Pillar of Fire (43 page)

From Phoenix, where word of the Boston soundings reached him overnight, Elijah Muhammad denounced “that no-good, long-legged Malcolm.” He told Minister Louis X of Boston and other officials that the Nation must make examples of the bad ones and cut the heads off hypocrites. Muhammad told John Ali and Captain Joseph that if the courts could not stop Malcolm from slandering his private life, then the Nation must “tell ours” to do so. He ordered them to file eviction papers for Malcolm's house.

Malcolm X, while not privy to what was being said in the opposing camp, recognized that his protégé Louis X made a convincing show of loyalty to Elijah Muhammad and that the shifting Muslim conspiracies crackled with potential violence. Returning from Boston to New York, he called reporters with accusations so sensational that only Harlem's
Amsterdam News
picked them up for the Saturday, March 21, edition: “Malcolm X Tells of Death Threat.” The story burned as a silent fuse in the regular Sunday evening service at Temple No. 7. Assistant Minister Benjamin 2X gripped his chair on the rostrum while Assistant Minister Henry X repeated the prescribed banishments on Malcolm X. For the third week, Henry X read from the
New York Times
article on Malcolm as the wedge of schism. He cried out that the Nation must shun slack talk from Malcolm the hypocrite, lest it destroy the faith that was raising them all from the gutter.

“Excuse me, brother minister, may I say a word real quick?” Benjamin 2X interrupted. He rose as mildly and routinely as possible, leaving Henry no choice but to surrender the microphone. The entire congregation fell silent. Benjamin temporized with metaphorical remarks about two planes sitting in a hangar, one about to take off, and Captain Joseph nodded ominously to his squadrons before Benjamin pulled out the
Amsterdam News
.

“Are you going to say it in the name of Allah?” Joseph called out loudly from the floor.

The question froze Benjamin at the microphone. To say yes was to begin the obedient litany about the Honorable Elijah Muhammad as His Messenger; to say no was to confess heresy in advance. Benjamin hesitantly tried to compromise, beginning, “As a Muslim…”

Captain Joseph bellowed his question again. His troops took it up as a chant, but opponents answered with shouts of, “Let him speak!” As some members gasped in horror, Benjamin shouted a question over the sound system: “If I can believe the
New York Times
, which is the devil's newspaper, and what it said about Minister Malcolm, then can I believe what the
Amsterdam News
, which is a black newspaper, said about Captain Joseph sending Lukman to Malcolm's house to put a bomb in his car?”

Joseph's security detail converged on the rostrum, enabling Henry X to snatch back the microphone. “If you're not going to say it in the name of Allah,” he told Benjamin over the booming speakers, “then you're not going to say it at all!” He kept repeating this above the bedlam. Benjamin yelled that Malcolm only wanted a chance to bring his case before the members, and more than two hundred listeners—about a third of the attendance—stalked out of the temple behind him.

Captain Joseph, while counting Benjamin 2X as the first minister to break to Malcolm's side, assured Elijah Muhammad that Temple No. 7 had foiled the attempted coup. Most of those who left were merely put off by the chaos, he said, but he did complain that things were happening too fast for outsiders to keep up. The loyal members of Temple No. 7 were being harassed mistakenly on the street as followers of Malcolm X, for instance—mostly by young white police officers whose hostility had been roused by recent publicity about the strange association of Muslims with championship boxing. The previous Friday night at Madison Square Garden, when fans had showered the new heavyweight champion with angry boos instead of the customary tribute, resentment seemed triggered by his demand to be introduced as Muhammad Ali instead of Cassius Clay, as Garden management insisted was his rightful name.

With strange new Muslim influences bouncing between sports and civil rights news, Malcolm's internal struggle confused the FBI's intelligence experts as well as the public. When J. Edgar Hoover ordered his Chicago office to make up its mind whether Malcolm X was or was not independent of Elijah Muhammad, the agent in charge of Chicago replied that the wiretaps themselves were contradictory. “As the Bureau can imagine, these conversations are extremely difficult to monitor and are even more difficult to make sense from and to intelligently record,” he cabled FBI headquarters on March 25. “Muhammad, at his best, is very difficult to understand.” Some reports ascribed to Malcolm about forty converts from Temple No. 7 (“five or six of them had guns”), some twenty-six, and others next to none. The Chicago agent was clearer that Elijah Muhammad would disdain Malcolm's request to defend himself before assembled peers within the Nation. “I do not have a court,” Muhammad declared on his wiretapped phone. “I
am
the court.”

D
URING THE PRELUDE
to an evening service on March 22 in Jackson, Mississippi—far from the chaotic split inside Temple No. 7—twenty-four young boys and girls were seated in front pews as prospective new members when an integrated group of five slipped quietly through a side door of Galloway Memorial United Methodist Church, a grand white structure of fluted columns (“the Cathedral of Mississippi Methodism”) across from the state Capitol. Alarmed ushers trotted down the aisles to intercept them, and, hoping to minimize commotion in the sanctuary, took the visitors silently by the arms toward the exit. “I am from India,” cried out Madabusi Savrithri, a diminutive new Ph.D. from Syracuse University and interim professor at Tougaloo. When the ushers shoved more firmly to remove her, Savrithri asked in protest what they would think if their women or their missionaries were manhandled on a visit to India.

Galloway's new pastor, Rev. W. J. Cunningham, worried especially that this latest expulsion took place in front of his impressionable young church candidates on Palm Sunday. He had walked into race trouble the previous fall, knowing that his predecessor had resigned over the congregation's explicit enforcement of segregated services. (“It is not unChristian that we prefer to remain an all-white congregation,” the official board resolved by a vote of 184-13.) Warning that he would not preach segregation, Cunningham reached an understanding with determined church elders to cover their differences within a reconciling Christian purpose. He never mentioned integration from the Galloway pulpit—to the point of avoiding inflammatory words such as “brotherhood”—but conflict burrowed into his ministry. While lawyers and politicians helped fend off abstract questions, such as whether trespass charges against integrated worshippers rested on church or state initiative,
*
Cunningham had to decide whether to laugh when his ushers jokingly dubbed themselves “The Color Guard.” Every tangible presence—a Negro seeking communion, a furtive huddle of elders, a motion about race in some committee—produced what Cunningham would recall in his memoirs as “tension so thick you could pick it up with your hands…” and “so high you could scrape it off the ceiling.”

For Reverend Edwin and Jeannette King, tension at Galloway Memorial had become a familiar experience over the nine months since King had been stripped of Methodist credentials and had run for lieutenant governor on the integrated Freedom Ticket. On Palm Sunday, escaping this time with physical eviction instead of arrest, they pushed on to a second rejection at St. Luke's Methodist. With numerous prior convictions trailing behind in appellate courts, the Kings discussed between them signs of a cumulative emotional toll, called “burnout” in movement slang. Idealism was wearing thin as a substitute for normality, especially after March 15, when the public announcement of Freedom Summer aroused little response.

As with Allard Lowenstein the previous summer, Edwin King grasped for hope in the quixotic schemes of pilgrim visitors. On cue from Bob Moses, who cherished dreams of acquiring a “Freedom Radio” station for the movement, he joined a media reformer in a dangerous gamble. Everett Parker, a professor at Yale Divinity School and part-time producer of educational television shows, brought to the United Church of Christ a specialty in broadcast law and religion. For thirty years, since his 1935 dissertation on the original Federal Communications Act (back when stations banned all advertisement during family listening hours between seven and eleven o'clock, and when NBC introduced the National Radio Pulpit as the first network program) Parker had published rearguard legal studies against rampant commercialism that obliterated, in his opinion, the public trust concept of the law. At the request of Andrew Young, his former colleague at the UCC in New York, Parker had undertaken to shame the Birmingham television stations into fairer coverage of the 1963 civil rights movement, and in early March of 1964, he activated at Tougaloo College the first stage of his revolutionary scheme.

Trained volunteers stealthily moved batteries of television sets, reel-to-reel recorders, and Parker-designed log books into designated monitoring homes, where primary and secondary teams matched sound recordings to formularized observations of all 7,186 minutes of the program week on Jackson television stations. The tabulated results showed, for instance, that the NBC affiliate WLBT never referred to any Negro civic event during an aggregate fifteen minutes and fifty-five seconds of public service announcements, never showed a Negro congregation in church services nor a Negro face on local shows, including
Romper Room, Today in Jackson
, and
Teen Tempo
. This was the accepted landscape of television almost everywhere, but the survey also logged the occasional use of the epithet “nigger” by two of the station's political commentators, and counted sixteen enthusiastic promotions for the segregationist literature at the White Citizens Council bookstore inside the WLBT station, run by its manager.

Parker and allied lawyers prepared a petition for the FCC to block license renewal on ground that the hostile, systematic exclusion by WLBT of nearly half the viewing audience (Negroes) violated legal obligation to broadcast in the public interest. Precedent had evolved so heavily against such a claim that the FCC allowed complaints only from rival broadcasters, and recognized no standing for public representatives to contest a license on any basis. Perpetual renewal had turned the free, three-year public license into permanent property that could be trafficked and inherited confidently, like peerages of fantastic value. (The small-market WLBT license was worth about $12 million to the Dallas-based insurance company that owned it.) On this structure rested many postwar American fortunes, including a small one for President Johnson's family in Texas, and Parker fully realized that any wisp of challenge would draw the concerted wrath of broadcast powers everywhere.

Mississippi's NAACP counsel advised state chairman Aaron Henry to avoid Parker's WLBT petition for fear of signing his own death warrant. Henry signed anyway, on the slim chance that the meticulous documentation might ameliorate news coverage of the movement. From such a beginning, even Parker could not imagine a twenty-year legal odyssey that would shake the foundations of broadcast regulation and make Aaron Henry himself the millionaire chairman and largest shareholder of WLBT. Rev. R. L. T. Smith, whose congressional campaign Bob Moses had managed in 1962, held fast as the second petitioner, but Tougaloo College dropped out when officials learned of a bill in the Mississippi legislature to revoke its charter. In a futile effort to save college president Daniel Beittel's job, Edwin King stepped forward as a substitute white petitioner, signing as campus chaplain of the United Church of Christ at Tougaloo. For King, the risk of media persecution seemed remote and superfluous. He was more than consoled by the upcoming visit of celebrity ministers that Easter Sunday, with their promise to relieve King and his wife of integrated witness in Jackson's mainstream churches.

 

I
N
W
ASHINGTON
, President Johnson gathered 150 leading ministers from the Southern Baptist Convention for a brief reception in the White House Rose Garden on Wednesday, March 25. He permitted no reporters, recorders, or cameras, and began his informal remarks with a string of jokes about Baptists baptizing each other in the White House pool (“I wish you could have seen Billy Graham and Bill Moyers in that pool together the other day”). To underscore his own Baptist heritage, Johnson read to the ministers a yellowed 1857 letter he kept on his office wall in which the patriarch of Texas, General Sam Houston, had commiserated with his pastor, Johnson's own great-grandfather Baines, over the miserly church contributions of most members. (“They ought to know that paper currency will not pass in heaven,” Houston wrote.) Johnson told his audience that his frontier ancestor, Rev. George Washington Baines, Sr., had been selected to deliver the annual sermon to the Southern Baptist Convention of his day. “If that doesn't make him orthodox,” he added with a twinkle, “nothing will.”

The President allowed that since the trauma of the Kennedy assassination he had caught himself reciting forgotten childhood prayers learned on his mother's knee. “The occupant of the world's most powerful office, like the most private citizen, has nowhere to go for help but up,” he said. He professed humility in their realm (“I am not a theologian. I am not a philosopher”), and ventured the opinion of “just a public servant” that there was hope for the nation “only if the separation of church and state does not mean the divorce of spiritual values from secular affairs.” Johnson defined that political line with an eloquence pleasing to his guests. “The principle, the identity of private morality and public conscience, is as deeply rooted in our tradition and Constitution as the principle of legal separation,” he declared. “Washington in his first inaugural said that the roots of national policy lay in private morality. Lincoln proclaimed as a national faith that right makes might. Surely this is so.”

Then abruptly Johnson dropped the folksy banter and supplication. Saying “no group of Christians has a greater responsibility in civil rights than Southern Baptists,” he cut through the usual bromides like a brimstone preacher grasping sinners by the throat. “Your people are part of the power structure in many communities of our land,” he said. “The leaders of states and cities and towns are in
your
congregations, and they sit on
your
boards. Their attitudes are confirmed or changed by the sermons you preach and by the lessons you write and by the examples that you set.”

Johnson challenged the South's leading white ministers to become suffering prophets in keeping with the Baptist struggle for religious liberty, guided by compassion, not conformity, and “unafraid of the consequences.” Warning against “voices crying peace, peace, peace, when there is no peace,” he summoned them to answer “with truth and with action. Help us pass this civil rights bill…. Let the acts of everyone, in government and out, let all that we do proclaim that righteousness does exalt the nation. Thank you.”

Word spread so rapidly that Martin Luther King issued a statement that evening, before the next day's newspapers, praising Johnson's “eloquent and passionate” plea to white Baptists. King was in Washington to attend a climactic session of the Senate debate, and on Thursday he looked down from the visitors' gallery on Senator Russell's racial relocation map, still standing on exhibit. Southerners, breaking off their warmup filibuster, yielded at last for the procedural vote to take up the bill, after which Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon stirred the chamber by moving to send it back to committee for hearings, as required by Senate practice. Well aware that Judiciary chairman James Eastland of Mississippi had killed all but one of 121 civil rights measures over the past decade, Morse foresaw still greater peril in cutting corners. To shut off debate by the required two-thirds vote—and thereby gain final passage over the real, mortal filibuster looming ahead—he declared that supporters must court senators who opposed cloture on principle, plus powerful chairmen with their own reasons not to bypass any committee, and also with Senate traditionalists who were loath to base historic legislation on the reports or hasty amendments of the House. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who had favored Morse's course as painful but prudent, now rose to announce that he had changed his mind. Even if Chairman Eastland did not manage to suffocate or disfigure the bill in committee, Mansfield pointed out that the ordeal of calling it up as pending business would start all over again. He moved to table Morse's motion and keep the bill before the Senate. After a dramatic afternoon debate, in which Republican leader Everett Dirksen joined Morse and the Southern senators in opposition, Mansfield prevailed by a vote of 50-34, and the Senate adjourned for a brief Easter recess.

“We shall now begin to fight the war,” vowed Richard Russell. Off the Senate floor, he and other senators fielded questions about whether supporters could find the seventeen additional votes necessary for cloture. A small cloud of reporters gathered around Martin Luther King as he moved from the visitors' gallery to a nearby conference room, where, on a sofa off toward the rear, the unmistakable figure of Malcolm X took a seat.

No one, including the two leaders, acknowledged the bizarre joint presence. Although thoughts of Malcolm X had been gnawing at King of late—not so much over philosophical differences as public jibes about “my being soft
*
and my talking about love and the white man all the time and…my being a sort of polished Uncle Tom”—the press conference ostensibly proceeded as though Malcolm were not there. King announced that he had discussed the bill's prospects with sponsors including Senator Hubert Humphrey, and had met with movement colleagues about contingency plans for demonstrations. “If there is a prolonged filibuster, it will be necessary to engage in a creative direct action program to dramatize the blatant injustice to Negroes,” he said, predicting a “dark night of social disruption” if the bill failed. He answered the usual range of questions about whether nonviolence contributed to violence, and whether Negroes would stop agitating if they got the bill. “Oh, no, we will not be content,” he replied, “…until we have absolute and full freedom.” Even in the best case, there would be summer demonstrations to test compliance with the new law.

When King finished and made his way from the conference room in the midst of reporters, Malcolm left by a separate door. Guided by Benjamin 2X, he placed himself directly in King's path along the corridor.