Pillar of Fire (18 page)

On May 30, he sent a telegram to the White House requesting a private conference with President Kennedy, underscoring his urgency by listing four available dates the next week. Unlike previous telegrams that had struck a tone of supplicant or petitioner, King pressed himself as a natural claimant for the President's time. His bargaining goal, unstated in the telegram, was remarkably similar to the recommendations being pushed secretly at the time by Vice President Johnson. “We need the President to do crusading work for us,” King told his advisers.

To press Kennedy into open alliance, King needed to maintain a balance among a host of movement forces, including hundreds of spontaneous jail marches that were being attributed to his leadership. The demonstrations were nonviolent for the time being, but they activated the natural fears of middle-class Negroes—disorder, indignity, hooliganism—along with competitive worries that King's tactics would eclipse the senior civil rights organizations. National NAACP officers went so far as to order their local leaders to head off “the King forces” across the South. This internecine opposition was neither a secret nor a surprise to King. While pushing for new status with President Kennedy, he knew Roy Wilkins would be pushing in a different direction.

Help came suddenly by way of Jackson, Mississippi. The sit-in of May 28 was tiny—only three students at first, with a handful of supporters later joining—but it cracked the wall of intimidation that had kept the Birmingham aftermath out of Mississippi. The demonstrators clung to the Woolworth's lunch counter, enduring curses, shoves, cigarette burns, showers of sugar and ketchup, a hail of fists, and other churlish, brazen violence that lasted long enough for news stringers to assemble and record the scene for transmission over national wires. By then, distant newspapers were so sensitized to the pattern of chain reaction that the editors of the
Wall Street Journal
took note the very next morning, predicting that “Jackson is in for a siege similar to Birmingham's.” Mayor Allen Thompson deputized a thousand special officers. At the Negro mass meetings, only students called for marches. “To our parents we say we wish you'd come along with us,” declared a high school junior from the pulpit, “but if you won't, at least don't try to stop us.” A few adults joined their runaway demonstrations, including a matronly nurse who jumped into a march line with a huge pocketbook and a look of rapture, shouting, “This is the
biggest
thing I have ever done.” On the third day, the students spilled out of their own nonviolent workshops and marched downtown into a phalanx of police. Officers used city garbage trucks to haul away overflow prisoners, and the
New York Times
compressed a day of numbing pathos into a striking page-one headline: “Jackson Police Jail 600 Negro Children.”

Medgar Evers groaned under conflicting pressures. He presided over the mass meetings as the accepted leader of the Jackson movement, but he could not join or endorse the jail marches on the direct orders of his NAACP employers in New York. Evers was doubtful of demonstrations, too, but he practically begged Roy Wilkins to reconsider NAACP policy in light of the mass uprising of youth, arguing that he and the NAACP were being left behind while the students transformed all of Negro Mississippi. Secretly—and not for the first time—Evers collaborated by phone with King. He told his New York office that King might come to Jackson if the NAACP avoided command, and the specter of such a coup helped motivate Wilkins to fly to Jackson on the evening of the six hundred arrests. He did not tell his wife, to spare her the worry and himself her objections.

On a few hours' emergency notice, the Justice Department crashed federal observers into Jackson ahead of Wilkins, including John Doar and Thelton Henderson, the first Negro staff attorney hired by the Civil Rights Division. When Wilkins pulled up the next morning with Medgar Evers, wearing a tan poplin suit, carrying his reading copy of Harper Lee's novel
To Kill a Mockingbird
, tense Jackson police officers arrested Henderson along with his official notepad and most of the other Negroes who crowded anywhere near the picket site outside the downtown Woolworth's. Then they ceremoniously hauled Wilkins off to what he called “the hoosegow,” in his first arrest in nearly thirty years. Wilkins bailed out of jail and departed by plane that same evening, leaving behind NAACP lawyers with instructions for a switch from pickets to litigation. He had tried to calm the Jackson movement—the
Times
noted his arrest on a back page—but nothing could diminish the specialized impact on King. From Atlanta, he arranged for a conference call with his New York advisers Clarence Jones and Stanley Levison as Wilkins was flying home. “We've baptized brother Wilkins!” King announced with excitement.

What seized King was the day's precedent for collective strategy: with his body, the national leader of the NAACP had declared that under some circumstances, at least, the NAACP would join in a strategy of nonviolent protest. King worried out loud about the strain of arrest on Wilkins's imperfect health, and discussed the wording of a supporting telegram. When Levison and Jones moved on to normal conference call business, such as the upcoming board meeting, King cut them off. “We are on a breakthrough,” he said, “and we need a mass protest.” King wanted to think beyond individual movements. “We are ready to go on a national level with our protests,” he said. They discussed whether A. Philip Randolph, the venerated founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union, might enlarge his planned Washington labor rally for jobs into a giant rally for freedom issues. “There is no problem with Phil,” said Levison, who volunteered to make inquiries.

King fed off the idea in a rush. If he endorsed a giant rally, Randolph's stature as the unifying senior presence among the quarrelsome civil rights leaders would make it difficult for Wilkins and the NAACP to withhold support, especially now that Wilkins was newly baptized for protest. “Roy will only act under extreme pressure,” said King. Now there was an opening to get Wilkins behind a giant national protest that could concentrate, symbolize, and define the spreading energy of local movements before they dissipated or something went wrong. That in turn could push President Kennedy into being a crusader who could move the country and a recalcitrant, fearful Congress. They agreed that it would take a crowd of a hundred thousand to generate enough political force, and that it would take at least until August to mobilize.

By the end of the conference call, King had put such a charge into Levison and Jones that they called each other like teenagers to replay and analyze his words. Jones said it was thrilling to hear King talk that way. The normally taciturn Levison agreed that “when Martin said what ought to be done and why the possibilities are good, you tingled.” In nearly seven years as all-purpose adviser on everything from King's personal taxes to speech themes for his trip to India, Levison normally had pushed King not to underestimate his strength, but now Levison found himself “one step behind” King's appraisal of the historical opening. “He says the hour is now,” Jones reminded Levison.

O
N
K
ING'S INSTRUCTION
, Jones and Levison made their first contacts about a national march over the Memorial Day weekend, when Vice President Johnson returned from Gettysburg to the turmoil of White House strategy sessions. That Monday, King received a reply to his telegram: the President was too busy to see him. The buffeting of events led President Kennedy to change his terms about a King appointment twice before the end of June.

New outside forces came to bear almost daily. On June 7, the General Board of the National Council of Churches addressed the racial crisis. Nearly all the assembled leaders had attended the conference on religion and had carried out resolutions to form a volunteer Continuing Committee of the Chicago Conference. What was bold and unprecedented in January became shamefully tame in May. The General Assembly of Presbyterians in Des Moines—after narrowly rejecting a subterranean groundswell to invite Martin Luther King from Birmingham to supersede the scheduled speakers—hailed by uproarious acclamation a preacher who challenged the denomination to “put its money where its mouth is” by committing $500,000 to support the civil rights movement. This bugle call from one of its thirty-one constituent bodies prompted the General Board of the National Council, meeting at the historic Riverside Church in New York, to create a professional strike force called the Commission on Religion and Race (CORR). “The world watches to see how we will act,” the church leaders declared in a public statement, “whether with courage or with fumbling expediency.”

Ironically, CORR's first action was to bypass the leadership of the National Council's own Department of Racial and Cultural Relations, headed by Oscar Lee, who for many years had served as the only Negro on the six-hundred-member professional staff of the National Council.
*
For all Lee's qualifications, church leaders instinctively sought a white minister to get action. By tradition, race relations was a timid division of the labyrinthine church bureaucracy. A single denomination might take decades to revise its hymnal or redefine a word of its creed, and the National Council was cross-knitted in denominational layers to guard against unintended offense. Church leaders wanted a sharp break from the patterns of Lee's department, which distributed mellifluous brotherhood statements to be read in churches on Race Relations Sunday.

Once Birmingham exposed “the real depth of the evil we face,” as one speaker put it to the General Board, epiphanies occurred almost continuously among church people, and the new CORR gathered stories of compressed awakening in “Twenty Days Later,” its first, unabashedly transfixed report. “In such a time the Church of Jesus Christ is called upon to put aside every lesser engagement,” declared the General Board. On the assumption that racial justice is inherently ecumenical, members voted to pursue an alliance of fellowship with Catholics and Jews. Having picked up already the buzz of preparations for a freedom march, they voted “to assemble in Washington as soon as is strategic.” In stark departure from the customary practice, the senior figures of the white Protestant establishment pledged “to
commit
ourselves, as members of the General Board, to engage personally in negotiations, demonstrations, and other direct action in particular situations of racial tension.”

Segregationists piled in from the opposite side. On Sunday, June 9, the Citizens Council of Selma, Alabama, posed a question in a large newspaper advertisement: “What Have I Personally Done to
Maintain Segregation?
” The text challenged readers to “probe deeper and decide,” and then join the campaign to “prevent sit-ins, mob marches and wholesale Negro voter registration efforts in Selma.” That same afternoon, a Trailways bus carried Annell Ponder's group through Alabama on the way home to Greenwood. After a week of advanced teacher classes under Septima Clark at the SCLC citizenship school, the high spirits of the seven Negroes collided with the resentments of Highway Patrolmen and police at a rest stop in Winona, Mississippi. Everything about Ponder's politely correct leadership training offended the officers—how she led her charges to the white side of the cafe, told the officers it was against the law for them to throw her out, objected to racial epithets, took out a pad to write down their names and tag numbers.

When Ponder did not arrive in Greenwood on the scheduled bus, Hollis Watkins began calling police stations, newspapers, and movement contacts back along the route. This was standard alarm procedure. Evasive answers and other clues converged on Winona, so that a bulletin intruded upon King's six-way midnight conference call about plans for a march on Washington. Andrew Young interjected that he had just received a secondhand report of an arrest in Winona, and that he was trying to get the FBI to investigate. From Greenwood, Lawrence Guyot volunteered to drive over and try to bail them out, but a designated observer soon reported from Winona that Guyot himself had disappeared into the jail. By the next day, a second emergency intruded from far away in Danville, Virginia, where police, instead of ignoring or arresting the daily prayer line outside city hall, attacked with high-powered fire hoses followed by a charge with billy clubs that sent more than forty marchers from the Danville Christian Progressive Association to segregated, substandard Winslow Hospital.

Martin Luther King protested “the beastly conduct of law enforcement officers at Danville” in a telegram to Attorney General Kennedy just as Kennedy, on his own, was pressing the FBI to find out what had happened in Winona. The Attorney General's quick, personal interest in the Winona incident—even before there was solid evidence of foul play—signaled that the government and movement alike were on daily tenterhooks against the live possibility of violence. Kennedy's attention was all the more remarkable because the Winona and Danville reports coincided with an overriding crisis on Tuesday in Alabama, where Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, backed by federal troops, read to the assembled national and international media a proclamation by President Kennedy, and Governor George Wallace, with his own proclamation and an opposing array of state troopers, fulfilled his campaign pledge to stand in the schoolhouse door against the court-ordered admission of the first two Negro students to the University of Alabama. What came off in the end as a carefully staged compromise—with Wallace gaining the spotlight of public resistance in exchange for the registration of the two students quietly off camera—carried the drama of a battlefield showdown because no one could be sure what civilities would survive.

So pervasive was the expectation of official or unofficial attack that peace itself became a focus of news. “There was no violence,” the
New York Times
announced of the Katzenbach-Wallace confrontation. In a parallel news departure, the
Times
also placed on its front page (“Dr. King Denounces President on Rights”) an account of an interview in which King called upon President Kennedy to be more visible in leadership and to speak of the morality rather than the politics of race. Perhaps goaded by the subtle change in coverage, President Kennedy decided spontaneously at six o'clock to go on national television that very night at eight with a declaration that he would submit an omnibus bill against segregation. Over the panicky advice of his advisers—who objected that the President had no prepared speech, no time to make preparations in Congress, and above all no reason to magnify his political risks—President Kennedy rushed to unburden himself in the favorable climate of the success in Alabama.

The peaceful Monday did not last long enough. Soon after President Kennedy hurriedly composed a speech in a clatter of aides with swarming television technicians readying his cue—“Come on now, Burke,” Kennedy prompted Burke Marshall, “you must have some ideas”—Bernard Lafayette was frightened to observe a white man in a two-toned 1957 Chevrolet parked outside his apartment in Selma. In less than a month since the Boynton memorial mass meeting, Lafayette had been arrested from a moving car and tried, absurdly, for vagrancy, and otherwise targeted in the local newspaper and Klan hate leaflets. So many people had been fired or traumatized after the first meeting that Lafayette only now managed to schedule a second. He was immensely relieved to hear the Chevrolet owner say he only wanted a push for his stalled car. When Lafayette pulled into position and looked down to make sure the two bumpers were not locked or misaligned, a blow to the head knocked him senseless. Bludgeoned twice more, he tried from nonviolent training to make eye contact, and only then realized he was being struck with a gun butt.

Sight of an apartment neighbor rushing to his defense with a shotgun made Lafayette scream, “No, Red, don't shoot!” The white man suddenly fled in the Chevrolet, and Lafayette wound up for the night at Berwell Infirmary being sewed up by Dr. Dinkins, son of Professor Dinkins, the malfeasance expert at Tabernacle Baptist. Treating a battered race victim unnerved the doctor even before Lafayette insisted that he would keep wearing his blood-caked shirt as a badge of commitment to Selma. To change the subject, Dinkins advised Lafayette that he did not consider milk a good source of calcium for healing his injured bones. “Milk is for calves,” he said somberly, and offered instead his preferred nostrum of calcium pills made from ground bones. Lafayette tried to make a joke to ease the tension. “If milk is for cows,” he replied, “bone pills ought to be for dogs.” Dinkins took offense at the levity; Lafayette later took the bone pills faithfully as a goodwill gesture toward one of Selma's leading Negro professionals.

On national television, President Kennedy delivered what the
Times
called “one of the most emotional speeches yet delivered by a President who has often been criticized as too ‘cool' and intellectual.” Wandering on and off a skeletal text, Kennedy spoke with the fervent directness that Lyndon Johnson had been urging upon him. His words rose from the twin moorings that anchored King's oratory at the junction of religious and democratic sources. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” Kennedy told Americans. “It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.” For those in the movement, the President's ringing speech was an answered prayer that collided with news from Jackson that a sniper ambushed Medgar Evers that night from a honeysuckle patch, killing him with a rifle shot through the back. Like Kennedy's speech, the murder of Medgar Evers changed the language of race in American mass culture overnight. The killing was called an assassination rather than a lynching, Evers a martyr rather than a random victim—recognized as such with a post-funeral cortege by train to Washington and a family audience of condolence at the White House.

In Birmingham, where he and his colleagues were trying to maintain the May agreement against a persistent backlash, Andrew Young mourned Evers as a conflicted martyr who bled for the NAACP even as he chafed against its patronizing hierarchy, who allowed his love for a cause to sweep him toward death in a battle not of his own choosing. To James Bevel, also in Birmingham, the concurrent hospital reports on his classmate Bernard Lafayette were closer to the throat personally, but he and Young had to push their reeling minds past Selma and Jackson. By Wednesday morning, June 12, a law student newly arrived in Greenwood as a summer volunteer had made it safely in and out of Winona, and her reports supported a string of fearful tips that Annell Ponder's group had been arrested and held incommunicado since Sunday, were beaten savagely while in custody, and that officers had seized Lawrence Guyot for similar treatment when he came to help. The Winona jail seemed to be a flytrap, cordoned off by lynch-fear so thick that Negroes shrank from being seen or asking questions. All measures having failed, including the promised intervention of Attorney General Kennedy, Young and Bevel decided they must drive over to bail out Annell Ponder.

An argument broke out when they tried to borrow Dorothy Cotton's car. She wanted to go, too, saying Annell Ponder was her dear friend and fellow teacher in the citizenship program—Cotton had put her on the bus back to Greenwood. Young vetoed Cotton as nonessential, saying she had no reason to expose herself to this danger, which was not just normal movement danger they preached about in nonviolence classes but something evil that had boiled over all around them—with Medgar, Bernard, Annell, Guyot—random as all their acquaintance and yet near as the next breath. Bevel told Young that guilt was driving Cotton to get beaten up herself. “Andy, we don't need to take this crazy broad,” he said. Dangling her keys, Cotton spoke up, “Well, dammit, it's
my
car.” She finally jumped in and lurched off down the street, forcing Young and Bevel to trot after her to make a truce. Overwrought, Cotton soon swerved off an Alabama highway to avoid crashing into a large trailer truck, and on the shoulder she collapsed with Young and Bevel into a cleansing hysteria of jokes that even on this forlorn mission, headed into Mississippi instead of away from it, they might die any moment of a fluke that had nothing to do with civil rights.

In Winona, expelled from the city jail to wait outside for the sheriff, Cotton read her copy of Kahlil Gibran's
The Prophet
as nonchalantly as she could, while Bevel and Young tried to maintain their composure. Under pregnant daytime scrutiny, their delicate task was to look purposeful but not impatient, important but not so conspicuous as to incite attack. A stroke of luck arrived with a long-distance call for the sheriff just as they were ushered in. Overhearing the caller's name, Young remarked that he knew this Wiley Branton, head of the Voter Education Project in Atlanta. He spoke to the jailers as though Branton were white—not as his friend whose organization sponsored drives to register Negro voters across the South—and thus insinuated himself as a telephone intermediary in the matter of the troublesome prisoners. Young “talked colored” to Branton, like a flunky eager to do the bidding of an eminent lawyer whose contacts among Southern senators, newsmen, and other notables all wanted to make sure that proper bail procedures were followed, so as not to give ammunition to the liberals. Branton played along through what was destined to become a merry reminiscence after Young obtained the bonded release of all prisoners that afternoon.