At Canaan's Edge (75 page)

A grand juror broke the charged silence. “Father, may I ask a question?” he said. When Flowers nodded approval, he continued abruptly, “Did you kiss that nigger girl in the mouth?”

Morrisroe shuddered. “Sir, I've never embraced a woman in my life,” he said. Scattered giggles punctuated further speculations of prurient interest in Ruby Sales and Gloria Larry, ignoring testimony that they had turned to flee with Jonathan Daniels the instant Coleman surprised them. For Flowers, the crude rebuff mocked his last effort to salvage any justice in the Hayneville shootings or revive his political career. He descended into disgrace, soon imprisoned on three politicized counts of neglecting petty corruption and reduced to a footnote in sports-mad Alabama. His namesake son, perhaps the state's most celebrated young athlete, had given up a dream invitation to play college football for coach Bear Bryant because he could not stand hearing his father booed at home events, and fans across Alabama would curse Flowers again when Junior scored the winning touchdown for archrival Tennessee in 1968, the year Tennessee fielded its first black player. The Alabama team remained white into the next decade.

Pride and denial rendered glacial transformations almost invisible. The precious ballot, seldom so studied and treasured for its promise of democracy, still had not yet been cast by any black citizen of Lowndes County in a general election on September 19, when Gloria Larry reported a rash of drive-by shootings into the tent city encampment on Highway 80 amid Klan warnings to vacate before the November vote. Morrisroe had hastened back to Chicago by then, striving to put prayerful distance between him and Alabama. His disappointment festered instead against the home diocese, where supervising bishops blocked his return to active service at St. Columbanus or any other black parish. They said Morrisroe was too enmeshed in politics for his own good, endangering the mission of the church, and only reluctantly approved a compromise assignment to St. Sylvester, a parish of mostly Puerto Rican congregants. Morrisroe stayed in the priesthood long enough to learn Spanish on visits to the island, where he appreciated cultural subtleties among his dark-skinned parishioners, and he recovered personal balance with a Chicago legal career after his 1973 marriage in San Juan. The bride's four-year-old nephew, Bernabe Williams, who served as ring bearer, grew up to play center field for the New York Yankees.

O
N
M
ONDAY,
September 26, Judge Werth Thagard dismissed all charges in the Morrisroe case with prejudice, freeing Tom Coleman from further risk of trial. Tuesday night, CBS aired its television special
Black Power, White Backlash,
sandwiching King's defense of nonviolence between Stokely Carmichael on Malcolm X tactics (“by any means necessary”) and interviews with Cicero children about what would happen if any Negroes moved in (“they'd be killed”). Adam Clayton Powell tartly asserted that King did not yet understand black power and therefore was in “agonizing reappraisal” to avoid falling among “the decadent aristocratic colonials of the civil rights movement.” CBS correspondent Mike Wallace concluded the broadcast: “There can be no doubt that at the end of summer, 1966, the white man and the black man in the North eye each other with more suspicion and hostility than they ever have before.”

On Wednesday, in a runoff election called “a stunning upset,” Georgia's Democratic nomination for governor was won by Lester Maddox, the entrepreneur who famously had chased away black customers with a pistol, distributed ax handles to patrons as anti-integration tools, and closed his fried chicken restaurant in Atlanta rather than comply with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Mayor Ivan Allen registered numb embarrassment over the success of a caricature segregationist—“The seal of the great state of Georgia lies tarnished”—which only sweetened Maddox's claim to represent the unrepentant common citizen. “Georgians are determined to turn back the trend of socialism,” he declared in victory, accusing high-toned Democrats of complicity with President Johnson to betray God and private property.

King absorbed the Maddox blow at home between speaking trips to Dallas and Chicago. He told reporters only that “Georgia is a sick state.” The next night, he confided to Stanley Levison a sense of confusion. He said Whitney Young had called so disconsolate that he discussed resigning from the movement to shock white America, and confessed he might do the same. Levison gently cautioned that King's resignation “wouldn't be shocking enough.” They took comfort in fund-raising details and plans to keep going. On September 30 in Chicago, King buckled under press questions about the last few months. “I do think we stand in one of those valley moments, rather than at the peak of united activity and at the peak of noble achievement that we've seen over the last few years,” he said, “in civil rights, and in our nation, and [in] the whole thrust towards a more democratic society.”

October–November 1966

T
HE
fall political campaigns showcased an unstable clash of moods over Vietnam and civil rights. Ray Bliss, the Republican national chairman, said his candidates would stress race issues because polls showed that 58 percent of party supporters made urban disorder a top priority. The next day, October 4, Republican mayor Theodore McKeldin publicly begged the tavern keepers of Baltimore to serve Negro customers during the baseball World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, calling their stubborn resistance “a distasteful irony” given that the local Orioles probably owed their first championship berth to the newly arrived black star, Frank Robinson. A few days later in Alabama, four members of the Diocesan Council of Catholic Women were turned away from formal tea at the governor's mansion, igniting controversies about who had known the guest list would be integrated. At a rare White House press conference, describing his plans to tour Asia before November, President Johnson tried gamely to smile when asked about Senator Strom Thurmond's bellicose charge that “we could win the war in Vietnam in 90 days if we wanted to.” He said he always welcomed the views of senators.

The President scheduled the trip abroad in part to escape frustration. Many Democratic candidates already considered him an albatross rather than an asset for the off-year elections, in spite of his historic record. “FDR passed five major bills the first one hundred days,” Johnson fumed to his aides. “We passed two hundred in the past two years. It is unbelievable.” War measures gave him political boosts that seemed to wear off more quickly as the public impression of Vietnam changed from pesky to serious. Nicholas Katzenbach had just left the Justice Department for voluntary reassignment to the surpassing foreign challenge, and Johnson sent the new undersecretary of state ahead with McNamara to evaluate the course yet again. The President, meanwhile, tried to curb a growing testiness. His recent complaints to Jewish War Veterans, wondering mordantly why rabbis were so prominent in Vietnam dissent, caused speculation about a conditional link between American military commitments to South Vietnam and Israel. Anxiety over global strong-arming led to summit meetings and more headlines—“Goldberg Mollifies Jews on President”—but some rabbis felt compelled to deny suggestions of a security deal that stifled conscience. “If Abraham had no hesitation about challenging the judgment of God over Sodom and Gomorrah, lest it should sweep away the innocent with the guilty,” said Abraham Heschel, “should not an American have the right to challenge the judgment of our President when horrified by the war in Vietnam?”

King did not speak out directly, though he had collaborated with Heschel for nearly a year in an ecumenical group of antiwar clergy. His pressures during the fall campaigns mirrored Johnson's. He received invitations to visit Israel and Jordan, each beckoning with a polar view of the conflicted Holy Land, and pragmatists within the national civil rights movement pushed him to accommodate Johnson toward a broad political realignment, looking beyond Vietnam. Bayard Rustin first sought approval for a public letter he drafted in King's name to the Negro youth of America, gently rebuking black power: “I implore all of you to remember that Molotov cocktails, and looting, and hatred, cannot, and will not, solve the problems we really care about.” King's most trusted labor supporters joined a conference call to obtain his signature. “Tell them that they can't solve problems with rocks,” suggested Ralph Helstein of the meatpackers union, “any more than nations can solve them with bombs.” When King resisted, saying any letter should address all practitioners of violence, not just black ones, Rustin drafted instead a newspaper advertisement. To accommodate King, he addressed a general audience with a text that affirmed “racial justice by democratic process” and condemned only “strategies of violence, reprisal or vigilantism.”

Still, King resisted entreaties to sponsor the advertisement jointly with traditional allies led by Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph. On October 10, two days before he had Rustin and other advisers debate the question in Atlanta, a front-page leak to the
New York Times
underscored his worries: “Dr. King Weighing Plan to Repudiate ‘Black Power' Bloc.” Tricks of racial perception gnarled a complex decision. King applauded the efforts of Rustin's broad coalition to gain a favorable reception for a ten-year national freedom budget, treating seriously the White House position that America could afford “guns and butter” to fight poverty as well as the Vietnamese, but he sensed a hidden bargain to blame the black fringes for shortcomings on both fronts. This made bad politics for an exposed racial minority, and he bridled at an implicit endorsement for the wars as a package. On nonviolent principle, King fought the impulse to repudiate. Like fear, that impulse slid toward enemy-thinking, hierarchy, and pride—the chief barriers to interracial democracy.

So King refused to join the advertisement, “Crisis and Commitment,” which appeared in the October 14
New York Times
along with a news story about its provenance: “7 Negro Leaders Issue a Statement of Principles Repudiating ‘Black Power' Concepts.” Instead, he held a press conference in Atlanta to outline his ideas for the future, including generous praise for the freedom budget. He carefully reprised his written critiques of black power as an invitation to a mutual standoff. Black people were overwhelmingly victims even in their own riots, King wrote for the current issue of
Ebony
magazine, pointing out that Charles Whitman alone, “the young demented white student at the University of Texas…killed more people in one day than all the Negroes have killed in all the riots in all the cities since the Harlem riots of 1964. This must raise a serious question about the violent intent of the Negro.” Militant talk defined make-believe battle lines for the negative instrument of force, King maintained, adding, “Violence as a strategy for social change in America is nonexistent.” By contrast, no one had ever been killed in a nonviolent demonstration, and when Negroes marched in a well-defined democratic movement, “so did the nation.”

Reporters in Atlanta passed over all arguments consigned to
Ebony,
asking why King withheld his name from the ad. They pressed him to specify an objection to the joint statement, which did not explicitly mention black power. King emphasized choices of tone and tactics, but finally conceded that he could have supported the overall message. From this alone jumped news. Many stories took their cue from the
Times
headline: “King Endorses Racial Statement / Backs Negro Repudiation of Black Power Concept,” and King biographer David Garrow later judged the incidental consent “a serious misstep.” It threw away the hard calculations based on experience “at tiptoe stance,” raising new controversy over King's change of mind. Wiretapped phone lines buzzed with recrimination. Rustin called Stanley Levison on October 15 to say King had brought trouble on himself by not signing the ad in the first place. Levison called a nonplussed Andrew Young, who said, “Bayard did this to us.” King told Levison apologetically that he had been backed into tacit support for the ad because Rustin had forecast disaster if he attacked it. Even more than feared, the substance of King's position was subordinate to appetites for projected remorse over black power, which in turn delivered to the White House the useful image of a self-tamed ally. “What bothers me is that when I make these tactical errors,” said King, “it's usually when I'm trying to deal with Bayard.”

M
C
N
AMARA AND
Katzenbach wrote reports in a windowless KC-135 transport on the day-long fight from Vietnam, while Bill Moyers and Harry McPherson returned from a parallel scouting tour of Asian capitals. After only thirty-six hours home, their combined missions melded into a gigantic presidential entourage that recrossed the Pacific Ocean for state visits to seven nations. “I know that I can wave no wand,” President Johnson declared at his send-off on Monday, October 17. Behind measured confidence and displays of pomp, he sagged under troubled assessments. McNamara was “a little less pessimistic militarily than the previous year, because the huge buildup was inflicting casualties at the annual rate of sixty thousand dead, blunting the earlier projections of imminent defeat. On the other hand, he “saw no reasonable way to bring the war to an end soon,” because the Vietnamese Communists had adapted through 1966 to a war of attrition, with morale intact and infiltration up threefold in spite of 84,000 U.S. bombing sorties. McNamara also wrote Johnson that “the important war,” for political allegiance, “has if anything gone backward.”

That failure was the topic Johnson assigned to Katzenbach, whose inspections in the Vietnamese countryside compelled a rare top secret memo of lyrical focus on “the unceasing, backbreaking toil of the peasant population…it is not so much water that their rice grows in; it is sweat.” He described for the President a political chasm between the rice paddies and American officials who discussed pacification “in a strange language of abbreviation and acronym. For example: ‘If we can get MACV, USAID and JUSPAO to prod the GVN, then maybe ARVN—working with the PF, RF, PFF, CIDG and the PAT cadres—can get RD off the ground.'” Back in Washington, Katzenbach formed a high-level “non-group” to brainstorm outside bureaucratic channels about connecting policy more effectively with the neglected outlook of ordinary Vietnamese. There was a surreal quality to the exercise, echoing the best experts. Bernard Fall, the French military historian who respected Ho Chi Minh's cause but patrolled with U.S. soldiers, said the growing deployment of 325,000 American troops already formed a distinct culture. They made Vietnam the first war zone of cheap transistor radios, blaring escapist pop songs with lyrics like “What a day for a daydream,” and invented a “Batman” vocabulary of minimalist slang, as in “Charlie zapped a slick,” meaning South Vietnamese Communists destroyed an unarmed transport helicopter.

Shock pierced the civil rights community before Air Force One reached the first stop in Honolulu. That same Monday, a custodian found Rev. Robert Spike bludgeoned to death in a guestroom of the new Christian Center at Ohio State University, where he had preached the night before. Three Protestant denominations issued tributes while detectives swarmed, and the family received telegrams of condolence from dignitaries including King, Vice President Humphrey, and Stokely Carmichael (“Our heartfelt sympathy in your loss which is a loss for all of us”). News stories reviewed the breadth of Spike's influence: praise from Bob Moses for marshaling the unlikely church support essential to Mississippi Freedom Summer, honor from President Johnson with a seat next to Lady Bird for the “We Shall Overcome” address to Congress, and a recent appointment to the National Council on the Humanities. Edwin “Bill” Berry of the Chicago Urban League called Spike “one of the best thinkers who ever lived.” With no reported progress in the criminal investigation, Spike's peers mobilized from his former office at the New York headquarters of the National Council of Churches on Riverside Drive. NCC officials prepared to hire private detectives and offer a reward.

Secret fears and hatreds abruptly stifled grief. Jack Pratt, the general counsel hired by Spike in 1963 for the NCC's Commission on Religion and Race, warned that public resolution was “the last thing” his colleagues should seek. He disclosed from a trip to Ohio that the body had been clad only in a raincoat, with homosexual literature nearby. To NCC General Secretary Edwin Espy, among others who knew Spike as a starched theologian with a picturebook family, these alien clues suggested an unspeakable plot to smear the victim, until Pratt made clear that any trial would unearth a forbidden world along with a few witting clergy who had shared, restrained, or protected Spike's furtive liaisons with men. Hushed National Council of Churches representatives miserably tested clues on his family. “This staggers my mother,” recalled Paul Spike, then a student at Columbia University. “In fact, it comes close to shattering her.” Mother and son fought an undertow of memories that seemed freighted with alibi or glancing confession, and would cling to disbelief when unnerved church officials shut down inquiry for damage control by triage. The family half-mourned a national church so terrified of truth.

Willful avoidance sealed Spike in mystery, opening doors to conspiracy theories. (Andrew Young always feared his friend had been killed for agitation against the Vietnam War; others suspected the shadowy FBI, working perhaps even with Spike's internecine rivals in the civil rights field.) Publicly, the murder case shriveled to a news squib that an itinerant man in custody probably would not be tried because prosecutors considered him insane. Newspapers still shunned this form of scandal because they could not bear to print the necessary words. A harbinger series in the
Atlanta Constitution
had just noted the appearance of startling picket signs outside the United Nations—“U.S. Claims No Second Class Citizens / What About Homosexuals?”—but profiled skulking, Jekyll-and-Hyde creatures of severely retarded emotions, who “would cut off their left arms to be cured.” Within decades, human energies founded on the civil rights movement would obliterate much of this lethal stigma and lift nearly all the closeted silence. The transformation, which lay just beyond the imagination of visionaries like Robert Spike, would be a swift one for history but too late for him.

R
ICHARD
N
IXON
captured the central glare of public attention by predicting for Republicans “the greatest political comeback of any political party in this century.” On the October 23 broadcast of
Meet the Press,
he sparred with correspondents about which party was “playing the backlash issue,” pointing to Lester Maddox and George Wallace as proof that Democrats would remain “the party of racism in the South.” (“I don't know one Republican candidate who is riding the backlash,” he claimed.) Asserting that neither party in the South actually favored integration, Nixon pointed to Republican unity on Vietnam as the pivotal divide. The election of forty or more new Republicans to the House “will serve notice to the enemy in Vietnam,” he declared, “that the United States is not going to do what the French did ten years ago: cut and run.” Nixon branded Lyndon Johnson the first American President who had failed to unite his own party behind a war. “The division in the United States on Vietnam is primarily within the Democratic Party,” he told viewers.