Pillar of Fire (48 page)

A competing alarm intruded just then from the underground politics of J. Edgar Hoover. Joseph Alsop's syndicated column of April 15 asserted that Communist agents “are beginning to infiltrate certain sectors of the Negro civil rights movement.” Alsop reported that King was “still accepting Communist collaboration and even Communist advice”—ignoring official government notifications as well as his own promises to sever contacts with one “genuine Communist article” and another “key figure in the covert apparatus of the Communist Party.” Alsop's tone mixed the hush of FBI secrets with scolding disbelief that King could be so blind to manipulation.

This single press item shattered respite on the subversion issue. Like other observers who knew Joseph Alsop as a famous journalist—distant cousin to the Roosevelts and oracle for Washington's most powerful anti-Communist Democrats—King took the column as a message directly from the Johnson administration. Because the column revived arguments that the civil rights movement was Communist-inspired, King assumed the administration was testing a line of retreat from the Senate filibuster, with him as the scapegoat. This interpretation so distressed King that he resisted the urgent counsel of Clarence Jones that he must refute Alsop publicly or face accusations of confession by silence. Given the reality that no answer would matter much if Johnson had indeed turned against the movement, King instead sent Walter Fauntroy, a young SCLC board member based in Washington, to ask Burke Marshall whether some misunderstanding might have caused the Alsop attack.

Much to the disgust of the FBI wiretappers who overheard, Fauntroy reported back that Marshall had listened sympathetically. When Fauntroy explained that the few contacts between King and Stanley Levison were emergencies related to special projects such as King's book on Birmingham, Marshall implied that the Alsop column was an unfair exaggeration based on an irresponsible leak of FBI information.

A follow-up press attack landed before anyone could digest the Marshall meeting. “Hoover Says Reds Exploit Negroes/Asserts Party Infiltrates Rights Drive,” reported the
Times
on opening day of the World's Fair, April 22. Hoover's words—that through “vitally important” Communist influence, “large masses are caused to lose perspective on the issues involved and, without realizing it, succumb to the party's propaganda lures”—were three months old. They made headlines, anyway, and King had no way of knowing that Hoover, blocked by Robert Kennedy from issuing a fresh statement through Justice Department channels, had asked friends in the House to release his secret testimony from the previous January. Nor did King know what leverage Hoover possessed over Joseph Alsop. The Director retained in his confidential files what he called “the Alsop case” of 1957, when male KGB agents had seduced and photographed Alsop during a visit to Moscow. For seven years since, Alsop had gamely persevered through real and imagined reminders that his homosexual entrapment could break the surface of public scandal. Hoover carefully disseminated the records to high government officials; periodic mailings of the graphic Moscow photographs shocked Alsop's colleagues in the press. Nevertheless, the Alsop secret would hold for two decades beyond disclosure of the Martin Luther King wiretap.
*

King embraced the assumption that the FBI was the direct source for both press attacks, which relieved his greater fear that the President himself was peddling classified smears. All through the night of the
Times
article, King pushed his advisers by phone to craft a public response that would isolate the FBI as responsible. The next morning, some fifty reporters and a few interspersed FBI agents greeted him in San Francisco for a boisterous airport press conference that more than lived up to advance billing: “Rev. King's Icy Fury,” reported the
San Francisco Examiner
.

FBI agents bypassed teletype channels as too slow and dictated the King statement across the country by phone line into headquarters. Barely an hour after King's plane landed in California, intelligence chief William Sullivan circulated a scandalized bulletin. “King mentioned the Director by name,” he reported, “…and challenged the Director if he had any real evidence, to come forth with it.” Worse, Sullivan noted, King had invoked the words of Robert Kennedy against the FBI position on Communists in the racial movement, and had charged Hoover with stiffening resistance to the civil rights bill. Still worse, if possible, King impeached not only Hoover's motives but also the Bureau's sacrosanct reputation in law enforcement. “It would be encouraging to us,” King declared, “if Mr. Hoover and the FBI would be as diligent in apprehending those responsible for bombing churches and killing little children, as they are in seeking out alleged communist infiltration in the civil rights movement.”

Hoover prudently declined to take up the frontal assault on King's chosen ground. (President Johnson himself had prodded Hoover about why the Bureau had solved none of the racial bombing cases, especially those in Birmingham, and Hoover, in a confidential “My dear Mr. President” letter earlier that month, sidestepped one direct inquiry with a cloud of statistics—“we have utilized a peak of 231 Agents….”) Assistant Director Sullivan let Hoover's charges of Communism stand in public while he channeled the Bureau's efforts into guerrilla tactics. That afternoon, while King delivered a speech at Stanford University, Sullivan placed an emergency call to the Bureau's best “sound man” in San Francisco, who swiftly arranged microphone bugs in Sacramento—where King was to meet with California Governor Edmund (Pat) Brown—and the following two nights in Los Angeles. These installations would glean no embarrassments the Bureau could use, but wiretaps did confirm that King had broken through Hoover's intimidation as the rare adversary who refused to be bullied. “I want to hit him hard,” King said. “He made me hot, and I wanted to get him.”

 

B
OB
M
OSES
arrived at Stanford on April 24 to address an audience about a fifth the size of King's the day before, composed mostly of students whose interest in Mississippi had been planted by Al Lowenstein. Those stirred by the classical oratory of Lowenstein and King witnessed the stark contrast of Moses speaking in quiet soliloquy, following his own thoughts with what one listener recorded as “the rhythms of man crossing a stream, hopping from rock to rock.” Reviewing the four years since SNCC students first went to Mississippi, Moses paid tribute to the unexpected teaching of sharecroppers. “If we have any anchor at all,” he said, “…if there's any reason why we can skip around from the bottom of Mississippi to the top of the skyscrapers in Manhattan and still maintain some kind of internal sense of balance, I think a lot of it has to do with those people, and the fact that they have their own sense of balance.” The farmers gave Moses a sense “that you had hit rock bottom, that you had some base that you could work with and that you could build on.” For a long time it had been impossible to communicate the promise or terror of Mississippi because those outside “really didn't know and didn't have any way of understanding,” he went on, but with the cumulative pounding of distant news, “and finally after Birmingham, the country came alive.” A vocabulary was emerging for national questions “much deeper than civil rights,” said Moses—automation, schools, the nature of cities—questions that affect “our whole international affairs” and “go to the very root of our society…. It just happens that the civil rights question is at the spearhead of all of these.” No one recognized the signs because they fell upon Negroes, he said, “but when the Negroes take to acts of terror, they will know about it. The country will know about it.” Preconditions of breakdown “exist already,” he said. “They exist within the cities….

“Seventy percent of the Negro youth in Philadelphia are unemployed,” he said. “It's a fantastic figure. It affects white people when they organize gangs and start hitting and shooting and fighting each other, and then maybe turn their violence into the street and attack property, which probably belongs to white people.” Because Negro literacy had always been a political threat to the white South—“if you teach people who want to read and write, then they're going to want to begin to govern themselves”—heavy migration from Southern plantations—“every year there are 10 percent fewer jobs”—had delivered up two generations of refugees who were largely useless to the modern world. Their claim on the future clashed with the World's Fair's dazzling model of slumless cities for the year 2000, with plant-filled glass buildings connected by whizzing elevated sidewalks encased in tubes. “The deep irony of that really hasn't reached out across the country,” said Moses. “All everyone was concerned with was, ‘Don't mess up our World's Fair.' Whose World's Fair?”

Moses drew his Stanford audience into some of SNCC's internal arguments. “There are deep moral problems that are connected already with the summer project,” he said, and mentioned Herbert Lee, “who was killed that summer [in 1961], was killed just as surely because we went in there to organize as rain comes from the clouds. If we hadn't gone in there, he wouldn't have been killed.” Moses confessed that nonviolence could not insulate its believers from blood responsibility, nor answer “whether those people who are enslaved, in order to get their freedom, have to become executioners and participate in acts of terror and death, and what sense they do participate in it.” He was posing those questions now to an auditoriumful of recruits—potential replacements for Lee. “We're back in that same kind of dilemma,” he said, his voice trailing off, “which can be put maybe not very precisely in terms of victims and executioners, and maybe not very philosophically, but still, when you come to deal with it personally, it rests very heavy.” Several seconds later, realizing that the speaker had lapsed into silence, some four hundred students rose for a standing ovation that lasted several minutes.

Moses returned to Mississippi, where only a handful turned up on April 26 for the founding convention of the Freedom Democratic Party.“All the colored folks in the state should be here,” fumed Tony Gray as he surveyed the cavernous Masonic Temple in Jackson. His wife, Victoria, still running her Beauty Queen business in Hattiesburg, had announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate less than two years after responding to Hollis Watkins at her first mass meeting. Fannie Lou Hamer was running for Congress from the Delta. An exhausted Lawrence Guyot, disappointed over the lack of support for these pioneers, collapsed after the convention. Moses withdrew in depression. The Kentucky college secured as a training site by Robert Spike's CORR suddenly backed out on complaints from its trustees, and the very idea of volunteers, trained or untrained, still overwhelmed many who prepared to receive them. “It is unbelievably absurd to think that 2,000 bright and eager youth are coming down here to help,” wrote a Mississippi staff worker. “And what in the name of God can they help with?…Please forgive me for this. I am too afraid.”

B
Y
M
ONDAY
, April 27, the Senate debate acquired recognition as a marathon. The CBS graphics department bestowed a logo on Roger Mudd's five-a-day special reports from the Capitol steps: a superimposed clock showing the continuous days and hours of a filibuster that stretched into its eighth week. That morning, representing seventy-five cooperating seminaries, an interfaith trio of religious students—one Protestant, one Catholic, one Jew—entered the eighth day of vigil at the Lincoln Memorial, resolved to pray around the clock in shifts until the civil rights bill passed. The next night, upward of five thousand religious leaders from across the country gathered at Washington's Georgetown University for what the
New York Times
called an ecumenical rally “unparalleled in the annals of worldwide religion.” The musical director of Howard University led a consortium of college choirs through the spiritual “Done Made My Vow,” plus selections from Mendelssohn's
Elijah
, and Eugene Carson Blake concluded the speeches with an assault on the notion that the equal treatment provisions of the civil rights bill would violate the Thirteenth Amendment as a reverse “enslavement” of white people, especially business owners required to serve Negro customers. “How can any Christian or Jew sit still when such an immoral argument is voiced?” cried Blake. “Where in the Holy Bible, in Old Testament or New, can one find one single passage to support the rights of property as against the rights of men?…Have we learned nothing since the day Amos thundered against those who, for profit, degraded men?”

President Johnson, finding himself without available advisers that night—“I turn around and the whole damn shop's gone”—hounded White House phone operators until they tracked down Bill Moyers in New York. “By God, you took off,” he complained. Johnson brushed off excuses that he had cleared the night's absence for Moyers long ago—“Oh, I never heard of it,” he snorted. “You got me in a weak moment.”—to say he had no decent draft for a speech to religious leaders the next day. He firmly suggested that Moyers either steal a Gideon Bible from his hotel room or “go buy you a Bible, and I'll pay for it,” and search on the flight home for “some good quotations on equality and we're all God's children.” Moyers promised to be back by midnight.

On April 29, more than a hundred visiting clergy fanned out to lobby the Senate, and Oscar Lee preached the first in a long series of daily Capitol prayer rallies, after which President Johnson received Blake, Spike, Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle, Rabbi Uri Miller, and nearly two hundred other religious leaders at the White House. “From the time of the ancient Hebrew prophets and the dispersal of the money changers,” he told them, “men of God have taught us that social problems are moral problems on a huge scale. They have demonstrated that a religion which did not struggle to remove oppression from the world of men would not be able to create the world of spirit.” Johnson eulogized the abolitionist preachers of the previous century, saying they had endured the scourge of burned churches and ostracism to lift the country out of slavery. “Today, as we meet here,” he declared, “again the problem of racial wrongs and racial hatreds is the central moral problem of this Republic.” Quoting Abraha, in one of the Bible's first pleadings against tribal division, Johnson called for an end to strife “between you and me, and between my herdmen and your herdmen, because we are brothers.” He challenged the clergy “to reawaken the conscience of your beloved land.” This, he said, “is your job as prophets in our time.”

Despite his passionate sermons, Johnson received more attention that week for lifting his twin beagles, Him and Her, by their ears on the White House lawn.
*
Beneath public uproar over animal cruelty that lasted beyond May, a number of religious bodies nearly split apart at their national conventions. When Northern Presbyterians elected Rev. Edler Hawkins as their first Negro executive, dissenting elders renewed a drive to remove the church from integrationist politics. Southern Baptists voted down a statement of support for “laws designed to guarantee the legal rights of Negroes.” Southern Presbyterians rejected proposals to form a race commission and require open church membership, but they did invite Rev. Henry Russell, brother of Georgia Senator Richard Russell, to relax segregation policies voluntarily before his Memphis congregation hosted the 1965 convention.

In Pittsburgh, national representatives of ten million Methodists contended over a proposal to abolish their Central Jurisdiction. Created in the 1939 compromise that reunited Methodists from their schism over slavery, the Central Jurisdiction governed Negro congregations only, in a geographical misnomer that masked ecclesiastical segregation. The previous Methodist assembly of 1960 had rejected integration guidelines in favor of the traditional rule that Negro churches could transfer into regular jurisdictions only by mutual consent. (“I would like to remind the General Conference,” an Alabama delegate had shouted, “that Jesus Himself never set a specific target date for the coming of the Kingdom!”) Four years later, the tumultuous Pittsburgh assembly did set an integration goal of 1968 but retained the voluntary absorption method. A slim majority held that more aggressive plans would divide the church again—orphaning Negro bishops and congregations, driving white Methodists into Baptist havens of local control. Rev. James Lawson wept openly among the defeated reformers on the floor of the assembly—more dismayed by his straddling church than by any of his persecutions as Gandhian resister or nonviolent tutor to the student movement. Shortly after midnight on May 2, Lawson and Edwin King of Mississippi joined a prayer vigil that swelled overnight until more than a thousand marched around the Pittsburgh Civic Arena, outnumbering the delegates inside. A Chicago divinity student carried a charred cross that the Klan had burned on the Tougaloo campus.

Deep crosscurrents churned partisan politics, too. On May 1, Senator Russell told colleagues he hoped to keep the Senate filibuster going long enough for George Wallace's presidential campaign to light warning fires for politicians behind Northern lines. Events favored his strategy a few days later when the Alabama governor obtained nearly 30 percent of the vote in Indiana's Democratic primary. A
New York Times
editorial acknowledged that Wallace's surprise strength earlier in Wisconsin may have been no fluke, and that “grassroots resistance to effective civil rights legislation is disturbingly widespread.” Wallace himself claimed the satisfaction of a redeemed pariah. “We have shaken the eyeteeth of every liberal in the country!” he boasted. Wallace developed a stump speech that courted resentment of “sweeping federal encroachment” by “pointy-headed bureaucrats,” tyrannical judges, and “tax, tax, spend, spend,” politicians—all supported by what he called “the ultra-liberal controlled press.” He downplayed the race issue except to poke fun at hypocrisy outside the South. In Boston, he chortled over the discovery that a crusading anti-Wallace television station employed no Negroes at any level. “Anybody here from Philadelphia?” he cried at another campaign stop. “You know, they can't even have night football games any more because of the trouble between the races…. Now, whoever heard of such a thing?” Of the nation's capital in Washington, he quipped that “they are building a new [Theodore Roosevelt Memorial] bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals fleeing to Virginia.”

Senator Russell looked for help not only from segregationists in the North but also from Republican forays into the solid Democratic South. Against the interests of his own national party, he appealed to the Republican dream of becoming competitive in Southern elections, telling Northern senators that to do so they must support or at least tolerate the civil rights filibuster. When Republican leader Everett Dirksen hinted instead that he might vote to shut off the filibuster if the Johnson forces would consider some seventy amendments he intended to offer, Russell was not deceived by the howls of Senate liberals who, fearing delay and paralyzing incompatibilities with the House bill, resisted the offer. Like Hubert Humphrey, his chief opponent in the Senate debate, Russell knew that the civil rights bill had no chance without Dirksen's Republicans. The voluble Humphrey, who later joked that he flattered and wooed Dirksen as ardently as he had courted his own wife, Muriel—“Oh, I was shameless”—took joy from the first murmurs of Republican cooperation, and Russell was correspondingly downcast. He soon rose on the floor of the Senate to castigate Dirksen for having “killed off a rapidly growing Republican Party in the South, at least so far as his party's prospects in the presidential campaign are concerned.”

Fixed upon the task of derailing a civil rights bill sponsored by the renegade Texas Democrat in the White House, Russell needed a visible shift in sectional and racial alignments as old as the major parties themselves. Instead, there were only embryonic signs. For the upcoming national convention, Tennessee Democrats selected the first Negro delegates in their party's history; newspapers reported that the intrepid COFO summer project would challenge the unbroken record of all-white Democratic delegations in Mississippi. More dramatic changes on the Republican side remained almost invisible because of the party's minuscule Southern presence. In Georgia, where candidate Barry Goldwater had trouble drawing crowds to fill even barber shops, his newly organized supporters took over the tiny state convention, electing all but two of the delegates to the Republican national convention, and in the process they evicted the caretaker Negroes of the old Black and Tan coalition. “The Negro has been read out of the Republican party of Georgia here today,” a Goldwater spokesman announced frankly on May 2, as the new Georgia Republicans broke tradition by celebrating with an all-white dinner. Bitterly disappointed, Daddy King and his generation of lifelong Republicans soon became a discarded remnant from the Party of Lincoln.

 

O
N
M
AY
2, anniversary of the first great children's jail march in Birmingham the previous year, King joined Fred Shuttlesworth to preach the funeral of William Shortridge, the prickly but dependable former treasurer of the Birmingham movement. “There was no guile in his mouth,” Shuttlesworth told mourners in a bittersweet eulogy. “…Mr. Shortridge was a sick man ever since I knew him, but he did much more being sick than most men I know being well. I pray God that He would afflict many more men with a sickness like that.” King followed with a distracted, more somber tribute, quoting Shakespeare's Horatio on the death of Hamlet, and then flew on short notice to Nashville. Students—supported by C. T. Vivian and numerous white religious leaders, including the renowned Vanderbilt Bible scholar Walter Harrelson—had picketed segregated restaurants through a week marked by a hundred arrests and numerous violent attacks, mostly by spectators. SNCC Chairman John Lewis, face bruised and lips split open from blows that morning, escorted King into a mass meeting at Fisk University.

Back in the Ebenezer pulpit the next day, King preached in his deepest bass register at slow cadence, which often signaled a troubled mood. Modifying his standard sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan—“Who Is My Neighbor?”—he projected three distinct philosophies upon those who had encountered the waylaid traveler on the road to Jericho. “Everybody within the sound of my voice today lives by one of these three philosophies,” King told his congregation. Beginning with the robber—“whoever robbed that man had a philosophy”—he offered examples of predatory behavior ranging from ancient slavery and modern colonialism to street crime. Preachers were not immune, King said acidly, saying he had just heard a prominent fellow minister sell his members “a real blessing” of rebaptism for $10 apiece, offering each one a drop of the genuine holy water the preacher had brought back from the Sea of Galilee. “Out of that bottle of water, I can imagine that he got himself a good ten thousand dollars,” King declared with a fury that carried through a dozen repetitions of the robber's philosophy: “What is thine is MINE! And if you don't give it to me, I'll take it from you.”

He began more gently with a second outlook—“What is mine is mine, what is thine is thine”—saying that the priest and Levite in the story may have had good reason to bypass the waylaid man on the Jericho road. To indict their cautious self-preservation, King recited other Bible stories, including his favorite parable of the rich man Dives, who went to hell for no overt crime. Wealth itself did not condemn Dives, King told his congregation. “I can assure you,” he said, “if there is a hell there will be plenty of poor folks in it.” What undid Dives was failure to bridge the gulf that divided him from humanity, including the beggar Lazarus at his gate. Dives “never saw Lazarus even though he passed him every day,” said King, who went on to scold worshippers “here this morning” for withholding their talents from those in need.

King proceeded to what he identified as the “third philosophy,” that of the Samaritan who stopped to help the victim. This merciful stranger “of another race” proved that “a man's back is never straighter than when he bends it to lift fallen humanity,” he said. King summoned up an assortment of models, including Albert Schweitzer and Peace Corps volunteers, plus students, rabbis, preachers, and other movement volunteers “willing to go to jail, willing to be on picket lines, willing to be beaten and persecuted for righteousness' sake. They know somehow, ‘what is mine is thine….'” Their philosophy “says in substance that all humanity is tied together,” King told the Ebenezer congregation, warning that neither predators nor bystanders could be healthy so long as misery, famine, plague, and hatred scavenged millions on the globe. “For you can
catch
these diseases, you know,” he said wryly, and some of the gloom lifted from his tone. “He who lives by this philosophy lives in the kingdom NOW!” King cried, and “not in some distant day.” This was “the kingdom within,” which rose from the sordid world “in a
great act
and a noble destiny.” It was the witness of Jesus, “who said in his own life, ‘what is mine is thine, I'll give it to you, you don't have to beg me for it.' This is why the cross is more than some meaningless drama taking place on the stage of history. In a real sense, it is a telescope through which we look out into the long vista of eternity and see the love of God breaking forth in the night…. It is God saying, ‘I will reach out and bridge the gulf that separates me from you.'…And may this morning in some way we grasp this idea…. We open the doors of the church now….”