Nine Days

by Paul Kendrick

  Watters felt the need to stand with these students, who he was suddenly sure would prevail, and found himself weeping. That night marked the beginning of a transformation, and three years later he would leave journalism to devote himself to the work of the Southern Regional Council for racial equality. He would recall in his memoirs how “We Shall Overcome” could be heard at each significant moment of the civil rights movement over the next eight years.

  * * *

  King just had time to change clothes before heading to the church he had known his whole life. Hollowell quietly returned to his office. After a few hours, he made his way to Ebenezer and spoke briefly, though the gratitude he was shown was muted. As was so often the case in Hollowell’s life, the attention was not on him; he had done his job. His tireless legal work to get King out would be forgotten in the rush to praise the Kennedys. For the attorney Howard Moore, who was mentored by Hollowell and knew how unflappable he was, the following days were one of the few times he ever saw Hollowell appear wounded. He was no self-promoter, but Hollowell would have liked to receive more thanks for what he had done.

  Hollowell was, however, gratified to receive a late-night phone call from Thurgood Marshall, who drawled, “Well, Don, I see that everybody except the lawyers is responsible for getting King out of jail.”

  As for Lonnie, he had never seen a church this packed so late at night; the service would still be going strong at one in the morning. The students had worked for hours getting word out all over campus and along Sweet Auburn, assembling the crowd they believed King deserved.

  The welcome-home service was titled a “thanksgiving prayer service.” Eight hundred people responded with fervor when Daddy King said of Kennedy, “It took courage to call my daughter at a time like this. He has the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right.” Daddy King came out strong, holding nothing back. “He can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is. I’ve got all my votes, and I’ve got a suitcase, and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.”

  The charged response made the sanctuary feel like a political rally. To the young Reverend Moss, it was an electrifying moment, with people around him going wild for Daddy King’s endorsement. Daddy King admitted to having been against Kennedy because “he is a Catholic and I couldn’t go that way.” Yet that one call to his daughter-in-law, showing sympathy for what Black people faced, changed his view. When King junior came to the lectern, the contrast between the elder King’s emotionality and his son’s cooler, more cerebral style had never been starker. He said only one thing regarding the election: “I never intend to be a religious bigot. I never intend to reject a man running for president of the United States just because he is a Catholic.” It was a statement that could certainly be interpreted as favoring Kennedy, though it was only a statement against discrimination. But King, still suffering from a viral fever that he had developed in prison, did not feel like talking about politics for long; instead, he focused on the meaning of suffering to their emerging cause.

  King recounted the handcuffing around 3:30 a.m. and the long, harrowing ride to Reidsville, and declared that he would endure it again for the cause of equality. He said Black people must “master the art of creative suffering … We must be prepared to suffer, sacrifice and even die.” It was a night of celebration, but also a night of reckoning. “We must continue to have the courage to challenge the system of segregation—an evil which no righteous person can accept whether it is in schools, libraries, public parks, Christian churches, at lunch counters.” Segregation is “an evil which must be removed from our society.”

  Then, for a moment, he let a smile pass over his face when he said he must be “a dangerous man” if they had to chain and handcuff him. King circled back to where it had all begun: the sit-in. He reminded the crowd that after all the attention that had been paid to him over the last few days, when he had gone down to Rich’s more than a week earlier, he was a follower, not the leader. He praised the students for “creative and victorious moments last week. They created the atmosphere for all that is taking place in Atlanta today.”

  Lonnie was jubilant. Everyone was joyful that night, but he had been released from the guilt that had dogged him for the past nine days. Now here they all were together, singing, safe.

  TIME TO DETONATE

  Since he had started working for the Kennedy campaign, Louis Martin’s rallying cry was “Let’s get all the horses on the track!” All the CRS’s horses were lined up—endorsements, ads in the Black media, support from local vote getters and organizations—but where was the opposition’s final play for Black voters? Martin spent all day Friday fretting, and the next morning, too, wondering when his opponents would do what seemed obvious: utilize the years of work Nixon had put into building relationships with Black leaders like King.

  While the Kennedys might feel relieved that the white-focused media had moved on from the passing attention given to the Georgia calls, Martin was still unsure whether they had taken full advantage of the incident to increase Black voter turnout. To the extent that they had covered the Kennedy’s involvement, the press mostly focused on the mystery of what had happened between Bobby and the judge, and Martin did not want the impact of Jack Kennedy’s earlier sympathetic call to Coretta to be lost on voters.

  Martin was now confident they were going to win a higher percentage of the Black vote than Nixon, but wondered if the total number of those votes would be enough to win them the election; after all, both candidates were still seen as largely uninspiring by many in the Black community. In his mind, there was a dangerous difference between adequate and full turnout. Martin sensed that “it was going to be a tight contest so every darn vote counted. I don’t care where we found it. We had to get it. We were anxious to make sure that we got the blacks to the polls because we knew that if they got there, they’d vote the right way.” He compared the election to setting up a horse race: “If they don’t run that day, that’s it.”

  Following King’s release, Martin and Wofford resumed their habitual brainstorming, even though they remained hamstrung by Bobby. Doing nothing seemed ridiculous with the election so close. They had to fully leverage their momentary political advantage and do so quickly, and invisibly. They considered how effective the National Conference on Constitutional Rights before Kennedy’s Harlem speech had been just weeks earlier. Could they do something in that vein, but even more ambitious?

  Martin had an idea: a hard-hitting pamphlet laying out the entire King crisis for Black readers, highlighting what Kennedy had said, and sandblasting Nixon for what he had not. The two of them believed Nixon had been a moral coward and that he should pay for it. As they kept batting ideas back and forth, they realized that Martin already had the distribution channels to get an explosive little pamphlet into the hands of Black voters.

  It would be the consummate Louis Martin play—one his whole life had been building toward. A story from Martin’s time campaigning for FDR in 1944 suggested he had what was needed to pull off a plan this risky. When Martin went to New York City to rally the growing urban Black vote, he saw a story in a Black newspaper that quoted the new vice presidential nominee Harry Truman as saying store owners should be able to serve whomever they pleased—or not. Knowing the story could blow up and cost Roosevelt critical Black votes, Martin drafted a made-up interview to present Truman as being against segregation. When he could not reach Truman’s traveling camp to get approval, and with a few hours left before weekly Black newspapers’ deadlines, the rookie DNC staffer had to decide whether to publish a statement in the candidate’s words without his permission—and this was a candidate Martin had never met. Martin chose to send out the Truman denial, consequences be damned. His informed gamble was that white folks would never notice anything in the Black press. To white journalists, it “might just as well have been written in Chinese for all they knew.”

  Could he do the same thing again, but on a bigger scale? Martin’s fearlessness cam
e from having confronted racism in its most terrifying forms. He could still see the Spanish-moss-covered tree branch on which two Black men were lynched in his childhood hometown of Savannah, Georgia; the branch had been cut down and displayed on the steps of a church two blocks from his house. After that, anytime he saw a group of white people talking together as a child, he wondered in panic if they were gathered for a lynching. As he would say, “I was twelve years old, and I was scared to death.” He did not believe people understood the terror he’d lived under. His physician father might have been an Afro-Cuban immigrant who believed he would be exempted from racism by his financial status, but Martin’s Black American mother knew better. When a new patient once came through the office’s front door, Dr. Martin’s receptionist found him napping and implored, “He’s a white man.” The doctor rose so quickly that even the child Louis understood these words implied a racial power structure that his father was forced to acknowledge.

  Kennedy’s call to Coretta was something almost beyond his wildest imaginings—an act so human, so timely, and so compassionate, but seemingly above the political fray … perfect (at least by the standards of the era). Martin would not have to say outright that Nixon was a racist; he felt confident that evoking outrage toward Nixon’s lack of compassion and empathy would resonate in the Black community because it resonated with him.

  Wofford asked Martin how they could possibly pull the plan off, given Bobby’s directive. In answer, Martin dialed up Shriver in Illinois, confident their boss would support them. Laying out the idea, Martin explained the media habits of the people he wanted to reach, saying, “They don’t read the New York Times or the Atlanta Constitution.”

  Regarding the pamphlet, Shriver asked, “What do you want to put in it?”

  Martin explained that they would simply highlight indignant statements that Black leaders like Daddy King had already made publicly.

  “So you don’t need to editorialize or make any new statement?” It was clear where Shriver’s sharp mind was going.

  In the end, Shriver made the decision to go ahead, against his brother-in-law’s orders. “Okay. We’ve got to use these wonderful quotations of Mrs. King, Martin Luther King Jr., and his father. That’s not propaganda, it’s just reporting what has been said. Bobby couldn’t object to that.” Of course, Bobby might well object, but Shriver wasn’t going to give him the chance: “Then you don’t need to ask Bobby’s permission. He might say no, but what you’re planning is not within his ban. Let’s do it. If it works, he’ll like it. If we don’t do it, and we don’t get enough Negro votes, he and Jack wouldn’t like that, and we would all be kicking ourselves for a long time.”

  With their boss taking responsibility, Wofford was thrilled. The quotations indicting Nixon were powerful. Martin told Shriver they would figure out a way to produce and distribute the campaign literature, while Shriver quickly found a way to finance the covert project without asking the campaign for funds, never explaining where the money came from. The marketing genius in Shriver realized, as he later put it, “we had a terrific propaganda coup.” He knew his in-laws were political sharks, but he also saw them as fundamentally decent people capable of an empathetic gesture like calling Coretta, even if the political equation hadn’t been fully figured out.

  Martin and Wofford called Coretta, writing down what she remembered from her conversation with their candidate and how it made her feel. It took them six hours to get the piece ready to be printed. They attempted to further hide their tracks by saying that the pamphlet was published by a group of respected Black ministers even if they were not involved editorially. Marjorie Lawson contributed as well: she had been focused on winning the support of Black churches, which could serve as distribution sites. The team called their fictive organization the Freedom Crusade Committee, listing as its head their friend from Philadelphia the Reverend William Gray. They decided not to mention Bobby’s call to the judge, given its questionable legality.

  The pamphlet was titled The Case of Martin Luther King. When opened, it featured Coretta’s quotations above Daddy King’s, and then at the bottom of the page was King junior’s statement that Kennedy “served as a great force in making my release possible.” Their use of King’s words made it sound like an endorsement: “I hold Senator Kennedy in very high esteem. I am convinced he will seek to exercise the power of his office to fully implement the civil rights plank of the party’s platform.” Alongside a statement by Abernathy was a quotation from the Reverend Gardner Taylor: “All Americans can rejoice that Dr. Martin Luther King and all the sit-in students are now out of jail.” He hailed Kennedy for “moral leadership and direct personal concern” and indicted Nixon for being “so insensitive to a case which has world-wide implications.”

  When they added in bold a headline reading, “‘No Comment’ Nixon Versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy,” they were clearly going beyond the editorial boundaries established by Shriver. They decided to run the headline anyway.

  Then came one last decision—paper size and color. They went with a simple tri-fold format, on robin’s-egg blue. When they were done, Shriver ordered fifty thousand pamphlets printed in Washington and, by midweek, five hundred thousand to be run off in Chicago. This number would grow quickly. Shriver and Wofford would later put it at around two million; Martin believed it was three million. No one remembers who gave it the name by which it has gone down in history and campaign lore, but the light blue paper it was printed on served as inspiration: it would be called the Blue Bomb.

  * * *

  The next morning, Wofford, Martin, and Shriver received a message they had been awaiting for weeks: Kennedy would indeed sign the recommendations coming out of their New York Conference on Constitutional Rights. Kennedy instructed Wofford to go to Washington National Airport to meet him as he passed through town, saying for “Harris to bring out the damn paper.” Campaign higher-ups had never been enthusiastic about this report, and would have preferred to let it be forgotten in the closing days of the campaign, but they were prevailed upon to have Kennedy sign it.

  Taking his son Daniel with him, Wofford drove along the Potomac River in Alexandria, Virginia, on a beautiful fall day. When he arrived at the airport, he was happy to see Kennedy had his daughter, Caroline, with him. He handed the document to Kennedy, who read over the detailed proposals for civil rights action and then looked up at Wofford. He asked, “Don’t you think we’ve shot our bolt in all this? Do we have to do it?” With an expression that was half hopeful, half sly, Kennedy said, “Tell me honestly whether you think I need to sign and release this today, in order to get elected Tuesday. Or do you mainly want me to do it to go on record?”

  Wofford knew what Kennedy was really asking. The unexpected events of the last two weeks had given the CRS more than they could ever have hoped for, and they might have the Black votes they needed without another set of future promises. This policy document was not going to sway many voters, not now. Wofford paused, knowing he was expected to return with a signature. But unable to refuse Kennedy, he said, “No, you don’t need to sign it.”

  Kennedy declared, “Then we can wait, and release it when I’m elected. You can consider me on record,” he said, smiling, “with you.” This was Kennedy charm up close. “Let’s issue it right after the election.” Having settled the matter, Kennedy said, “Let’s go out to the plane.”

  Wofford strolled with Kennedy out onto the sunlit tarmac where his private plane was waiting. On parting, Kennedy made a surprising remark, one of the few he ever made about the events surrounding King’s arrest and release. He casually said, “Did you see what Martin’s father said? He was going to vote against me because I was a Catholic, but since I called his daughter-in-law, he will vote for me. That was a hell of a bigoted statement, wasn’t it? Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father!” The candidate smiled, waved farewell, and added, “Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?”

  Wofford was left holding the uns
igned papers.

  * * *

  Nixon knew it was time to roll out the old general, still the most potent weapon the GOP possessed. President Eisenhower’s wife, Mamie, had taken Nixon aside, saying Ike’s health meant his appearances would have to be limited, but she asked that he not tell the president that this was the reason he was being sidelined. Eisenhower was puzzled and angry about his small role in the campaign. Nonetheless, the White House announced on Monday, October 31, that President Eisenhower would campaign in New York on Wednesday and in Ohio and Pennsylvania on Friday.

  Kennedy had been relieved that the beloved president had stayed out of the fray, but it was inevitable that with Eisenhower flashing his trademark smile, the polls would start to shift in Nixon’s favor. On Monday, Kennedy was in Philadelphia, speaking to Temple University students leaning out of dorm room windows to see him. It was a drizzly, cloudy day, with Kennedy campaigning in a raincoat and hat, an item he disliked and rarely wore. It has been assumed that Kennedy never spoke about the King affair in any public way (with few references even in private), but he mentioned it that afternoon when campaigning in a Black neighborhood of Philadelphia. At a campaign stop at the Raymond Rosen Apartments, Robert Nix, a local Black political leader, introduced Kennedy and recounted that he had been crucial in getting Dr. King out of prison.

  During Kennedy’s turn to speak, he ruefully told his audience, “And with Martin Luther King in jail, Mr. Nixon’s headquarters issued a statement ‘No comment.’ If that’s what you want, you can have him.” Kennedy closed with his well-honed theme of moving forward and left to applause.