. King, Jr., has been there has followed in his wake a wave of crimes including stabbing, bombings, and inciting of riots … He is not welcome to Georgia.” Vandiver believed, “Until now, we have had good relations between the races.”

  King was costing Vandiver sleep—quite literally on that Wednesday morning. The state patrol would ordinarily not put calls through to him until after 7:00 a.m., so Vandiver was startled by the jangle of his bedside phone, his wife, Betty, still asleep next to him. Why was a call being put through at 6:30 a.m.?

  John F. Kennedy was on the line. Without early morning apologies or political pleasantries, Kennedy stated his request: “Martin Luther King is in jail. Is there anything you can do to get him out of jail? I think if you could work it out, and we could get him out of jail it would help tremendously in this campaign.” Kennedy was eager to solve a problem for their party.

  It was at the Democratic National Convention earlier in the summer that Vandiver first met the candidate, and the two had a productive private conversation as Vandiver implored him to let Georgia handle its own affairs. Kennedy promised never to send federal troops into Georgia to enforce school desegregation; for the prize of Georgia’s twelve electoral votes, it seemed to Kennedy a bargain worth making.

  Suddenly Vandiver was faced with an unthinkable request from his presidential candidate: “It’s important to me if Martin Luther King is free.”

  Vandiver answered, “Well, he was driving a car without a license; he’s obviously guilty, it’s gonna be a difficult thing to do to try to get a man out.”

  “Well, just get him out.”

  Vandiver said, “If I did anything to help get Martin Luther King out of jail, they’d probably throw me out of the state, or run me out on the rail.” He added, “Senator, I don’t know. It would be political suicide for me to do it overtly. And I don’t know whether I can or not. I don’t—I couldn’t make any promises.”

  Kennedy replied, “Yeah I know that, but see if there is anything you could do behind the scenes maybe to get him released.”

  “I’ll do what I can undercover, and we’ll see what we can do.”

  “Well, I’m going to be busy today, but here’s a number where you can reach Bobby.” Jack read out the number and added, “If you are successful, call Bobby and let him know.”

  The candidate hung up, leaving Vandiver shaken. JFK was someone to whom he wanted to say yes—his party’s nominee and a man who, if he won, could be quite helpful to Vandiver in the future. And so the Georgia governor did what he always did at difficult moments: he called his best friend, Bob Russell, brother of his wife, Betty, and nephew of the Georgia senator Richard Russell, American segregation’s arch legislative tactician. Besides that of Betty, it was Bob Russell’s judgment that Vandiver trusted most in this world—even if he was starting to wonder if Russell had been wise during the campaign in pushing Vandiver to make his “No, not one” promise against Black students ever being allowed into schools with white children.

  Still, Bob Russell was a man who thought quickly, and Vandiver needed to make a swift decision that morning. He sat down in the den as Betty hurried to get the kids off to their nearby public school. The governor had short, wavy black hair, a thick bottom lip, and placid blue eyes behind thick glasses. He got his brother-in-law on the phone and related Kennedy’s request. Bob Russell’s instincts were the same as his own. Russell wondered just how much this maneuver would cost them if it ever became public knowledge; still, political patronage might flow back to Georgia if they somehow pulled it off, completely sub rosa. Vandiver assured Russell that only Betty knew about Kennedy’s call.

  Getting King freed would solve an uncomfortable problem for the Democrats. It would help not only Kennedy but also the best friend of Bob’s uncle, Senator Lyndon Johnson. Senator Russell wanted his friend Johnson in the White House, and having Democrats in control would be good for all of them at such a tenuous time. Though Vandiver and his fellow southern Democratic governors hated Kennedy’s liberal civil rights plank, they concluded that their best shot at warding off the implementation of these policies was to be owed favors by D.C. politicians, and they were piling up. These promises could lock Kennedy into the deal he made with Vandiver at the convention to keep federal troops out. Nixon still seemed more aggressive on civil rights enforcement than Kennedy, so they certainly did not want the Republican in the White House.

  Still, intervening to secure Martin Luther King’s release pos
ed an existential threat to their political futures. Bob Russell, though, just happened to have a clever idea about whom to call to help them get the job done: George Stewart, the secretary of the state senate. Not long ago, police had found Stewart drunk in his parked car and arrested him. This embarrassment could have ended his career, but Vandiver, who was the lieutenant governor at the time, told him, “Our friendship goes way beyond that, George.” A couple of days after the arrest, Vandiver walked with Stewart through the senate chamber, sending the message that Vandiver would not abandon him, and that no one else should, either. George Stewart therefore owed Vandiver a favor, and he just so happened to be a close friend of Judge Mitchell’s. Given how they all felt about King, asking Mitchell to release the minister was a request that could come only from a friend.

  Though Stewart’s leadership role in the States’ Rights Council of Georgia—a group formed to defend segregation against federal intervention—made him among the least likely people in the Peach State to want to aid Martin Luther King, these were not normal circumstances. They were not asking Stewart to do it for King’s sake, after all.

  So Vandiver picked up the phone and invited Stewart to the governor’s mansion. They were close enough that even if he refused the request, Stewart could at least be trusted to keep his mouth shut.

  When Stewart arrived later that morning, Vandiver and Russell, who had also come to the governor’s mansion, described their predicament and asked him if he could do anything to persuade Judge Mitchell to release King. They all knew Mitchell was a stubborn man. He would not have exposed DeKalb County to the scorn of the nation without some personal desire to sentence King.