At Canaan's Edge (63 page)

Book critics wrangled over the January 1966 publication of
In Cold Blood,
which the
New York Times
praised as a “remarkable, tensely exciting, moving, superbly written ‘true account'—the undeserved, unforeseen, hideous slaughter of an ideal American family,” while doubting author Truman Capote's boast to have invented the “nonfiction novel.” A British writer called the book immoral for its exploitive sympathy with the real-life killers all the way to the bottom of their drop from the Kansas gallows. For Capote, controversy accented a year of transcendent fame he parlayed into a Thanksgiving “Party of the Century” at New York's Plaza Hotel, featuring an eclectic guest list of masked celebrities who attracted more press coverage than a White House state dinner. Before that, far below on the scale of literary events, James Meredith advertised his spring memoir of integration,
Three Years in Mississippi,
with pithy attacks on the civil rights movement. “Nonviolence has no meaning,” he told reporters in April. “This is a rough, tough country and always has been…. I admire Dr. King as an individual, but his philosophy just doesn't square with the American way of life. He's never been in the military. He's a professional preacher.”

April–June 1966

T
REMORS
from the larger world shook the laboratories of new democracy in Alabama. On Sunday afternoon, March 27, five hundred Lowndes County citizens and nearly a hundred SNCC workers gathered “far out in the rurals” to mark a year's passage since the first stir against terror, with schoolteacher Sarah Logan presiding. She called for the invocation by Rev. R. U. Harrison, whose son had been chased from his pulpit and the county for daring even to mention the vote. She brought on John Hulett to review their birth pains after his caravan flight from the Klan, beginning with the first attempt to register the next day, when Martin Luther King himself had appeared at the courthouse, and the first political meeting in the back of Haralson's store at night before any church would open to them, when twenty-eight people had dared to form the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights with the strangely miraculous encouragement of white preachers visiting from a pilgrimage trapped behind the “Berlin Wall” in nearby Selma.

“We had to stand for hours in the sun, rain, and the cold” for months after the great march to Montgomery, said Hulett, describing the quest to register. “We had only one attempt to demonstrate. It ended in a tragedy with our losing Jonathan Myrick Daniels of Keene, New Hampshire. We tried to get our people out of jail, but we did not have the money.” After Hulett, and movement songs by youth leaders Timothy Mays and Clara Maul, Logan introduced a small woman billed as the “mother of the civil rights movement” on hand-lettered programs for a “first anniversary” service entitled “No More Chains and Sorrow.” Rosa Parks, having braved the trip from her Detroit home to the backwoods church in Lowndes, praised a political awakening among the most oppressed people of her former state.

Loudspeakers transmitted her words to an overflow crowd outside, where anxious sentries eyeing distant surveillance cars also waited to serve hot food from the back of a station wagon. After Parks came young Julian Bond of Atlanta as living proof that they could aspire not only to vote for the first time but also to be elected. Bond quoted poet Sterling Brown on the passing of the hangman's era and Frederick Douglass on the need for constant agitation—as in his case pending before the Supreme Court. “I'm not sure of the future,” said Bond, “but the people in Lowndes County realize that the way we've done things in the past has been a mistake.” Stokely Carmichael followed with a fiery reprise on his year among them. Declaring the recent repeal of the “White Supremacy” slogan nothing more than a cosmetic change for the Alabama Democratic Party, he strongly urged that new Lowndes voters use the May 3 primary day to select their own slate for local offices. No one yet volunteered to be the first Negro candidate, but many of the crowd returned on Saturday, April 2, to take preliminary steps. They voted to create an “independent structure” called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, adopting bylaws, a symbol, and other formalities required to begin a county-wide political party under Title 17, Section 337 of the Alabama Code. They elected six officers, including financial secretary Ruthie Mae Jones and vice chairman R. S. Strickland. “Once you get power,” said chairman Hulett, “you don't have to beg.”

Alabama native John Lewis had been agitating separately toward the black vote—for South Africans—and was arrested with colleagues James Forman, Bill Hall, Cleveland Sellers, and Willie Ricks in South Africa's imposing consulate on Madison Avenue. Their vanguard sit-in remained obscure, being some twenty years before mass demonstrations stirred popular hope for imprisoned Nelson Mandela against apartheid itself, but Harry Belafonte paid bail for the five SNCC pioneers only days before he toured Europe. French actors Yves Montand and Simone Signoret hosted Belafonte and Martin Luther King on March 28 at a sold-out festival of music and speech in Paris. Swedish scholar Gunnar Myrdal, author of the authoritative 1940s study on race,
An American Dilemma,
presented them in Stockholm to King Gustav VI, who welcomed their joint program at the Royal Opera House as a national honor. Tickets for March 31 had vanished within a half-hour in February, and they agreed to a repeat performance on April 3. An ad hoc network relayed television broadcasts throughout Northern Europe, including Finland. The post office of Sweden established a unified mailing address for SCLC. The Bank of Sweden publicized an ongoing special account for civil rights contributions, and transferred initial proceeds of at least $100,000.

Spectacular success in Europe muffled tensions across the Atlantic Ocean all the way back into Alabama. King's original church sponsors in Paris had canceled less than two weeks before the engagement under a cloud of government displeasure, and a last-minute appeal had yielded the emergency rescue led by artists. Actors Peter O'Toole of England and Melina Mercouri of Greece joined the French stars to commandeer a substitute venue ten times larger. Secretary of State Rusk ordered Ambassador Charles “Chip” Bohlen not to attend the reconstituted King-Belafonte event in Paris, and, as a precaution against Vietnam controversy, Ambassador Graham Parsons canceled plans to greet King at the airport in Stockholm. A soothing report from the U.S. embassy later found that the high-profile visit “did not create any difficulties for the American image here,” because King was “quite explicit” to say he opposed Vietnam as a matter of individual conscience rather than as a political priority for the civil rights movement. His conflicted restraint satisfied nervous sponsors of the Swedish gala, diplomats added, at the cost of press criticism that “King wears a muzzle” on the war in Vietnam.

K
ING RETURNED
home April 10 buoyed by the dramatic rally of support overseas and determined to break through hesitancy that had been eating at him since the debates at SCLC's convention in August. He pressed his SCLC executive board to take an official stance on Vietnam at the semiannual meeting in Miami, and announced the favorable result there on April 13. “It is imperative to end a war that has played havoc with our domestic destinies,” King told reporters. The approved resolution committed SCLC on nonviolent principle. “If we are true to our own ideals,” it stated, “we have no choice but to abandon the military junta under such manifestly vigorous popular opposition. We believe the moment is now opportune, and the need urgent, to reassess our position and seriously examine the wisdom of prompt withdrawal.” The words “abandon” and “withdrawal” vaulted past Robert Kennedy's explosive call for negotiations, and landed King on the front pages without quite the voltage of a potential contender for the White House. The initial
New York Times
story noted that Vietnam dissent had nearly bankrupted SNCC, and cited a national poll in which 41 percent of Americans said dissent from that quarter made them feel “less in favor of civil rights for Negroes.” Several of King's allies dismissed him archly to the
Times
for making “the greatest of mistakes to mix domestic civil rights and foreign policy.”

FBI wiretaps picked up Stanley Levison's pragmatic assessment of infighting between and within civil rights groups. He observed that King's peers were delighted to see him “sticking his neck out” on Vietnam. “Roy [Wilkins] and Whitney [Young] have snuggled up to Johnson,” he told Clarence Jones. “Martin is now in a different relationship to the White House than he used to be. They are on the inside, and I think they love it.” To Levison, this much was normal politics. He aimed for a long-range view of movement progress, and indeed wanted King to compliment the FBI for arresting thirteen Mississippi Klansmen recently to break open the Vernon Dahmer firebomb murder case. (“J. Edgar Hoover may dislike Martin intensely,” Levison said on the tapped line, “but his men are now doing the job in the field.”) What disturbed Levison was an internal breach with Bayard Rustin, who was “sore” at King for pushing the Vietnam resolution. The friction exceeded prior jockeying among advisers who shared bruises and miracles alike from service close to King. Rustin had grounded his idealism and tactical genius in nonviolence for more than thirty years, choosing prison over service in World War II, and it seemed inexplicable that he of all people would change his compass during an epochal surge of vindication and promise. Levison thought Rustin accommodated the war to protect his new stature in mainstream politics. Rustin said mature democracy demanded compromise at home and abroad.

King primed a new movement campaign while laboring to harvest practical results from the one just behind. Several trips after a perfunctory introduction to Mayor Daley, he left Chicago again on April 28 for what turned out to be his final meeting at the White House—a pep talk from President Johnson on the formal civil rights message to Congress, which received there a tepid response—then scurried south to give four speeches late into the same night on a get-out-the-vote push for the May 3 Alabama primary. From Montgomery at breakneck speed, he covered 825 miles to give nine speeches in scattered rural churches on Friday, April 29. At the second stop, in Wilcox County, 1,500 newly registered voters waited under a scorching sun outside Antioch Baptist Church, where movement supporter David Colson had been shot dead in January. “If they aren't afraid to come to hear Dr. King,” SCLC organizer Dan Harrell told reporters, “they won't be afraid to vote.” An afternoon rainstorm caught King far behind schedule as always, trotting across a field toward a Marengo County church between his two oldest children, Yolanda and Marty, flanked by Fred Shuttlesworth and Hosea Williams.

Opposing forces scrambled to master a new electorate. No fewer than nine white men ran for governor against George Wallace's “stand-in” wife, Lurleen, with black registration already doubled to 240,000 under the Voting Rights Act. Attorney General Richmond Flowers, publicly recognized as “the first major white candidate in modern times to campaign directly among the Negro people in a Deep South state,” pledged to haul down the Confederate Battle Flag as a symbol of defiance rather than progress. SCLC ran workshops on rudimentary politics for the first fifty-four Negroes to qualify as candidates in a Democratic primary. A movement journal published a signal photograph of one kissing a baby. A grizzled out-of-state incumbent advised them to expect no quarter and accept only cash contributions. Church women taught new voters how to mark ballots. Newspapers erratically scolded Negroes as foolish rookies when two of them ran for the same office, as craven supplicants when a Tuskegee group endorsed the white sheriff over a Negro, and as sinister robots when reporters detected a potential “Negro voting bloc.”

Hosea Williams had assumed the role of slate-maker. “We must let the Negro vote hang there like a ripe fruit,” he told one crowd, his arms raised to mime the caress of a vineyard inspector, “and whoever is willing to give the Negro the most freedom can pluck it.” As King's deputy for Alabama, he asserted primacy over traditional Negro leaders in deciding whether to broker deals with white moderates or push selected Negro candidates. “We've got the Black Belt sewed up,” he said, declaring unabashedly that whoever registered voters should control them. Editors at
The Southern Courier,
a small newspaper formed by Freedom Summer volunteers, chided his overbearing ways in an editorial: “Have a Seat, Hosea…but give him a hand as he goes, folks.” They reminded readers that each voter was “the anvil” of democratic trust and responsibility. “Remember that the choice in the end is yours,” they wrote, “and you do not have to vote the way you have said you were going to vote. No one can control your vote if you make up your own mind.” King echoed their advice with pleas above all for a large turnout. He avoided Lowndes County, and did not join the vituperation by Williams and others against its resolve to work outside the Democratic primary.

Sadly, the
New York Times
out-bossed even Hosea Williams. Fixed upon the “exciting, precedent-breaking” opportunity to defeat “old-line segregationists” behind Lurleen Wallace, the paper called late in April for Negroes to “fuse their strength with liberal white voters” in the Democratic primary race for governor, and aimed a laser of rebuke at Negroes who adopted a different political strategy. A lead editorial branded the Lowndes County plan to run an independent slate of local candidates a pointless “boycott,” as though the sharecroppers and canvassers risking their lives to vote for the first time, under conditions scarcely imaginable in New York, were madly possessed to throw away the ballot itself. The article, “Sabotage in Alabama,” perceived in SNCC workers only “destructive mischief-making…a rule-or-ruin attitude…extremism for the sake of extremism…a revolutionary posture toward all of society and Government.” The editors might well have paid tribute to a year of miraculous new citizenship in the county that killed Viola Liuzzo and Jonathan Daniels. Instead, America's best newspaper—long a voice of authority sympathetic to civil rights—recognized no competing priorities or capacity for basic self-government. To portray the Lowndes County movement as frivolous vandals against the right to vote, the
Times
blotted out yearnings and exertions toward freedom seldom matched since Valley Forge. Such dismissal helped provoke black power conflict and rebellion soon to grip the whole country.

T
HE
M
AY
3 primary races showcased colorful politics at the historic divide. Lurleen Wallace, Alabama's first female candidate for governor, sought to become only the third woman to hold that office in the United States. Her husband, George, pledged daily to “tote the wood and draw the water at the governor's mansion,” quoting Governor Edward “Pa” Ferguson's successful 1924 campaign for Miriam “Ma” Ferguson in Texas. Wallace had picked up Ferguson yarns from President Johnson at a governors' briefing on Vietnam. He now omitted the word “segregation” from stump speeches, reporters noted, but pointedly renounced an agreement to integrate mental hospitals. Wallace said Washington's “dictatorial” conditions for federal support insulted all Alabama, and so did Richard Nixon's barb that the state was running “a dime-store girl for governor.” (The former Vice President demeaned the candidate's only former employment in the hope that a Wallace family failure would forestall a third-party presidential bid for 1968, which third-party failure would help Republicans retain the Deep South Goldwater states.) Other public voices complained that federal “occupation” under the Voting Rights Act treated Alabama like “some kind of banana republic.” Attorney General Katzenbach did his best to hide civil servants being trained to safeguard new Negro voters at the polls—“I am attempting to do the least that I can safely do without upsetting the civil rights groups,” he assured President Johnson—and he quietly concentrated observers in Selma for the high-visibility showdown between challenger Wilson Baker and incumbent Sheriff Jim Clark.