Parting the Waters (136 page)

The music soared as the congregation rose without noticeable dissent. Off in the wings, the preachers huddled to argue. Wyatt Walker fumed against this latest maverick surprise from Bevel, who had called off that day's demonstration and was now calling it back on. Walker saw every circumstance as unfavorable: King was out of town; the congregation was mostly adults, in their Sunday clothes, unprepared for jail; and rough treatment by Connor's police might puncture morale before the climactic jail marches the next day. Worst of all from a personal point of view, Bevel had swept along Bernard Lee into his renegade spontaneity, and since Lee had been practically Walker's ward for the past two years, this reflected poorly on Walker's discipline. Bevel kept saying they must not allow the police to plant fear in a nonviolent movement, and all the while the surrounding preachers urged them to set aside the dispute for the pressing reality that the congregation was about to exit leaderless through the church doors. Walker salvaged some authority by decreeing that Bevel could not lead the column—he could not risk being jailed before Monday's youth march. From the volunteer preachers he selected Charles Billups, a Shuttlesworth colleague of many years, and Billups ran ahead to catch up.

They spilled out of New Pilgrim past the startled police officers, who retreated before them up Sixth Avenue, waiting for orders. Sirens sounded. Curious porch-sitters watched the solemn marchers go by for five long blocks through a Negro section of town. Paddy wagons and fire equipment converged ahead, just short of the city jail. Firemen rushed to hook up, while some police units stopped traffic and others roughly cleared the area of all bystanders, including indignant reporters. Before the head of the Negro column reached the barricade, Bull Connor himself walked out into the tangle of fire hoses to confront them.

Drawing close, Billups knelt on the pavement, and many of the two thousand behind followed his lead, like a line of falling dominoes stretching all the way back to New Pilgrim. After a brief prayer, Billups stood up and shouted loudly enough for the distant reporters to hear: “Turn on your water! Turn loose your dogs! We will stand here 'til we die!” Many of the Negroes within range trembled, and a woman keeled over in a faint, but after a few seconds some noticed that the fireman remained paralyzed at his tripod, unable to blast the preacher at point-blank range. To save face, Connor repeated his order to fire in a hushed, angry growl. Some heard him say “Dammit! Turn on the hoses” before the silence swallowed him up too. After a few more seconds, Wyatt Walker gingerly approached the two police captains standing near Connor and whispered that the Negroes need not march into white Birmingham nor even to the city jail. He suggested that they be allowed to gather for a prayer service just across the street in a Negro-only public park.

“Let us proceed,” intoned Billups, who walked forward as though in a trance. Watching from afar, the puzzled reporters felt the tension evaporate, and then they saw Bull Connor walking toward them. He explained breezily that he had granted a routine request to let the marchers pray in a segregated park, but to the marchers themselves it was nothing short of a miracle. Billups led the column past the water pumpers and the dreaded monitor guns, stepping over the hoses. As disbelief turned to joy behind him, shouts of “Hallelujah!” raced back along the line. Nonviolence had touched the fireman's heart, they said, and had tamed Bull Connor's hatred as surely as Moses had parted the Red Sea.

 

Across two hectic and furtive days, Burke Marshall had taken soundings across the racial divide. Fred Shuttlesworth, while glorying in the attention from Washington, objected that Marshall's practice of shuttling back and forth between whites and Negroes helped the whites maintain segregated negotiations. On the other side of town, Marshall found the city's leading whites boiling with internal conflict. They were desperate to remove the stigma of racial ignorance and violence, to restore the city's prosperity and reputation on their own initiative. This was the white power structure's “whole desire,” Marshall told President Kennedy. “They want Birmingham to look like Atlanta.” However, another side of their pride made them deeply resent the Negro demonstrators as the proximate cause of their troubles. The idea of negotiating under the pressure of street demonstrations was offensive to all the city's leading merchants and politicians. Conservatives refused to talk with any Negroes at all, Marshall found, and liberals refused to sit down with “outsiders,” most especially King.

The best Marshall could do that Sunday night was to patch together scouting groups of moderate whites and conservative Negroes. Reform leaders Sidney Smyer and David Vann, plus several white merchants, met downtown with Negroes led by Arthur Shores and A. G. Gaston. Both sides lamented the dangers of demonstrations, but the Negroes stood by King's original four-point program as a necessary condition of stopping them. In the end, the whites rejected all four points. But at least it was a beginning, and Burke Marshall followed up on all sides with his most telling and persistent argument: they should keep talking, he said, because only then could they sort out King's confused, irrational demands. He said King did not know what he wanted. In the aftershock of the D-Day publicity, this perspective served Marshall's tactical need to promote consideration of King's aims, and balanced his criticisms of segregation with a parallel attack on King. Politically, it supplied a dignified role for the Kennedy Administration. By casting Birmingham as a failure of articulation on King's part, Marshall projected the sovereign understanding of a problem solver without risking any government authority.

Partly because the characterization so sharply patronized King, it appealed to those who recoiled from the protests as nearly unfathomable outbursts of Negro passion. It was particularly welcome in Washington, as the leaders of the Free World did not enjoy professing helplessness on a stark issue of freedom that was commanding attention around the world. Even privately, Marshall and his colleagues clung to a portrayal of themselves as facilitators cutting through the fog of King's unhappiness. Some days later at the White House, Robert Kennedy emphasized the brain-power gap to the full cabinet, saying that “the Negro leadership didn't know what they were demonstrating about. They didn't know whether they were demonstrating to get rid of Bull Connor or whether they were demonstrating about the stores…I think some of the people who were demonstrating certainly didn't know what they were demonstrating about, and none of the white community knew what they were demonstrating about.” A year later, in a joint oral history with Kennedy, Marshall said that when he went to Birmingham, “I talked to King and I asked him what he was after. He really didn't know.” Twenty years later, Marshall recalled that it was “hard to negotiate with King because he had no specifics. What he wanted was something.”

At John Drew's house on Monday morning, May 6, Marshall spent two and a half hours trying to convince King that the afternoon demonstrations would hinder rather than help the negotiations now under way. It was true, Marshall conceded, that the white merchants could grant some of King's demands on their own authority, but it was also true that the city could prosecute the merchants under the segregation ordinances if they did. Therefore, on this and every other matter at stake, the merchants were justifiably reluctant, not knowing which of the pretender governments would be recognized as legitimate. Until the courts decided between Boutwell and Connor, which would be only a few days now, all parties, including the federal government, would be partially blind, and demonstrations in the interim could only raise tempers at substantial risk of violence. To all this, King replied that he believed Birmingham's merchants had the power to prevail upon any city government, including Connor's. One of his mistakes in Albany had been to aim his marches at politicians, who didn't need Negro votes, instead of merchants, who did need Negro trade. Now that the demonstrations were better focused, he would negotiate at any time, but he would not shut down the Birmingham movement on the mere promise of later negotiations. Every time Marshall cited the logic driving the merchants' position, King replied that pressure, even fear, had been improving their reason. When Marshall left Drew's house about noon, reporters pried out comments that the meeting had been instructive but essentially fruitless.

The red pumper trucks and the monitor guns were in position when King pulled up at Sixteenth Street Baptist, but the police deployments otherwise revealed that Bull Connor had changed his tactics. To reduce the chance of conflict with riotous, non-movement Negroes, he had ordered his men to seal off the war zone of Kelly Ingram Park, which was now an empty square block of trampled grass surrounded by helmeted police. Almost politely, by way of compensation, Connor had permitted a crowd of some two thousand Negro spectators to gather on the sidewalks near the church. Though the rows of stand-by school buses indicated that Connor was going to try the Laurie Pritchett, welcome-to-jail strategy, no one knew what would happen. With King preaching nonviolence to the forming lines inside the church, James Bevel stepped outside for a final parley. Extending his hand to shake on the bargain, Bevel publicly asked a police captain to confirm that he would not use the hoses on the marchers if they kept good order. The captain, who by this time had built up a cross-trench acquaintance with Bevel, smiled tightly as he contemplated the dark outstretched hand. He replied that the police would not use excessive force, but no, he could not go so far as to shake on it.

On signal, Dick Gregory led the first nineteen children out of the church. The captain called for the paddy wagon after the standard warning of arrest, whereupon the young people behind Gregory broke into a song of spirited relief. To the tune of “The Old Grey Mare,” they sang “I ain't scared of your jail / 'cause I want my freedom / want my freedom / want my freedom…” Some of them snake-danced into the wagon as the next group spilled from the church. After that they came so continuously, and sang so loudly, that the police commanders merely waved them toward the paddy wagons and buses, dispensing with the dialogue.

Older people joined in significant numbers for the first time since D-Day, comprising more than half the demonstrators. Some parents went to jail with their children. Others were so overcome by fear or disapproval that they snatched their children from the lines by force. At first, isolated outbursts of grief or anger were among the few indications that the procession between rows of nightsticks was no parade, but the festivity gradually wore off among the spectators. Watching friends and relatives walk to jail at the rate of ten per minute for nearly two hours, a number of them grew sullen and angry, perhaps compounded by guilt that they were not willing to submit to the jailers themselves. A few bottles and rocks landed on the pavement near officers who, laboring in the heat under orders of restraint, lost snappish tempers more than once. In front of news photographers, five of them threw an overwrought Negro woman to the pavement and subdued her with knees to the throat and limbs.

King's aides, fearing that a riot soon would tarnish the largest single day of nonviolent arrests in American history, raced outside at 2:40
P.M.
to call a halt. “That's it for today!” one shouted, urging both Negroes and policemen to go home. Nearly eight hundred people had marched to jail from the church; more than two hundred reached the same destination from surprise picket lines in the downtown business district. With the next day's headlines secured by midafternoon—
BIGGEST MARCH STUNS BIRMINGHAM
! the Chicago
Defender
would say—King's aides began to harvest the newcomers who surged forward to replace the jailed ones many times over. Bevel said they would have six thousand ready for the next day. He and the other leaders directed the crowds into the mass meeting at St. James Baptist Church, which was swamped long before nightfall. The movement was becoming a tempest. A foretide of one event churned into the backwash of others, and mass communications spread the ripples far and wide.

In New York, Stanley Levison worked to place the first newspaper fund-raiser since the 1960 ad that had brought the crippling
Sullivan
v.
New York Times
libel suit. In the forty-eight hours since he first saw the
Times
photograph of the police dog attacking Walter Gadsden, Levison had talked constantly with Jack O'Dell about how to capitalize on the opportunity to make money for the SCLC. O'Dell said that his mass mailings were already showing a fantastic shift in public opinion. Mailing lists were yielding many times the expected return. Ten-dollar contributions suddenly were giving way to big ones. A woman from Queens had sent $3,000. One list had money pouring in from Canada. These early signs put the New York mail room in chaos and O'Dell in awe. With his concurrence, Levison had prepared an ad, but on Monday afternoon—minutes before the first marchers went to jail in Birmingham—the man at the advertising agency called Levison to say that “the bastards at the
Times
wouldn't print the ad.”

Levison brought Clarence Jones in for phone negotiations, and Jones, after talking with some of the
Times
lawyers he knew from the
Sullivan
case, reported that “they want to take out references to brutality and all strong references to segregation and discrimination in Birmingham.” Although the deletions included headlines and copy that had been published in the
Times
' own news stories, Levison was too pragmatic to waste time fighting. He said the lawyers' business was to be conservative, and that the
Times
was fearful of being sued again over a controversial King ad. The important task was to get an ad out, he said—almost any ad that mentioned King, Birmingham, and an address to which to send contributions. Not long after the arrests ended that afternoon, Levison was back on the phone with the
Times
lawyers, negotiating a compromise ad that referred to Birmingham simply as “one of the largest segregated cities in the Western Hemisphere.” FBI wiretap clerks laboriously transcribed all this, together with his intermittent conversations about stock prices. While the business side of the
Times
dickered with Levison, the news editors agreed to publish on the next day's front page another gripping dispatch from Claude Sitton, headlined “Birmingham Jails 1,000 More Negroes.”