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June 17 - July 19, 2019
Judge Elliott turned upside down the civil rights movement’s cherished stand on the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead of ruling that segregation was a denial of Negroes’ rights to equal protection under the law, Elliott ruled that Negro protest marches denied Albany’s white people equal protection by draining police manpower and other public resources out of white neighborhoods. Therefore,
King felt victimized at the hands of bystanders. He did not believe that the continued enforcement of segregation in Albany lessened the justice of his claims any more than a second-place finish by Jesse Owens would have ennobled Hitler’s ideas.
King had to balance Kennedy’s coolness to the Emancipation celebration against Nelson Rockefeller’s ardor. This was Rockefeller’s day, honoring a president of his Republican Party and summoning up nearly a century of Rockefeller family interest in the welfare of the former slaves. Fittingly, Rockefeller possessed the original parchment of Lincoln’s Proclamation.
King dropped his hands “like a newborn baby,” she said, and from then on she never doubted that his nonviolence was more than the heat of his oratory or the result of his slow calculation. It was the response of his quickest instincts.
The internal strife at the SCLC also was ample proof that the Bureau’s first active blow against King had landed with telling effect. FBI agents had planted the unsigned New Orleans article, along with virtually identical ones in four other newspapers scattered from St. Louis to Long Island.
Thereafter, upon receiving intelligence that someone was trying to kill him, the Bureau would refuse to warn King as it routinely warned other potential targets, such as Shuttlesworth. The FBI assigned full enemy status to King, who had staked his life and his religion on the chance that enemy-thinking might be overcome.
A white voter explained his gut appraisal to reporters: “We killed two-month-old Indian babies to take this country, and now they want us to give it away to the niggers.”
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”),
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumblingblock is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice, who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action,”
From the swirling mass of Negro children, blue uniforms, and picket signs, an anxious policeman spotted a familiar figure across the Sixteenth Street truce line. “Hey, Fred,” he called. “How many more have you got?” “At least a thousand!” shouted Shuttlesworth. “God Almighty,” said the policeman.
As the firemen concentrated the hoses upon the singers, the crowd surged back toward the contested borders. Then the firemen advanced toward the holdouts, pounding them with water at close range. The holdouts sat down on the sidewalk to stabilize themselves. It was a moment of baptism for the civil rights movement, and Birmingham’s last effort to wash away the stain of dissent against segregation.
the spirit of the congregation ran so high that Andrew Young came out to make a cautionary speech. “We have a nonviolent movement,” he said, “but it’s not nonviolent enough.” He warned that no amount of provocation justified rock-throwing. “We must not boo the police when they bring up the dogs,” he added. “…We must praise them. The police don’t know how to handle the situation governed by love, and the power of God. During these demonstrations we must tell the crowd to behave.”
“There are those who write history,” he said. “There are those who make history. There are those who experience history. I don’t know how many historians we have in Birmingham tonight. I don’t know how many of you would be able to write a history book. But you are certainly making history, and you are experiencing history. And you will make it possible for the historians of the future to write a marvelous chapter.
Once again, more urgently than ever, Robert Kennedy needed to get King out of jail. He called Harry Belafonte in New York with an emergency request: could Belafonte protect the movement, the country, and Dr. King all at once by raising $5,000 bond money—in cash, that same day, as every hour was precious? Belafonte agreed to try. The New York banks were closed, but he mobilized wealthy friends to pluck up loose cash in the city. By evening, Belafonte called Kennedy to say that the money soon would be on its way to the airport. In a telling aside, however, Belafonte added that he was still
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For the ever-present Birmingham police detectives, this joyful hugging was the worst part of the night’s surveillance. “Of course Officer Watkins and myself were sitting between two negroes,” Officer Allison reported to Bull Connor, “and they really gave us the treatment.”
the President pried out of his guest, Newsweek bureau chief Ben Bradlee, a tip that the subject of the next cover story would be Senator Barry Goldwater’s chances to become the Republican presidential nominee in 1964. “I can’t believe we’ll be that lucky,” said Kennedy, who hoped to run against Goldwater. “I can’t believe Barry will be that lucky, either.”
After the rally, Burt and Norma Lancaster hosted a reception in Beverly Hills, for which California governor Edmund G. Brown had sent out the invitations. A brassy Hollywood lawyer got down to business by announcing that it took $1,000 in hard cash to run the SCLC movement each day. Paul Newman wrote the first $1,000 check, singer Polly Bergen the second, actor Tony Franciosa the third. Actors John Forsythe and Lloyd Bridges contributed, as did the wife of basketball star Elgin Baylor. Marlon Brando mumbled a warning against “what-we-have-doneism” and bought a week of the movement for $5,000.
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Wallace responded by reading a defiant proclamation of his own. “There can be no submission to the theory that the central government is anything but a servant of the people,” he declared. “We are God-fearing people, not government-fearing people. We practice today the free heritage bequested to us by the Founding Fathers.”
“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he declared. “It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”
We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and a people…A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.
“I may lose the next election because of this,” said Kennedy. “I don’t care.”
King, like Kennedy, hoped to escape the shackles of everyday politics and show that he stood for an idea of awesome, sustaining power. Kennedy, like King, hoped to prove that his message transcended all barriers of culture, language, and race. Each left Washington with the other prominently in mind, and each promptly broke through to success of frightening dimensions. It was as though they had sprinkled magic dust on one another. The similarities between their miracles were striking enough, but the contrast gave them depth. King and Kennedy were at odds over the innermost meanings of freedom.
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I have a dream this afternoon that the brotherhood of man will become a reality…”
In those few days, a president of Irish descent went abroad to Germany while a preacher of African descent went inland to Detroit, both to stir the divided core of American identity. The proconsul defended the empire of freedom while the prophet proclaimed its soul. They inspired millions of the same people while acknowledging no fundamental differences in public. Together, they traced a sharp line of history. Where their interpretations of freedom overlapped, they inspired the clear hope of the decade. Where incompatible, they produced conflict as gaping as the Vietnam War.
“And so tonight I say to you, as I have said before, I have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” he began. “I have a dream that one day, right down in Birmingham, Alabama, where the home of my good friend Arthur Shores was bombed just last night, white men and Negro men, white women and Negro women, will be able to walk together as brothers and sisters. I have a dream…”
By and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic, and social exploitation.
Later, King said only that he forgot the rest of the speech and took up the first run of oratory that “came to me.” After the word “despair,” he temporized for an instant: “I say to you today, my friends, and so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream…”
“And when this happens…we will be able to speed up that day when all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”
Like most television viewers, President Kennedy was witnessing a complete King speech for the first time. “He’s damn good,” the President remarked to his aides at the White House. Kennedy was especially impressed with King’s ad lib off the prepared text, and he was quick to pick out the most original refrain. As the principal leaders filed into the Cabinet Room from the march, he greeted King with a smiling “I have a dream,” as a fellow speechmaker who valued a good line.
At a minimum, the President should agree to add a section banning racial exclusions in employment, he said, stressing the rising threats of automation and joblessness.
What the Republicans were “trying to do is to play to the South—with some success, these days.” Nationally, they had nothing to lose, as the Democrats already had most of the Negro vote, and if they could push the President into a crusade, then they could be safely for civil rights and still hang blame for Negro excess on the Democrats.
More than his words, the timbre of his voice projected him across the racial divide and planted him as a new founding father. It was a fitting joke on the races that he achieved such statesmanship by setting aside his lofty text to let loose and jam, as he did regularly from two hundred podiums a year.
White attorney Charles Morgan passionately declared that he and all other whites shared guilt for the bombing because they had tolerated or encouraged racial hatred. “We all did it,” he said. For this he became a pariah among whites, and his speech itself fed a tide of aggrieved self-vindication. “All of us are victims,” insisted Mayor Boutwell.
“People ask me,” said Niebuhr, “since I am such a strong anti-pacifist, how I can have this admiration for a pacifist? Well, I have a simple answer…King’s doctrine of nonviolent resistance is not pacifism. Pacifism of really the classical kind is where you are concerned about your own purity and not responsibility. And the great ethical divide is between people who want to be pure and those who want to be responsible. And I think King has shown this difference.”
Knowing that the old preacher was in another vagabond phase and had not lived regularly with Altona Johns in some years, Eskridge was not surprised to hear King say that he was not reachable by telephone, lived “somewhere around Petersburg,” some thirty miles from Richmond, and that the recommended detective approach was to go to a church or street corner and ask any Negro.
Most unforgivable was that a nation founded on Madisonian principles allowed secret police powers to accrue over forty years, until real and imagined heresies alike could be punished by methods less open to correction than the Salem witch trials.
Fosdick quoted one of King’s favorite lines, from the abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
