Pillar of Fire (80 page)

“I've been expecting you,” said Delmar Dennis, a part-time Methodist minister and chaplain to the Klan.

When Dennis agreed to risk his life for an informant's fee of a hundred dollars a week, FBI agents John Martin and Tom Van Riper took forty pages of notes at their first briefing session. Dennis confirmed Wallace Miller's knowledge of orders within the White Knights that marked Mickey Schwerner as a special target, and he described firsthand the sight of Klan member Alton Wayne Roberts returning breathless with bloody knuckles from the ambush and arson at Beatrice Cole's Mount Zion Church on June 16. Both Dennis and Miller were in place for a summit meeting of the White Knights on Sunday, September 27, when armed Klansmen with radios patrolled the perimeter of a factory outside Meridian, and Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers quoted the Book of Romans to ordain that any “fourth-degree sanctions”—as the White Knights referred to murder—be accomplished by compartmentalized command “without malice,” in the spirit of Christian soldiers. The FBI task force had the informants' reports on his speech before midnight. They were hearsay, and stopped well short of direct evidence in the triple murders, but they gave the agents a new veneer of omniscience in psychological warfare. “Once we had Miller and Dennis providing a pool of information,” Sullivan later recalled, “we were pretty hard to beat.”

 

O
N ITS PUBLIC RELEASE
that same Sunday, the
New York Times
massed typesetters to reproduce the Warren Commission report overnight for a forty-eight-page special, which James Reston introduced as “the greatest repository of Presidential political history, drama and fiction since the murder of Mr. Lincoln….” Each clue raised “a whole new catalogue of mysteries,” he observed, and he pronounced the Kennedy assassination “so involved in the complicated and elemental conflicts of the age that many vital questions remain, and the philosophers, novelists, and dramatists will have to take it from here.”

The emotional impact of the Warren report buried the previous day's FBI report on race riots in the North, in which Hoover's Bureau groped toward the Black Muslims as scapegoats, just as Philadelphia riot police in multiple platoon strength had stormed what they thought was the national citadel of Black Muslims only to find a man who had been riding the streets with an NAACP leader to urge calm. The
Times
stressed the lone captive's alien resonance and exotic names—Abyssinia Hayes, aka Shakkyh Muhammad—calling him “an apostate from the Black Muslims who now leads a cult of his own.”

The actual violence among seedling Muslims was precise, confined, and nearly invisible—far removed from the interracial fears of the riots. The Nation of Islam sealed its hold on core believers with attacks that lumped together “rebel” doubters and temple debtors with “hypocrite” followers of Malcolm X. In Los Angeles, firebombs struck one of the few Negro newspapers that commented on such internal conflict. Private enforcements escalated in most major cities. Captain Clarence X led a squad from Temple No. 11 in Boston that blocked traffic as it dragged ex-secretary Aubrey Barnette and a companion from their car and stomped them on a Sunday afternoon—fracturing Barnette's ankle, two ribs, and a vertebra. From his nonviolent training center, SCLC's Rev. Virgil Wood ran behind the rush of sirens up Blue Hill Avenue into a milling crowd, where he heard that the bloodied figure on a stretcher was a Boston University graduate who had gotten mixed up with the Black Muslims. Barnette felt the attack as a brutal lesson for those tempted to follow him out of the temple, as well as a warning that he should not testify against Muslim defendants in the car-chase ambush of June 14, when Malcolm's aide Benjamin 2X had fled into Logan Airport. Only three years after he and his cousin Ronald Stokes proudly served as Elijah Muhammad's first college-educated temple secretaries, Barnette had lost his cousin to police violence in the sensational LAPD shootout of 1962, then his own savings and religious beliefs to corruption within the Nation. Still bitter about the Nation's exploitation of the Stokes family,
*
Barnette resolved to press criminal charges against the thirteen attackers he remembered.

Earlier in September, at an improvised program for the disoriented remnant of Malcolm's followers, twenty-two people had heard Benjamin 2X read a letter in which Malcolm grandly volunteered to raise an expedition army often thousand Harlemites to drive white mercenaries out of the African Congo. Collateral events just then were shutting down the wiretap on Malcolm's phone lines, as the U.S. Departments of Justice and State—upset that the overseas traveler reportedly was urging African heads of state to “take the issue of racialism in the United States before the United Nations as a threat to world peace”—asked the FBI to discontinue any practice that could taint criminal prosecution if and when Malcolm returned to the United States.
†
The Bureau's ongoing Chicago wiretaps did pick up acid remarks by Elijah Muhammad that Malcolm was staying in Africa because he “does not have a hundred people in all the United States.” The Arabs, scoffed Muhammad, were “laughing at him and not committing themselves.”

Muhammad minimized the parallel defections of his youngest sons Wallace and Akbar, the latter of whom was studying orthodox Islam at Cario's Al-Azhar University. “Other messengers, like Moses and King David, have had trouble with their sons,” he said. Akbar remained in Egypt with Malcolm, but Wallace openly challenged what he described as his father's determination “to be the strongest black man on the face of the earth.” Two hundred Muslims from several cities answered his call to Philadelphia's Venango Ballroom on Sunday, September 27. In Malcolm's absence, his wife, Betty X, came with Benjamin 2X from New York, and Abyssinia Hayes arrived in a flowing white robe. They heard Wallace say he had come out of prison determined to teach no more lies, and solemnly announce that Muslims should forget everything Elijah Muhammad had taught them about Islam. He instructed them to stop applying for and using “X” names, for openers, although they could adopt African or Arab ones through the courts. By claiming authority to supersede the Nation of Islam, Wallace knowingly launched the active opposition that had brought his father's sectarians swarming against Malcolm. All that protected him, other than his lingering status as the troublesome but designated heir in Elijah's “royal” family, was Wallace's reputation for straightforward candor about religion. He was perceived to be both genuine and dangerously weak. Wallace told the Venango audience that he abhorred violence, and therefore could not work wholly in concert with Malcolm because of his “violent image.”

Betty X rose from the floor to object that her husband had committed no crimes or retaliations against anyone. Wallace carefully replied that while he admired Malcolm for defying the Nation's gangsters, and did not consider him to be violent by nature or performance, Malcolm nevertheless cultivated an aura of violence that could not be reconciled with true Islam or with the black man's crusade against bigotry.

 

O
NCE AGAIN
, race served as the hidden midwife for far-flung, mysterious upheaval. It was, as Lincoln said in his own more terrible era, “somehow, the cause.” In early September, when sitting governor Endicott Peabody unexpectedly lost the Democratic primary in Massachusetts, pundits variously blamed his stiff manner and his mother's arrest in St. Augustine, which either upstaged him as a hero or associated him with unpopular meddling. Opinion polls showed that heavy majorities in New York were deeply attached to the civil rights bill while also resentful of the civil rights movement for having “gone too far,” with a front-page
Times
survey story quoting whites bitter that Negroes expected “everything on a silver platter.”

President Johnson ventured north for his first major campaign trip into an unyielding sea of admirers that swallowed up his motorcade on the streets of Providence, Rhode Island. It was September 28—publication day for the Warren Commission report—and the near hysteria of the crowds alarmed Secret Service agents even before one of the overheated limousines exploded into flame, but an oblivious Johnson pulled as many as fifteen pedestrians at once into the convertible to share the overflow glory. A record one million people hailed him in person through the six New England states before dawn on Tuesday the twenty-ninth, and he ended with a hospital visit to young Edward Kennedy, still recuperating from his June plane crash. Johnson scarcely noticed his own hands bleeding from a press of flesh that left his White House touring car, the
Queen Mary
, with assorted dents and a buckled roof.

That Thursday morning, October 1, Berkeley students protested the shutdown of the Bancroft Strip by setting up a token three information tables on the steps of Sproul Hall. Jack Weinberg of CORE distributed literature on Chaney and Schwerner, the two CORE staff members murdered in Mississippi, but he refused to identify himself to an assistant dean, who decided to have Weinberg arrested. Rather than walk him through the gathering crowd, the arresting lieutenant summoned a squad car onto the broad plaza in front of Sproul Hall, but as Weinberg debated campus authorities through the window, students by the score sat all around the car, singing “We Shall Not Be Moved,” impervious to the revved engine and commands to make way.

Sight of the captured vehicle astonished Mario Savio on his arrival for a scheduled noon rally. Reinforcements of press and police ringed an expanding perimeter as Savio waded through to the center and stood on the roof of the squad car to be heard. Over the intermittent crackling of the police radio, he explained the arrest of Weinberg with a parable from Herodotus. His speech made the roof a platform for serial speakers from all sides, uncertain what to do next, and the student body president implored Savio to join him for negotiations with campus officials. “All right,” shouted Savio, “but I want it understood that until this person in this car is placed, you know,
out
of arrest, nobody will move from here!” The car, with Weinberg in it, remained trapped all afternoon and through the night. Students massed in numbers great enough to detach sit-in expeditions of five hundred.

A world away, Minister Louis X was reporting by phone to Elijah Muhammad on trial testimony in Boston. While repeating that his members had been provoked by the “hypocrite” Aubrey Barnette and his companion on Blue Hill Avenue, Louis X noted the day's medical evidence on fractures and ruptured kidneys, plus eyewitnesses that “the Muslims pulled a car in front of them and pulled them out from the car and beat them.” The judge was an “original,” he added—the Nation's term for black—and had remarked so favorably on the prosecution thus far that Louis X asked whether it might be wise to offer a guilty plea to lesser charges. Muhammad emphatically vetoed the suggestion on the ground that renegades were a threat to worship in the Nation. “They needed a severe beating and should have been killed,” he declared, telling Louis X he would rather his members serve time than pay a nickel for the medical bills of hypocrites. Accordingly, nine defendants, including Captain Clarence X, stood fast through trial to eventual conviction in January.

Elsewhere on Thursday, the FBI's Deke DeLoach took a bulletin to the White House about McComb, Mississippi, where attention had concentrated in the week since President Johnson received its delegation of three women. The local white editor hazarded his first oblique community warning—“bombings cause tension”—which earned a firebomb through his office window and a burned cross in his yard. (An anonymous caller offered the editor a pinch of chivalrous regret about the burned cross, saying the Klan would not have struck that particular night “had we known of your mother's death.”)

On Wednesday, Acting Attorney General Katzenbach reported confidentially to the President that McComb's “local officials are publicly claiming that Negroes are bombing their own homes, and responded to the latest bombings by making a number of arrests of Negroes.” Four Episcopal ministers from the National Council of Churches made news that day over McComb's refusal to allow visits with twenty-four jailed Negroes, including eight minors, and Governor Johnson ventured his first public doubt on the self-terror theory, saying, “Some were bombings by white people.” Historian John Dittmer later discounted any chance that President Johnson would have sent martial law troops before an election, but state officials used a torrent of such rumors to spur the emergency response DeLoach tracked on Thursday: the FBI and highway patrol jointly arrested off McComb's streets three Klansmen who more or less admitted their klavern bombed weekly by drawing Negro names from a hat, and confiscated their automobile arsenal of one pistol, four high-powered rifles, eight wooden clubs, “a black leatherette hood and apron,” brass knuckles, an explosives box, and a deputy sheriff's badge.

Hours after his annual address to the SCLC convention, Martin Luther King announced this news in Savannah to a Thursday evening mass rally of fifteen hundred inside Saint Paul CME Church, plus several hundred overflows standing outside in the rain. He praised the three arrests in McComb as an “indication that the nonviolent movement by its relentless exposure has finally penetrated the closed society of Mississippi.”

In Jackson, television station WLBT
*
was reporting that the bomb charges filed against the three McComb Klansmen carried “a possible death penalty,” but Mississippi judge William Watkins soon released the three—and eight others who similarly pleaded guilty—to probation on suspended sentences, telling the defendants from the bench that because they were “unduly provoked” by outsiders of “low morality and unhygienic,” he had decided “to make your punishment light, and I hope you appreciate it.” Like the bombings themselves, his action both revealed and broke down Mississippi's isolation. In a rare public attack on a conservative jurist, J. Edgar Hoover denounced Watkins for “blindness and indifference to outrageous acts.” When McComb police arrested thirteen COFO workers the day of the Watkins sentencing—on charges of sharing meals in the McComb Freedom House without a food license—syndicated columnist Drew Pearson sent bond money from Washington, and the
Stanford Daily
in California headlined two bail releases of McComb volunteer Dennis Sweeney over four days. Oliver Emmerich, the embattled local newspaper editor, published a revolutionary “Statement of Principles” in which 650 citizens of McComb endorsed “equal treatment under the law.”