Nine Days

by Paul Kendrick

  Though he was grateful to be out of jail, King sensed with growing unease that the story of his release was all too convenient for certain white politicians. He emphasized that “the Kennedy family did have some part, at least they expressed a concern and they did have some part in the release, but I must make it clear that many other forces worked to bring it about also.” It was a difficult rhetorical line to walk, but even the day he emerged from Reidsville to face reporters, he knew that his story was bound up with the sit-ins, with the resilience of his Atlanta community, with the way his family and staff had worked against odds that white reporters did not understand. He knew that long-standing relationships between men like Daddy King and John Calhoun and imperfect white allies like Hartsfield prepared the ground on which he eventually walked free. And as he passed through the foreboding gates of Reidsville, he was standing next to the commanding Hollowell—a Black lawyer who refused to be intimidated by white judges and prosecutors.

  The Atlanta students, for their part, refused to give all the credit to the Kennedys. One Inquirer headline read, “King: Public Freed Him.” The SCLC’s Wyatt Tee Walker claimed, too, that broad public support for King was responsible for his release:

  If there was any critical pressure that brought the judge to this new position, certainly the hundreds of thousands of telegrams, letters and calls from all over the nation had its impact on the conscience of the court. Coupled with the brilliant handling of the team headed by Donald L. Hollowell, the judge really had no choice but to grant bail.

  Walker wanted to wrestle the story back under control before it was completely wrenched from their hands.

  * * *

  Nonetheless, Wofford’s heroic account of the Kennedys’ actions was accepted by many, and its simplicity gave it great utility. As Governor Vandiver said in an interview years later, “Those of us who knew [the true story]—the only ones—we went underground, we didn’t tell anyone either.”

  “Us” meant Vandiver, George Stewart, Bob Russell, Bobby Kennedy, and the new president, and “underground” often meant taking certain facts to the grave. Of those five individuals, only Vandiver reached old age, and his late-in-life account sheds unique light on the real story. Vandiver first began to talk in a 1967 Kennedy Library oral history, but comments on sensitive negotiations he’d conducted with Kennedy and his Georgia associates were only included in an addendum that remained sealed for many years. In interviews conducted long after his political career was over, Vandiver was more open, even displaying a touch of pride in his odd entanglement with King—quite a change from his earlier belief that the matter was political poison.

  President Kennedy himself apparently told Theodore White aspects of the story on deep background. White went to Atlanta to ask Vandiver for more details, but he did not get the real story from the governor, because Vandiver still had political ambitions. And so the story remained unbroken for decades—except for a brief interlude in 1960, in the wake of a Christmas party livened with perhaps too many spirits. A Journal reporter picked up on how George Stewart had set up Bobby’s call to Judge Mitchell, and subsequently published a story that quoted Stewart taking credit for something that had turned out to help his party. Stewart said, “Since King had to be released under the law anyhow we might as well get in a good lick for the national Democratic party and the state by showing the nation anyone can get justice down here.” He added, “The Kennedys were interested in King and Nixon wasn’t.” After that, Stewart remained silent about his role and died a decade and a half later.

  In later years, in certain Georgia circles, the effort to help Kennedy help King might be discussed quietly at parties or at funerals, but never around strangers. By the close of the decade, many of those involved had died, including King himself, and the official story held firm, gleaming like Georgia marble.

  * * *

  After the election, the exhausted president-elect retreated to his father’s West Palm Beach mansion and relaxed with his adviser John Kenneth Galbraith, the six-foot-eight professor of economics at Harvard. The two men had a comfortable, frank rapport. Galbraith was the only person to have recorded Kennedy’s own thoughts about the King affair in the immediate aftermath of the election.

  After a day spent walking beside the ocean with Bobby and Ethel, they all gathered for dinner at the grand Louis XIV mahogany dining room banquet table and refought the election. Kennedy said of Nixon, “He sat out the jailing of Martin Luther King.” Galbraith remembered the brothers saying that they had “acted individually; neither knew what the other was doing.” Historians long mistook this statement for the truth, and it has taken decades for the reality of what actually happened to emerge. Later testimony from Vandiver and Mitchell confirms what the Kennedy adviser Dick Goodwin and other family members also claimed: that the brothers were in constant communication in those days. They are sure that Bobby would not have made such a critical decision without Jack’s approval.

  Kennedy said one more thing to Galbraith about the unfolding of the King crisis. In his typically dry manner, he shrugged off any suggestion that he deserved praise: “The finest strategies are usually the result of accidents.”

  * * *

  In Chicago, two days after the election, Louis Martin picked up his home phone, surprised to hear the familiar can-do tone of Shriver. Shriver was not interested in reminiscing; he ordered Martin to “get back to Washington … We’ve got to recruit a whole leadership here with this new government. We’ve won it. Now we’ve got to do something with it.” Shriver called Wofford as well, saying, “If you thought you were going on vacation, enjoy it quickly—between now and Sunday. Monday morning we get to work. Jack has asked me to organize a talent search for the top jobs—the Cabinet, regulatory agencies, ambassadors, everything. We’re going to comb the universities and professions, the civil rights movement, business, labor, foundations, and everywhere, to find the brightest and best people possible.” They had three days to learn how an American government transition worked before showing up at the Mayflower Hotel in D.C.

  Suddenly Louis Martin was exactly where he needed to be. His goal was to build Black political power, and he would do that by becoming the ultimate background adviser, finding qualified Black candidates to appoint to posts dealing with more than just Black affairs. No matter what position came up, Martin would have a stellar candidate to pitch—one who just happened to be Black. Shriver and Wofford were amazed at what he dubbed his “Who’s Who of Negro experts of one kind or another.” He quickly had a list of 750 strong prospects. Eight years on, he was still crossing people off that list whenever he was able to get them into pathbreaking roles. As he would put it, “There was an opportunity for the first time to try to slip—as the boys used to say—a few brothers in here.”

  His position for the next eight years would be deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a job he found well suited to cultivating a generation of Black presidential appointees—among them, the first Black cabinet secretary and Supreme Court justice. That being said, if Martin felt (justifiably) snubbed by being assigned to the DNC instead of to the White House, he never said so in writing. Later, President Johnson would turn to Martin more and more regularly as an adviser and even as a confidant.

  Martin justified his behind-the-scenes appointment by saying that he did not want racist opponents knowing of his access to power, nor did he want Black Americans to criticize him, as they had Morrow, as “some black sitting in the White House assuming that he had some power and was telling how they should run the country for blacks.” Martin had a full pass to the West Wing, but Wofford still thought the Kennedy administration had missed an opportunity to hire a man of Martin’s talents to be at the president’s side on a daily basis.

  Wofford would later write, “Louis and I continued through the next decades to be on call for Shriver.” They continued to support Shriver’s endeavors such as the Peace Corps that survive to this day as his legacy. The three close colleagues w
ould weave in and out of each other’s lives, a loose but affectionate partnership forged during the 1960 election. What happened during the race to save King’s life would continue to play a powerful role in their lives.

  * * *

  While the new administration took shape, the old one packed up, its members choosing their soft landing places. Morrow expected, along with the rest of Eisenhower’s departing staff, to be recommended for some lucrative post by the president. At the final Christmas party, however, Eisenhower took him aside with a pained expression and told him that no one he knew seemed to need his services. Morrow found himself, somewhat like Vice President Nixon, left adrift and unemployed by the Republicans’ loss.

  During his limbo, he published his White House diaries, which he titled Black Man in the White House. The book, even as it honored the president he served and a vice president he admired, stirred more than a few pots in Eisenhower’s circle. It revealed Morrow’s frustration at not having been listened to, his sense of being invisible, and his opinion on the mistakes Nixon had made at the end of his campaign. Morrow expressed disappointment that Nixon didn’t seize the chance to win the Black vote.

  It would take nearly three years before his Republican connections paid off with a high-level position at Bank of America. By then, Nixon, having lost the governor’s race in California, had established himself as a New York lawyer literally across the street from Morrow’s offices. Morrow never became part of Nixon’s inner circle, though Nixon said of him, “His career would have been bright if I had won.” Morrow served as a mentor to minority executives facing the same frustrations he encountered at CBS, the White House, and now the world of New York banking, telling them, you can “be in it but not of it.”

  To outsiders, Morrow seemed to have fulfilled the American dream, but he felt that he had fallen just short. He was denied access to the corridors of power that others of his stature passed through freely. In the end, he hoped there would be change, and if not that, he felt his existence at least offered “a certain nuisance value.” Morrow’s path as “the first” was marked by pain that he could not easily forget, but he developed a wry perspective on events—even titling his last autobiography Forty Years a Guinea Pig.

  * * *

  As for the defeated vice president, his time in Washington appeared to most observers to be at an end. Yet the man who equaled FDR for being on the most national ballots—five each—sensed his time there was not quite over. As night fell on the day of Kennedy’s inauguration and galas got underway across the city, Nixon asked his driver to take him back to the Capitol before taking him to the airport for his flight to California. Alone, the former vice president looked out from a balcony atop the dome toward the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, shimmering white in the cold distance. He later wrote, “As I turned to go inside, I suddenly stopped short, struck by the thought that this was not the end—that someday I would be back here. I walked as fast as I could back to the car.”

  * * *

  The Georgia Court of Appeals finally put to rest the case that sent King to Reidsville. The appeals court invalidated Judge Mitchell’s twelve-month sentence and declared King’s infraction a paid traffic violation. The Atlanta sit-ins, however, were not over. At the end of the monthlong truce, Mayor Hartsfield still had not secured an agreement to desegregate downtown stores. The students went back to the picket lines, with the KKK marching in opposition, but this time Daddy King was out there holding a sign with the students.

  A deal was eventually reached with Mayor Hartsfield and white business owners in March, though desegregation would not happen until the fall of 1961, when Georgia schools were finally to be integrated after seven years of resistance to Brown. At the start of that school year, nine Black students would walk into formerly all-white high schools, and President Kennedy praised the fact that this occurred “with dignity and without incident.” He asked other segregated school systems to “look closely at what Atlanta has done.” Nor was racist violence able to deter the integration of the University of Georgia, the culmination of Donald Hollowell’s work.

  Days later, Black customers were seated in the Magnolia Room for the first time. Less than a year after students had displayed their willingness to risk their lives to integrate downtown Atlanta, that goal was calmly realized. As their struggle approached a kind of culmination, Lonnie King finally began to take stock of the stress he had been under for so long: he was diagnosed with an ulcer.

  * * *

  One especially important implication of the 1960 election was noted by A. S. “Doc” Young in the Los Angeles Sentinel: “Today, a Negro stands no chance for the presidency … because of cancerous racial prejudice. But certainly behind Kennedy’s victory lies the suggestion that 25 or 50 years hence, particularly in view of the rising tide of color throughout the world, a Negro might occupy the White House, as head man.” Bobby was ridiculed a few months after the new administration took office when he said much the same thing: “There’s no question that in the next thirty or forty years a Negro can also achieve the same position that my brother has as President of the United States.”

  Having dedicated his life to creating equal opportunities for Black Americans in politics and other fields, Louis Martin would no doubt have been amazed to learn that the nation’s first Black president would come from his Hyde Park neighborhood forty-eight years later and that he lived two blocks down Greenwood Avenue from where Martin watched Kennedy’s victory with his family.

  EPILOGUE: THE DUNGEON SHOOK

  April 1968

  Those nine days in late October were defined by the actions of men who were astonishingly young: King was only thirty-one, Wofford and Bobby were thirty-four, Shriver was forty-four, and JFK was forty-three. Louis Martin and Nixon were the oldest, aged forty-seven.

  Nearly all of them would come together again one final time. This last meeting took place a long way from 1960, the year when three mavericks imagined that politics could be something different, something daring. Those intervening eight years seemed like a lifetime, but Martin Luther King would reunite them.

  * * *

  It was pouring in Atlanta that night. The city was bearing the brunt of the same storm system that had thundered down on Memphis’s Mason Temple the night before, where Coretta King’s husband promised they would reach the promised land—“though I may not get there with you.” When the phone rang, Coretta was resting in bed after an afternoon of shopping with Yolanda for her Easter dress. It was Jesse Jackson; he reported that her husband had been shot. She wrote that she felt “not surprise, but shock—that the call I seemed subconsciously to have been waiting for all our lives had come.” She was afraid to ask how serious it was. Minutes later, a call from Andrew Young confirmed the wrenching news: “Well, I tell you, it’s pretty bad, and you need to come right away. He’s not dead yet.”

  She was already thinking, this time Martin was gone. Within half an hour, Atlanta’s mayor, Ivan Allen Jr., arrived at the house with his wife, offering to escort Coretta to the airport for a flight to Memphis. In a private waiting area at the Atlanta airport with King’s secretary Dora McDonald, the mayor came to her and confirmed the devastating truth: King was gone. She turned around, to be back home with the children.

  The Atlanta police chief, Herbert Jenkins, traveled through the drenching rain to inform Daddy King of his son’s murder, while both men stood in the empty Ebenezer sanctuary. As it was for Coretta, this was news that shocked him in its timing, not its eventuality. He went home to tell Alberta. When he spoke to Coretta, he said, “I always thought I would go first.”

  For the next week, King’s city would be the center of the nation. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy would evoke the book of Genesis: “Let us slay the dreamer, and see what shall become of his dream.” As the news spread, thousands began to make plans to convene on a redbrick Baptist church in Sweet Auburn.

  * * *

  When the news reached him, Lonnie King was in Gaffne
y, South Carolina, helping the local school board implement integration. He canceled his evening meeting so he could return home.

  Two days after Lonnie arrived in Atlanta, he found himself standing in a line of silent thousands, winding through the Spelman chapel to view the body of his friend, brought home the day after his death.

  Lonnie had drifted away from direct action, leaving Atlanta for Howard Law School, burned out from the student movement, and so he had seen little of King in the past six years. The last time they had actually talked was a few years before, when Lonnie was in Columbus, Ohio, delivering a speech. Hearing King was coming to the area the next day, he stayed on and went up to King after his address, where they hugged and caught up on where life had taken the two of them. In the early months of 1968, whenever Lonnie was home visiting family, he took advantage of being able to hear King preach from the Ebenezer pulpit.

  After meditating on the sight of King under a sheet of glass, lying in a simple bronze and African mahogany casket, Lonnie went home. There he sat, distraught, when the phone rang. It was a voice he was surprised to hear, calm but firm. Coretta was on the line, asking him if he would be available to help organize the upcoming funeral at Ebenezer. A bit stunned, Lonnie asked what she meant.

  The widow explained, “Wyatt Tee will be handling the pulpit arrangements, but I need someone at the church to handle all the logistics outside the church—who gets in, the lists of special guests…” She added there would be two funerals, one at Ebenezer, another in front of Morehouse, where Dr. Mays would offer the eulogy, and a long walk between the two, with 10,000 people expected to follow the casket (the actual crowd was later estimated to number 150,000).