Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

Omega Psi Phi. Coretta sang in the fraternity’s talent contest, and King delivered a blistering attack on the assembled Omegas for devoting themselves to the pursuit of liquor and luxuries. Turning to what was already his standard theme when addressing the Negro middle class, he dared them to make alliances with, rather than shun, the less fortunate members of the race. The Woffords were struck first by the effrontery of the message and then by the warmth of the reception.

A leftist radical since his college days during the Depression, Levison nevertheless had a firm capitalist side to him. He was a forty-four-year-old socialist who had grown rich off real estate investments, a lawyer who shunned law books and had never practiced law.

Communists officially scorned such efforts, as they had scorned Randolph for decades. In the prevailing Marxist jargon, as laid down from Moscow, integration was a “revisionist” pursuit based on the false hope of progress without world revolution. Moreover, the ideal of integration contradicted the official Moscow goal of “separate national development” for American Negroes, modeled on the Soviet republics. This arcane line made for private Communist derision toward the Brown decision and the Montgomery bus boycott, but it also isolated the party from the aspirations of most American Negroes.

Although King largely rejected Communist doctrine, he never wavered in support of the victims of McCarthyism or in his sympathy with Communist advocacy for the oppressed. He also gave the American Communists enormous credit for their record on the race issue. Regardless of their doctrinal contortions, the Communists advocated and practiced racial equality far beyond any other political organization in the country.

It was said that FBI agents spotted white Communists by their ease and politeness around Negroes, or by the simple fact that they socialized with Negroes at all. To Negroes, this was all part of heaven’s mystery—why only the Communists? Even King’s most conservative teachers had drilled into him the minutiae of Communist history on the color question—that Stalin, for instance, had written into the Soviet Constitution a provision that discrimination by color was a national crime. “I think there can be no doubt about it that the appeal of Communism to the Eastern nations today can be traceable to a large degree to the Soviet attitude toward race,” a Morehouse professor wrote to King in 1952.

The year of the Montgomery boycott had also been the year of Soviet Premier Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin as a tyrant, murderer, and traitor to Communist principles. Endorsement of these revelations by the Kremlin caused massive psychological trauma among American Communists. Some beat their hands bloody against the wall. Despair only deepened in the fall of 1956 when Khrushchev himself sent Soviet tanks to crush a rebellion by Hungarian workers whom the Kremlin had portrayed as blissfully socialist and free.

As the nature of Levison’s call registered on the people in the adjoining room, a new debate erupted. The Gateses argued furiously that Levison was subjecting King to needless, unconscionable danger. If a spy or an FBI wiretap revealed such a call from a gathering of top national Communists, King might be destroyed. King had enough problems already, they said, and party people should stay away lest they ruin him—as they had ruined Paul Robeson—by encouraging him to endorse the Soviets. All this infuriated Ben Davis, who retorted that the Gates faction always blamed the party instead of the reactionaries. America needed a hundred Robesons, he insisted, and if Levison could make one of King, so much the better. The argument raged until Levison returned to shrug it off. King was not a Communist, he said, and he could take care of himself.

Eisenhower was in Newport, Rhode Island, prior to heading for a two-week hunting vacation in southern Georgia. On his way out of a church service in which he heard a sermon on the need for new civil rights laws, Ike shook hands with the Navy chaplain and said, “You can’t legislate morality.” News of this instantly famous comment crossed the ministers’ telegrams. Although it dismayed King, the remark provided him with the grist for numerous sermons about how the President misconstrued the essential function of law.

Therefore, King argued, the proper purpose of the desired civil rights laws was to take down “Whites Only” signs and to secure the ballot for Negroes who wanted to vote. “A law may not make a man love me,” said King, “but it can stop him from lynching me.”

Forty years in a segregated Army conditioned Eisenhower to think of Negroes as inherently subordinate. His condescension was so natural and paternal as to seem nearly well-meaning. Only his private secretary winced with embarrassment when he passed along the latest “nigger jokes” from his friends at the Bobby Jones golf course in Augusta.

Eisenhower never had received a Negro delegation at the White House to discuss civil rights, and he did not reply to King’s telegram.

Nixon said that whites were only a tiny minority of the third billion which held the balance of world influence. In Accra, where Nixon treated his Negro countryman with the courtesy due an ambassador, he invited King to come to Washington for private talks on civil rights. Having traveled halfway around the world to secure the audience that had eluded him at home, King did not miss the political lesson. The logic of diplomacy gave him a stature that he lacked as a political nonentity in the South. His experiences in Ghana helped secure his belief that the Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, was rising to the defense of oppressed peoples. Everything he saw tended to confirm it.

“When I stood there in Westminster Abbey, with all of its beauty, I thought about all of the beautiful hymns and anthems that the people would go into there to sing, yet the Church of England never took a stand against this system. The Church of England sanctioned it. The Church of England gave it a moral stature. And all of the exploitation perpetuated by the British Empire was sanctioned by the Church of England.

“Then I can hear Isaiah again,” he said, “because it has a profound meaning to me. That somehow ‘every valley shall be exalted, every hill shall be made low, the crooked places shall be made straight, and the rough places plain. The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.’ And that’s the beauty of this thing. All flesh shall see it together. Not

And then we will be in Canaan’s freedom land. Moses might not get to see Canaan, but his children will see it. He even got to the mountain top enough to see it, and that assured him that it was coming.”

King studied the changes in frowning silence. “Bayard, this just doesn’t sit right on my tongue,” he said. “Well,” said Rustin, “tell me exactly what you want to say.” “Give…us…the…ballot,” said King, between long pauses. He practically sang the words, as though to emphasize that his concern was how they sounded as opposed to how they looked on paper.

Press commentators would say that King’s performance proved that his Montgomery leadership was no fluke. Rustin already knew that, but he puzzled over King’s ability to move widely divergent audiences with material that seemed suited to a college student’s notebook.

King suggested four dates for a meeting in Washington. Nixon promptly confirmed what became, in the popular parlance of the new nuclear age, the first “summit conference” between a Negro leader and Nixon or Eisenhower. Still more promising results came from King’s performance at the Pilgrimage, when, only three days after the speech, cabinet secretary Maxwell Rabb tracked King down at the Statler Hotel in New York to say that Eisenhower himself would be pleased to see him soon.

The two advisers knew that King was vulnerable to blandishments from the Republicans, because Daddy King and nearly all the most powerful preachers of the National Baptist Convention were lifelong Republicans. By force and repetition, they urged on King a “superhuman vigilance” against partisanship, citing “the extreme importance of this conference for race relations.”

Privately, King told Rustin that Nixon was a mixture of enthusiasm with pragmatism, whose general stance was that he would help the cause of civil rights if he could do so without getting hurt politically. King’s major reservation about the Vice President was that his relish and conviction seemed so evenly applied to all subjects as to mask his interior substance. Nixon was “magnetic,” King wrote a year later, in a public letter that darted between flattery and suspicion. “I would say that Nixon has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere. When you are close to Nixon he almost disarms you with his apparent sincerity…. And so I would conclude by saying that if Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.”

A few liberal Democrats and Republicans—squeezed between Negroes and Eisenhower on one side and Johnson, the Southerners, and organized labor on the other—sided with Johnson. Senators Henry Jackson and John F. Kennedy went with Johnson at the last minute, a defection that civil rights leaders would not soon forget, and the jury trial amendment passed by a vote of 51-42. Reporters who swarmed onto the Senate floor heard Vice President Nixon denounce the Senate’s action as “a vote against the right to vote.”

delay, Harriman learned from the doctors, was caused by the critical position of the blade, which X rays showed to be lodged between the heart and a lung. A team of surgeons was being assembled to remove it. The governor waited in the corridors more than four hours, until doctors advised him that the delicate surgery had been successful. They had to remove two ribs and portions of King’s breastbone before they could safely extract the instrument. It had grazed the aorta, they said. One of the surgeons later told King that even a sneeze could have punctured the aorta and killed him.

His friend L. D. Reddick, who was then finishing the first biography of King, wrote that the stabbing was a “natural turning point in his life,” and made so bold as to recommend a “thoughtful reordering” of King’s priorities. Reddick called for more discipline and restraint in King, more political organization and more renunciation of worldly concerns. In short, he wanted King to remake himself in the service of his cause.

At a political meeting that winter, Nixon suggested that the Administration push strongly to enact tax credits for tuition paid to private schools. The idea, he explained, was to reach out to the growing number of families that would like to send their children to private schools but were pained by the cost. He wanted the Republicans to run on what he called “the erosion of the middle class,” by appealing to resentment against social leveling and a perceived loss of privilege.

Nixon was beginning to depend less on theory and more on the status desires of people like himself. He was becoming less of a civil rights man, more grasping, more of a demographer. Comparatively speaking, Eisenhower was an idealist.

Embarking on a trip to study Gandhi, a man who had renounced wealth, sex, and all clothing except his loincloth, the Kings carried trunks stuffed with suits and dresses to wear at the most elegant of the hotels built during the British Raj. Their first act on the trip was to pay a large tariff for excess baggage.

King spoke so often about his desire to learn more of Gandhi’s nonviolence that Nehru felt obliged to remind him that it was impossible to say how the surprisingly pragmatic Mahatma might have dealt with the concrete problems of modern India, let alone the problems King faced in the United States. His replies disappointed King slightly, but the two men discussed race, colonialism, Gandhi, communism, and nonviolence largely without interruption for nearly four hours.

was clear to the Kings that the Indians were celebrating them partly for their color, as fellow dark people struggling against white domination, but the meaning of color internally among the Indians was much harder to determine. One of the few indications they noticed was that newspaper advertisements for brides commonly specified a preference for light skin.

To make the best of the strolling audience, King put to Vinoba questions that had been tugging at him as he listened to the tangled theories of various Gandhians: should not India, as the first nation to come to life on nonviolent principles, set an example for the world in foreign affairs by disarming itself? What were the risks? Would any modern country dare to exterminate the world’s first nonviolent nation? On this subject, King felt he made contact. Suddenly the great man became quite enthralling, at least in flashes, and King ran up against the unsettling dilemma of any observer who decides that a madman is a genius. Where was the line that stood between

It was the inspiration he had been seeking—how to extend the spirit of the Montgomery bus boycott as far as religion and politics would allow. He could advocate international nonviolence as a Negro and as a human being, as a Gandhian and as an American, as a minister and as a student of war.

He explained that his suggestion was a consequence of the failure by the United States and the Soviet Union to have the “faith and moral courage” to stop the arms race. The reporters nodded vigorously in assent, as denunciations of the superpowers for militarism were a rhetorical staple in India. “It may be,” King continued, “that just as India had to take the lead and show the world that national independence could be achieved non-violently, so India may have to take the lead and call for universal disarmament, and if no other nation will join her immediately, India should declare itself for disarmament unilaterally.”

Reporters rained hostile questions on King, making the point that disarmament was absurd for India because of the threat from its mortal enemy, Pakistan, which the United States was busily rearming. How could Dr. King fail to see that the bloodthirsty Pakistanis would love nothing better than to slaughter nonviolent Indians? King tried to calm their fears, to minimize the risk, to remind them that the true test of Gandhian nonviolence came in the severest trials of one’s own life. Most of the reporters kept repeating that King did not understand the Pakistanis, and they glossed over his strange ideas in generally buoyant dispatches on the departure of the Negro Gandhian.

“Most of us have an amazing capacity for external criticism,” King said wryly. “We can always see the evil in others. We can always see the evil in our oppressors.” The Indian people had felt keenly the injustices of British colonialism, he said, but Gandhi had forced them to acknowledge also the injustice of their own caste system, which had developed long before the first Englishman set foot on Indian soil.

In Palm Beach, Florida, on April 1, tycoon Joseph P. Kennedy hosted the first private strategy session toward the nomination of his son John for President in 1960. The presence of pollster Louis Harris at the Kennedy conclave gave proof that marketing specialists were advancing from advertising into politics. Also in Florida, the Pentagon demonstrated the growing power of public relations when it introduced the first team of prospective astronauts, successfully passing off seven high-strung and often cantankerous test pilots as specimens of a new American personality type—bland heroes. All seven were white Protestant men from small towns; six had crew cuts. A steady diet of propaganda created the historically dubious impression that it was the wholesome, well-rounded types who stepped off into the unknown.

Bureau documents also noted that Levison was “closely associated” with King, who was described as “one of the motivating forces behind this demonstration.” The implication was clear—Levison was strategically placed to be orchestrating both the Washington march and King’s career on Communist orders. Hoover directed the New York FBI office to report on the details of Levison’s involvement. His order commingled King, Levison, and racial demonstrations under the poisonous heading of subversion.

There was more to Hoover’s reaction than either his hostility to communism or his prejudice against Negroes, both of which were strong. Above all else, the Director was a consummate bureaucrat, sensitive to deep historical tides. Twenty years earlier, the FBI had mushroomed in size to guard against Nazi espionage. From a mid-Depression force of fewer than five hundred agents, the Bureau had more than tripled by Pearl Harbor, then tripled again by D-Day. Hoover never needed further education on the advantages of an intelligence agency over a law enforcement department. An intelligence agency enjoyed greater prestige, less danger of public failure, greater freedom and power through the mystique of secrecy, and an enhanced role for shaping national values and symbols.

On losing out finally to the newly created CIA, a vengeful Hoover had extracted from President Truman a major consolation prize: responsibility for “background checks” and other loyalty investigations of federal employees. Such work not only sustained the Bureau’s manpower levels through the McCarthy era but vastly increased Hoover’s political influence as the defender and oracle of domestic security.

From 1956 onward, the formal COINTELPRO operations took the FBI deeper into domestic spying. Through covert operations and blatantly political investigations, the Bureau became more of a classical intelligence agency, like the CIA. Hoover kept COINTELPRO highly secret, as it violated basic constitutional restrictions on internal police power.

If convicted on tax charges, even in the white courts, he would take to prison the tarnished public image of a lying, greedy, sham preacher. This was everything King had resolved most devoutly not to be himself and to change in his church if he could. His entire life’s struggle as a preacher had begun in rebellion against what he saw as the cynical pabulum and exploitative uses of fundamentalist doctrines.

He felt he could not face an audience, hold his head up, or be sure of his courage. Then he decided that if he did not keep going, he would have lost already. In a fit of energy, King rebooked his speeches and caught a later flight to Chicago that same afternoon.

The compromise remained vague as to whether the manifesto would be a prologue to or a substitute for a sit-in. Julian Bond of Morehouse—son of an Atlanta University dean and former president of two Negro colleges, whose own childhood had been favored not only with his scholarly initiation by W. E. B. Du Bois himself but also by an audience with Albert Einstein—undertook to draft most of the manifesto, for submission to the college presidents.

When a policeman said “You’re under arrest” to John Lewis, a lifetime of absorbed taboos against any kind of trouble with the law quickened into terror. He tried to blot out everything but his rules as the police frisked, cuffed, and marched him to the paddy wagon. Then, riding to jail with the others, his dread gave way to an exhilaration unlike any he had ever known. They had held steady through the worst, he believed, and by the highest standards they knew there was no doubt that they had been in the right.

pattern of the early sit-ins was established: constant surprises, all-night meetings, serial victories, and setbacks, with the elders of both races often on the defensive against their young.

While one white man scuffled with a Negro woman on the sidewalk, his companion bludgeoned her from the blind side. There was little doubt about the nature of the encounter or the names of the people involved, because Sunday’s Advertiser carried a photograph with a caption naming the attacker. The white photographer and reporter at the scene both said that the police had stood by passively, and that the crack of the baseball bat on the woman’s head could be heard from half a block away. Governor Patterson announced that he would leave the investigation to local officials. Police Commissioner L. B. Sullivan—who had replaced Clyde Sellers since the bus boycott—blamed the Negro students for causing the original disturbance and the Advertiser for publishing the photograph. Editor Grover Hall, while dividing the larger blame between “rash, misled young Negroes” and “white thugs,” defended his newspaper against the police commissioner. “Sullivan’s problem is not a photographer with a camera,” he wrote. “Sullivan’s problem is a white man with a baseball bat.”

Charles McDew, leader of the Orangeburg march, would always recall looking back at the melee from a police car after his arrest, to see one of the hulking local football stars, David “Deacon” Jones, holding in his arms a crippled female student who had been knocked down by the firehoses. The expression on Jones’s face was one of peaceful sadness instead of rage. The sight of it haunted McDew. Although he had little use for nonviolence or even for Christianity, he became convinced that an inescapable power could be buried in doctrines of meekness and humanity.

Walker was a hotspur. As a New Jersey high school student in the 1940s, he had heard Paul Robeson say that if being for freedom and equality meant being a Red, then he was a Red. Walker promptly joined the Young Communist League. One of his high school papers was a five-year plan for a Soviet-type economy in the United States, and he dreamed of carrying out technically ingenious assassinations against leading segregationists. In college, he acquired dark-rimmed glasses that gave his face the look of a brooding Trotskyite.

His nickname within the family was “Boy Scout.” Ted Sorensen, Senator Kennedy’s closest aide, advised Wofford at their first meeting not to become too closely associated with Shriver, because the insiders thought of him as the “house Communist.” As always, it was said partly in jest, but the attitude was daunting to Wofford. Those closest to Senator Kennedy were driving hard to reach the average voter in the fifty-first percentile of victory. If they thought of Sargent Shriver—the highly successful manager of patriarch Joseph Kennedy’s Chicago Merchandise Mart, himself the scion of a preRevolutionary Maryland family—as sentimental, impractical, and pinkish, they were not likely to be enamored of King.

An emissary from Congressman Adam Clayton Powell contacted him with the message that if King did not call off his plans to picket the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, Powell would tell the press that King was having a homosexual affair with Bayard Rustin.

Powell did carry out his threat, however, it would matter very little that his charge was untrue. The mere assertion would be extremely damaging, especially since many reporters and most of the active Negro preachers knew of Rustin’s homosexual “problem,” which lent credence to the charge.

In Los Angeles, the frantic machinations of an undecided contest boosted the normal convention chaos to a hyperkinetic state. Kennedy was picking up delegates by the handful and was said to have nearly enough to win, but his front-runner status failed to win over the stalwarts of the party. Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter Lippmann publicly urged him to step aside in favor of the more seasoned Adlai Stevenson. Negro voters disliked Kennedy, Mrs. Roosevelt declared, adding that he would do better “to grow and learn” as Stevenson’s running mate. A spokeswoman for Lyndon Johnson charged that Senator Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease, which was true, and “would not be alive today if it were not for cortisone,” which was probably not true, but the Kennedy campaign, running hard on youth and vigor, flatly denied it all.