At Canaan's Edge (91 page)

King mostly listened. Abernathy and Young occasionally made favorable comments about a poverty caravan, but they reflected King's guarded wish rather than their own conviction. In fact, King alone had received Marian Wright's proposal like an answered prayer. Its focus on abject poverty opened an important but neglected dimension in human rights, where there was ample space for democratizing nonviolence outside the factional glare of the peace movement. Also, having been stumped about how to dramatize poverty from remote Mississippi or Alabama, King welcomed the inspiration to bring its faces and stories into the capital instead. Wright got the gist of her idea from Robert Kennedy, who told her after the hearings in Mississippi that Congress would address such misery only if someone made it more uncomfortable not to.

Warring critiques elevated tension at Airlie House for five days. Historian Lawrence Reddick, King's first biographer, stalked out with a prickly declaration that he would hear no more grandiose plans while SCLC remained functionally incompetent and nearly bankrupt. When King tried a musical metaphor, imagining poverty harmonized in diverse strains from black and native Indian to Appalachian white, Joan Baez tartly questioned all that effort tuning an orchestra for slaughter in Vietnam. When Wall Street lawyer Harry Wachtel asked whether Operation Breadbasket really hoped for more than token jobs and corporate write-offs, Jesse Jackson bristled against doubt from “a slavemaster.” King rebuked Jackson, then invited him to preach reconciling devotionals, and Jackson dazzled his detractors with eloquence on Ezekiel's vision of new life from dry bones. To counter King's worry about surging hostilities that fragmented and discredited the Vietnam protest, Bevel belittled the poverty campaign as bus fare next to the crisis of a misguided war. He said the first duty of nonviolence was to resist organized brutality. If Washington and Jefferson risked “crucifixion” by kings to establish democracy, he preached, the lowliest American should do no less to refine the spirit and practice of equal citizenship. Late one night, King literally howled against the paralyzed debate. “I don't want to do this any more!” he shouted alone. “I want to go back to my little church!” He banged around and yelled, which summoned anxious friends outside his room until Young and Abernathy gently removed his whiskey and talked him to bed.

King greeted colleagues sheepishly the next day. “Well, now it's established that I ain't a saint,” he told newcomers before the retreat ended on Sunday, September 17.

Back on the road, King renewed a determined search for executive staff to help resolve the strategic impasse. In Cleveland and San Francisco, pressed for comment about the interracial marriage of Secretary of State Dean Rusk's daughter, he called the ceremony at Stanford “a mighty fine thing.” The cover story of
Time
magazine recorded President Johnson's emphatic assurance that the Secretary of State need not resign, and emerging private details included the formal stipulation by Rusk of disregard for a deeded covenant still prohibiting the resale of his Washington home to any descendant of Africa, Asia, or “a denizen of the Ottoman Empire.” The
New York Times
described several pioneer weddings made possible by the Supreme Court's
Loving
decision—“Negro and White Wed in Nashville”—and other scattered events marked lighter anxiety after the grim summer of riots and war. FBI agents in the Grand Bahamas tracked a ring of pranksters who skillfully covered George Washington's portrait on dollar bills with an image of King. Republican U.S. Representative George Bush pronounced himself satisfied that seven new microscopes in his Houston district were academic and benign, not rifle scopes secretly retooled for insurrection as he had suggested in a speech about miscellaneous purchases under the federal anti-poverty program. Governor Lurleen Wallace, though gravely ill, pushed through an amended resolution for the song “Dixie” and a presentation of Confederate colors to precede every football game at a public school or site in Alabama—not just the homecoming game, as legislators had proposed.

King worked to convince the mild-mannered Bernard Lafayette, who had shifted from SNCC to Quaker-sponsored slum projects in Chicago, that he was fierce enough in nonviolence to supervise the combative energies of Bevel, Jesse Jackson, and Hosea Williams. In public, meanwhile, King and Harry Belafonte launched an eight-city fund-raising tour that sorely disappointed their hopes to replenish the SCLC treasury. Audiences fell short, and performers even quarreled on stage. At the Oakland Coliseum, singer Sammy Davis warned a meager first-night crowd not to stray from traditional civil rights issues, and promoted his goodwill trip to entertain U.S. troops in Vietnam. Joan Baez promptly challenged Davis to beckon the soldiers home instead, winning mixed applause for her resolve to blockade the Army induction center nonviolently at dawn. As Baez stayed behind to serve ten days in jail with 123 fellow resisters, a bomb-threat evacuation delayed another small concert the next evening in Los Angeles.

A
UDIENCE APPEAL
for King dipped into a kind of public relations trough, obscured between dramatic youth clashes over Vietnam and nostalgia for simpler racial heroes and villains. Early in October, a showcase federal trial finally commenced in the lynch-murder of three civil rights workers more than three years earlier on the first night of Mississippi Freedom Summer. With an all-white jury impaneled, a jovial mood prevailed when one of the first prosecution witnesses was asked if the murder victims really had recruited “young male Negroes to sign a pledge to rape a white woman once a week during the hot summer of 1964.” On objection, asked to supply legal ground for the lewd inquiry, the defense lawyer disclosed that the handwritten speculation had just been passed to him from defendant Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen. U.S. District Judge Harold Cox banged his gavel to silence laughter in the Meridian courtroom. “I'm not going to allow a farce to be made of this trial,” he declared. Cox, though himself an ardent segregationist, fixed a tone of decorum for proceedings marked by jolting surprise. FBI Inspector Joseph Sullivan delivered witnesses who elicited gasps by revealing that they had worked for the FBI from inside the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. A local police officer identified prominent fellow Klansmen, including several mortified defense lawyers. Rev. Delmar Dennis said he had turned against the White Knights because of sickening violence and the chronic refusal of rowdies to pay fines levied by the Klan chaplain for vulgar language. He described firsthand an elaborate plot consummated with orders for Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price to hold the civil rights workers in jail while a lynch party was assembled, quoting boastful but inaccurate congratulations from White Knights founder Sam Bowers: “It was the first time that Christians planned and carried out the execution of a Jew.” After the trial, Dennis would remain besieged under threat, abandoned by his family and ambushed more than once as a turncoat to the Klan. Almost daily, the trial revealed bombshell witnesses who had confessed their part in the systematic murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. James Jordan, pale with heart trouble and remorse, petrified of Klan retribution, recounted details of the night's frantic coordination to bury the three bodies fifteen feet deep in a fresh earthen dam.

Courtroom drama from Mississippi shared headlines with National Draft Resistance Week. On Monday, October 16, hours after the Joan Baez group was arrested in California, one hundred clergy led four thousand people from the Boston Common to historic Arlington Street Unitarian, which rested on 999 pilings sunk in Old Back Bay. Bells tolled “We Shall Overcome” while police lines restrained crowds of hecklers, and nearly three hundred prescreened volunteers filed solemnly into the last home church of the Selma martyr James Reeb. Sixty-seven of them burned their draft cards with a church candle in front of whirring cameras from the television networks. Another 214 surrendered cards to Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, who announced that senior counselors would share the risk of punishment by presenting the cards to Washington authorities on Friday in ritual defiance of conscription laws. “Are we to raise conscientious men,” Coffin cried from the pulpit, “and then not stand by them in their hour of conscience?”

Across the country in Oakland, a coalition of militant student groups took their turn trying to shut down the Army induction center by more aggressive tactics than the previous day's pacifists, whom they derided as “jailbirds.” A series of blockades, feints, and rolling jeers led to a police countercharge that cleared entrances quickly at the cost of some fifty arrested or wounded students. The incident, dubbed “Bloody Tuesday,” attracted thousands from Berkeley and San Francisco, some with makeshift helmets and shields behind street barricades, to harass the induction center in “urban guerrilla” fights modeled on the 1871 Paris Commune.

On Wednesday, a demonstration in Wisconsin telescoped protest moods from the entire decade. University students jammed Commerce Hall to block job interviews on the Madison campus with representatives of Dow Chemical Company, which manufactured napalm. Nearly all were inexperienced and curious, with vague anticipations of a sit-in, while a few activists circulated leaflets calling for decisive physical resistance. When police officers pushed through to clear access to the interview room, students prevented removal of those arrested by locking arms around their ankles. When the police chief sought a path in close quarters to retreat back outside, students suggested he jump out the window. Claustrophobia bred skittering fear. Trapped females heard ominous advice to remove earrings, and police reinforcements covered badges before they barged inside after their comrades. Some officers were struck with their own nightsticks, but most clubbed through flailing arms and flying objects. Forty-seven students and nineteen officers left by ambulance, many bleeding profusely from head wounds, in mayhem that stunned the several thousand bystanders. Clumps of enraged students shouted “Sieg heil!” at officials and called uniformed officers “pigs,” adopting hostile slang from the black power rebellion. It took the first tear gas ever fired in the academic enclave to disperse them, and author David Maraniss, who later reconstructed the clash from all sides, traced a sharp transformation in most participants. Casual protest vanished quickly, along with any hopes to emulate the nonviolent discipline of the civil rights era, and a typical student proposed drastic measures to the first strategy meeting in the aftermath. “I'm a radical!” she declared. “I don't know what it means, but will someone please explain it to me? I've just become a radical.”

FBI wiretappers overheard Stanley Levison relay assurance that his son Andrew, a freshman at Wisconsin, was not beaten or arrested—“only gassed”—during Wednesday's upheaval. “It was a brutal business,” said Levison. The younger Levison wanted to “stand up” by renouncing a draft card before he was old enough to have one, but his father advised against rashly forfeiting his freedom. Levison also tried to steady King, who called from Houston in acute distress about a third failure on the Belafonte tour. When King complained of a “vicious” editorial, which urged Negroes to boycott the local concert because his Vietnam stance “borders on treason,” his intercepted words rocketed to FBI headquarters with a proposal to distribute the editorial clandestinely among “friendly news media sources,” especially in the last five cities on the concert schedule. Hoover secretly approved the dual scheme to suppress SCLC's revenue with attack material shown to be “extremely irritating” for King.

That same Wednesday, Inspector Sullivan embodied the FBI's public mission during summations in the Mississippi Klan case. John Doar confessed to the Meridian jury that this was only the second trial he ever handled personally. Representing the United States, he acknowledged in open court the gaps and limits of the extraordinary investigation. “Midnight murder in the rural area of Neshoba County provides few witnesses,” he explained. His spare, motionless oration broke only with a raised finger at Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price to illustrate broad stains from the crime. “Price used the machinery of law—his office, his power, his authority, his badge, his uniform, his jail, his police car, his police gun,” Doar said slowly. “He used them all to take, to hold, to capture and kill.” The assistant attorney general from small-town Wisconsin stressed that judgment rested entirely with citizens of Mississippi, and he could devise no better conclusion than a paraphrase of Lincoln at Gettysburg. “What I say, what the other lawyers say here today…will soon be forgotten,” Doar told the jury, “but what you twelve people do here today will long be remembered.”

In Washington, government officials braced for the weekend National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. To discourage attendance, they publicized fear of Communist saboteurs and refused to supply portable toilets or water fountains. To reinforce two thousand police, they nationalized 1,800 National Guard troops, imported four battalions of military police plus units of the 82nd Airborne, and concealed reserves in the basement of the Commerce Department. McNamara warned President Johnson that the jails available would not hold mass arrests that could stretch into thousands. Johnson discarded advice to be elsewhere, vowing that demonstrators “are not going to run me out of town,” but then flummoxed his national security advisers by asking what would happen if he refused to seek reelection in 1968. (“You must not go down,” pleaded Rusk.) In a pensive interview on Thursday, October 19, the President brazenly denied that he ever questioned or regretted the basic decisions to intervene and bomb in Vietnam. More candidly, he complained of sour results from his decision to present the war as a measured cause rather than a crusade against demons. “If history indicts us for Vietnam,” Johnson predicted with a sigh, “it will be for fighting a war without trying to stir up patriotism.”