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

by Taylor Branch

Many battles later, Kennedy won the presidential nomination on the first ballot by holding nearly two-thirds of the delegate votes outside the South.

Early the next day, Senator Kennedy decided to pay a surprise call on Lyndon Johnson to offer the nomination, which was not expected, so that he could take credit for having done so when Johnson refused. Kennedy did not quite offer the job; he merely took the idea a few inches outside his pocket and flashed it in front of Johnson, as he put it. Moments later, a breathless Kennedy took his brother aside in another hotel room. “You just won’t believe it,” cried John Kennedy. “What?” said Robert. “He wants it,” said the nominee, in utter disbelief. “Oh, my God!” said Robert. “Now what do we do?”

Robert Kennedy arrived on a diplomatic mission of the utmost delicacy, suggesting to Johnson that he might want to remove himself because of the ferocious opposition in the North. Instead, the Johnson camp put through an anguished call to Senator Kennedy himself, who backed off, saying, “Bobby is not up to date.” Johnson handed the phone to Robert Kennedy so that he could hear the decision from his brother. These climactic moments humiliated both Johnson and Robert Kennedy, sealing a personal enmity between them.

Kennedy mentioned eight American presidents, four British kings, and two British prime ministers. Citing Lloyd George’s remark that a tired nation is a Tory nation, Kennedy declared that the United States could afford to be neither. He summoned the nation not so much from pessimism as from complacency. “The New Frontier is here whether we seek it or not,” he said. “Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.” Kennedy concluded with a quotation from Martin Luther King’s favorite Old Testament prophet, Isaiah: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary.”

Another correspondent, Malcolm X, objecting to one of King’s attacks on racial separation, invited him to hear Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad at a Harlem rally “and then make a more intelligent appraisal of his teaching.” Malcolm X was gaining a reputation in the white media as an incendiary anti-white orator at the same time that his debating skills were bringing him lecture dates in prestigious theology schools, such as King’s own alma mater in Boston. Rather oddly, he addressed his letter to King at the NAACP office in New York, and King instructed his secretary to decline the invitation with a polite letter beginning “Dear Mr. X.”

at Ebenezer again, he flew to Oklahoma for two SCLC fund-raisers and on to Chicago for the Republican National Convention. There Randolph’s agenda was virtually transplanted from Los Angeles, complete with the march, the rally, and the round-the-clock picketing.

The two of them vowed publicly to strengthen the civil rights plank of the Republican platform. Their last-minute pact was being denounced by conservative leader Barry Goldwater as “the Munich of the Republican Party,” as “immoral politics,” and as a “surrender” by Nixon to “the leader of the Republican left.” Goldwater’s hostility helped make Rockefeller a hero to nearly six thousand people who jammed in and around the Liberty Baptist Church for the afternoon rally.

What troubled the President was not so much the civil rights provision as the call for increases in the defense budget. (“There must be no price ceiling on America’s security,” Rockefeller and Nixon had declared in their joint statement.) Disgusted, Eisenhower protested to Nixon by telephone. How could Nixon expect to run on the Eisenhower record of peace and prosperity and also pander to Kennedy’s charges that Eisenhower was betraying the nation’s security? How could he run as a fiscally sound Republican and also run up deficits to buy new weapons without military justification? A squirming Nixon replied that Rockefeller had slipped the weapons into the statement on his own. This was Nixon’s dilemma.

Nixon tried to patch over the differences, but Eisenhower made his triumphal entry into the Chicago Amphitheater still steaming over the Rockefeller pact, the U-2 disaster, and other accumulated insults to his military expertise. In his televised address, he scarcely mentioned Richard Nixon or the Republican Party. Instead, he declared that “just as the biblical Job had his boils, we have a cult of professional pessimists, who…continually mouth the allegation that America has become a second-rate military power.”

By the time he uttered these words, Eisenhower was cursing his television screen because the network producers had chosen to cut away. The networks had blacked out Negro speakers at both conventions for fear of offending Southern stations. Although the race issue was bubbling up strongly enough to make both political parties take platform stands of unprecedented clarity, it was still too sensitive for television.

one point, Wofford thought he had clearance to offer a Kennedy-King meeting in Nashville, which was “Southern enough” for King but “too Southern,” as it turned out, for Kennedy’s top strategists. The Southern politicians within their telephone networks howled so loudly in opposition that the Nashville plan was revoked. A hundred phone calls and many white lies later, Wofford called King again to offer Miami instead of Nashville, the next afternoon or evening. King was not very happy about the switch.

The next day, Tuesday, October 18, Daddy King joined the leadership of the Atlanta Baptist Ministers’ Union in an endorsement of the Nixon-Lodge ticket. These were the city’s senior Negroes, for the most part—men who had grown up with a loyalty to the “party of Lincoln” and whose status within their community as relatively big businessmen reinforced that identity against the Democratic encroachments since Franklin Roosevelt. This year, there was an additional factor binding them as conservative Baptists to the Republicans: Kennedy’s Catholic faith. Perhaps for that reason they took the unusual step of signing their names to a declaration of Republican support.

Nixon called for a full economic quarantine against the “intolerable cancer” of communism in Cuba, but Kennedy drew more applause by charging that Nixon’s preference for economic solutions indicated a lack of military resolve. “I have never believed in retreating under fire,” said Kennedy.

Confined by agreement to issues of foreign policy, the debate was an unrecognized milestone of American politics in that it featured the clandestine preoccupations that had been growing within the U.S. government since World War II. Kennedy, who later maintained that his CIA briefings had not covered the subject, criticized the Republicans for not doing precisely what they were doing: helping Cuban exiles prepare to overthrow Castro by covert warfare. Nixon, who already had helped launch this plan, decided he must protect the operation’s secrecy by opposing his own policies. He criticized Kennedy in the debate for making “probably the most dangerously irresponsible recommendations” of the campaign. If the United States followed Kennedy’s prescription for secret warfare, Nixon declared, we would violate no fewer than five treaty commitments prohibiting intervention in the internal affairs of Latin American nations.

Soon Abram was calling Wofford from the Mayor’s office to broach Hartsfield’s bold proposal. Wofford almost fainted when he heard it. He was feeling even more on the political fringe of the Kennedy campaign, and he knew from hard personal experience that the last thing his bosses wanted was to be associated with King in a Southern racial confrontation. Frantically, Wofford begged Abram and Hartsfield not to go forward with the plan unless Senator Kennedy approved, and he reminded Abram that his own call earlier that morning had been strictly personal, not political.

Wofford’s panic returned instantly. He poured into the mayor’s ear all the arguments that had been thrown at him inside the campaign, about how Kennedy was in danger of losing Georgia, the South, and the entire election because of his association with civil rights. Hartsfield did not believe this, but he promised Wofford that he would contact Kennedy himself.

In the aftershock outside, Mayor Hartsfield worked diligently to dissociate his city from the De Kalb proceedings. “I have made requests of all the news agencies that in their stories they make it clear that this hearing did not take place in Atlanta, Georgia,” he announced. Governor Vandiver’s press spokesman, on the other hand, warmly praised Judge Mitchell’s decision. “I think the maximum sentence for Martin Luther King might do him good,” he said, “might make a law-abiding citizen out of him and teach him to respect the law of Georgia.”

Stevenson hoped to be Secretary of State if Kennedy was elected—or, as Wofford thought more likely, to Stevenson’s simpler, more personal discomfort in the presence of Negroes. This trait, which Wofford had observed firsthand, was one of the factors that had moved him to switch from Stevenson to Kennedy early in the election year.

have the faith to believe that this excessive suffering that is now coming to our family will in some little way serve to make Atlanta a better city, Georgia a better state, and America a better country. Just how I do not yet know, but I have faith to believe it will. If I am correct then our suffering is not in vain.

campaign was the lawyer who had pried out of the Eisenhower State Department a secret poll showing U.S. prestige to be in decline around the world because of the U-2 incident and the crises in Cuba and the Congo. In order to protect Kennedy from charges that he was using classified information for partisan purposes, the lawyer helped leak the poll to The New York Times with assurances that the campaign would not be identified as its source.

The “Rock Hill Jail-In” was an emotional breakthrough for the civil rights movement. Its philosophical rationale—on the Gandhian notion that cheerful suffering for a principle makes effective political witness—was familiar enough to students who had read or heard the speeches of James Lawson. What made the Rock Hill action so timely, however, was that it responded to a tactical dilemma that was arising in SNCC discussions across the South: how to avoid the crippling limitations of scarce bail money. The obvious advantage of “jail, no bail” was that it reversed the financial burden of protest, costing the demonstrators no cash while obligating the white authorities to pay for jail space and food. The obvious disadvantage was that staying in jail represented a quantum leap in commitment above the old barrier of arrest, lock-up, and bail-out.

Lewis stated that he would willingly sacrifice his graduation from the seminary and anything else required. “This is [the] most important decision in my life,” he wrote, “to decide to give up all if necessary for the Freedom Ride, that Justice and Freedom might come to the Deep South.”

The race issue was intruding on Kennedy’s early presidency so persistently as to be irksome. Even before the inauguration, he had been forced to pass over his first choice for Secretary of State, Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, because of Fulbright’s segregationist voting record. Similarly, he dropped plans to make Governor Ernest Vandiver Secretary of the Army after aides realized that the press was sure to make sport of Vandiver’s ceremonial duties as head of an integrated army in contrast with his highly publicized battle to thwart integration.

The President believed that segregation, like colonialism, was an anachronistic addiction curable by the steady advance of modern attitudes. To him, this required the exercise of cool, detached reason in an atmosphere of public calm, which was incompatible with emotional demonstrations by either whites or Negroes. Like any President, Kennedy responded instinctively against “unrest” within his domain, but in the area of civil rights especially he stressed calm as a condition of progress. Such a posture necessarily placed civil rights on the periphery of his ambitions in the White House, inasmuch as no President, and certainly not one so romantic as he, could or wanted to accomplish his major goals in seclusion.

Quite apart from the political dangers perceived, those closest to the President shied away from civil rights because they considered the racial controversies being publicized too prosaic, too small and quirkishly human, for the President’s attention.

Only once that first winter did President Kennedy allow himself to take sides in a public squabble over civil rights, and he came to regret it. On the approach of the Civil War Centennial, trouble stirred in Charleston, South Carolina, where reporters learned that a Negro delegate to the National Civil War Commission would not be permitted to stay in the hotel hosting the commemoration of the battle of Fort Sumter.

Northerners called on President Kennedy to “relieve” General Grant for failing to preserve the honor of the federal government, while Southerners rallied to support the grandson of the man whose troops had mowed down their forebears from Shiloh to Appomattox. From the point of view of the White House advisers, the second battle of Fort Sumter was a farcical tempest over the hotel accommodations for a single Negro woman, proving that the President would probably look foolish and impotent if he tried to act nobly in racial politics.

Centennial history began a four-year trek through the back pages. Charleston officials reported that the city’s tourist traffic was down by half on the day of the ceremony. News from Fort Sumter was overshadowed by the opening of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and even more so by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight, which shocked Americans as a kind of reprise on Sputnik. Five days later, these sensational stories were swept away by the real-life military disaster at the Bay of Pigs.

Having initiated a $17 billion nuclear missile program a month before the Bay of Pigs, he returned a month afterward to deliver a special State of the Union address in which he called for twelve thousand new Marines, the training of new anti-guerrilla units that came to be known as Special Forces or Green Berets, and a tripling of funds for fallout shelters and other civil defense programs. Moreover, he made the electrifying announcement that the United States was undertaking to place a man on the moon “before this decade is out.”

When Seigenthaler returned to the Justice Department, Attorney General Kennedy took one look at him and said, “He was out of it today, wasn’t he?” Hoover’s quicksilver moods became a running joke, which was made all the more surreal by the assumption that Hoover himself was homosexual in style if not in performance. On learning that the Director’s associate and bachelor housemate, Clyde Tolson, had been hospitalized for an operation, the Attorney General quipped to his aides, “What was it, a hysterectomy?”

His father had once offered Hoover $100,000 a year to become chief of security for the Kennedy interests, he said. To Robert Kennedy, his father’s assessment of Hoover’s worth meant something, and it was a measure of Hoover’s devotion to the Bureau that he had turned the offer down.

J. Edgar Hoover’s top officials at the FBI first took personal notice of King only two weeks after the Kennedy inauguration, when The Nation magazine published an article by King titled “Equality Now.” Deep within a long list of recommendations for the incoming Administration was a parenthetical reference to the FBI: “If, for instance, the law-enforcement personnel in the FBI were integrated, many persons who now defy federal law might come under restraints from which they are presently free.” This one sentence rocketed up through that portion of the FBI bureaucracy keeping watch for the appearance of criticism in the public domain.

For all that, King substituted a single question—how can the new President most rapidly and effectively bring about integration? “We must face the tragic fact that the federal government is the nation’s highest investor in segregation,” wrote King. His tone was unfailingly positive, as usual, and he presented his agenda as an “opportunity” for the Administration. Still, for fresh Kennedy officials, the article could be perceived only as a warning shot across the Administration’s bow, or, more accurately, across its stern.

Appointments secretary Kenneth O’Donnell turned him down on March 25, citing the squeeze of the “present international situation” on the President’s time.

Levison did not say very much during the meeting, nor did King. To the Kennedy people, in fact, the most noticeable aspect of King’s private behavior was his quietness. He did not preach, bargain, or strike postures. When called upon for response, he heartily endorsed all the Administration’s plans in the field of voting rights, promised to step up the SCLC’s registration work in tandem with the lawsuits, and indicated his full understanding of the need to conceal the Administration’s facilitating role in the registration work itself.

With his slow cadences of speech, his lofty expressions, and his amiable demeanor, King struck the Kennedy people as a saint or a pushover, or both. He was not the type they would think of asking out for a beer, but he was reasonable.

King’s overall performance so relieved and reassured the Kennedy officials that they moved almost by group instinct to cultivate him politically rather than to disengage. Attorney General Kennedy set the tone with his response to King’s remark that harassed and endangered voter registration workers often had trouble reaching the FBI for assistance. Kennedy wrote down the telephone numbers of John Seigenthaler and Burke Marshall and handed them to King. “Any hour of the day or night,” he said, “you call.”

“It’s good to see you,” said President Kennedy, shaking King’s hand for the first time since their campaign meeting seven months earlier. Kennedy said he had been keeping up with King’s work through the Attorney General. He alluded briefly to the confidential plans to promote Negro registration in the South and promised his support. To King’s polite inquiries about how he was doing, Kennedy replied that everything was fine except that the world had fallen in on him since the disaster in Cuba. In honor of his pledge to keep the Mayflower meeting secret, King made no public reference to it then or later, and he did not even acknowledge his chance meeting with President Kennedy until after the assassination in Dallas.

King still had a powerful appetite for prestige and for luxuries, but competing against it was an ego strong enough that he did not need to chatter about his attentions from the Kennedys. That ego, in the crucible of the Freedom Rides, would blow apart the Administration’s hopes for a cozy, private partnership.

The first principle was that they had to meet the Negroes personally. They had to establish trust. They had to learn how to tell a reliable witness from one who would crumble under the fear. They had to learn which counties to choose first and how to go about looking for supporting witnesses.

In early April, Doar and a colleague named Bob Owen flew into Jackson, Mississippi, incognito. They wore khaki pants, work shirts, and old boots. They would prefer that the FBI not know they were there, lest the Bureau get huffy about trespass on its investigative territory, but the disguises were mostly to fool the local whites. To minimize the chances of provoking curiosity, they drove out into the remote countryside and checked into a flophouse motel. Before dawn the next morning they introduced themselves to Medgar Evers. Sitting at his kitchen table, Doar explained their purpose, and soon Evers, who knew almost every Negro on their list of those who had complained about voting discrimination over the years, was marking spots on their special-issue large-scale maps. Doar and Owen used the marks as guides to a dirt-road farm in one county and a back-alley house in the next. They drove down to Natchez, over to Hattiesburg, then up to Clark County—knocking on doors, poking their way out into cornfields, interviewing rejected Negro voters, asking each one for the names of others. They would send the new names to the FBI for interview. The scouting trip through Mississippi was the first of many that helped them refine an assembly line for a-suits.

The President himself might be required to act publicly, if things went badly. All three Justice officials were agreed that the most drastic and least desirable course was the “Little Rock method”—the use of Regular Army troops to guard the Freedom Riders’ bus. Among the many drawbacks of this option were President Kennedy’s campaign statements faulting Eisenhower for allowing the 1957 Little Rock school crisis to deteriorate to the point that federal troops had been required. Kennedy had promised a more vigorous, farsighted presidential leadership to spare the country such traumas. To falter now, so early in his Administration and so soon after the Bay of Pigs, might raise questions about the President’s elementary competence. It would certainly bring the wrath of the South down on him, and Kennedy, unlike Eisenhower, rested his thin governing margin upon solid electoral support in the South.

the third case, a squad of policemen had arrested on disorderly conduct charges a white Illinois professor, his wife, and thirteen of his students, who were having lunch in a Negro café near Alabama State while on a sociology field trip through the South.

Kennedy proposed instant solutions to all Patterson’s political objections: if the governor could not afford to announce that Alabama would protect the Freedom Riders, said Kennedy, he could say he was protecting “the highways.” These facile suggestions only enraged Patterson, who, convinced that the Attorney General was paying only superficial respect to the realities of the governor’s political career in Alabama, launched into a tirade. He had sworn an oath to preserve racial segregation, he said. “You’re making political speeches at me, John,” Kennedy interjected. “You don’t have to make political speeches at me over the telephone.” Patterson feared that he was being pushed into a deal whose meaning would be twisted into an abandonment of segregation. He declared that he would discuss the matter only face to face, with a personal representative of the President.

Southerner,” Patterson remarked on hearing Seigenthaler’s Tennessee accent. He followed this hearty welcome with an angry oration, which Seigenthaler decided was largely for the benefit of the assembled Alabama politicians. “There’s nobody in the whole country that’s got the spine to stand up to the goddamned niggers except me,” Patterson declared, using the word “nigger” with casual defiance. “And I’ll tell you I’ve got more mail in the drawers of that desk over there congratulating me on the stand I’ve taken against what’s going on in this country…against Martin Luther King and these rabble-rousers.

Far beyond any other word or deed of his tenure at Justice, the remark would erode Kennedy’s political standing in the South, making the name “Bobby” a regional epithet.*

drivers’ union and the chief Greyhound dispatcher. Policemen

Down below, the Freedom Riders realized that whites who had been secluded at various observation posts were closing in on them from all directions. Some stalked and some charged, egged on by a woman in a yellow dress who kept yelling “Get those niggers!” Fighting panic, the Freedom Riders made their way to two nearby Negro taxis and tried to send the seven females away to safety.

Less than five minutes after the bus door opened in Montgomery, official Washington knew that pipes and bare knuckles nullified all the painstaking federal-state agreements. Seigenthaler, driving slowly toward the scene through a mass of bystanders, first saw suitcases flying upward in the distance. He did not yet know that this was the Freedom Riders’ luggage being thrown into the air—smashed open as trophies—but he could sense the contagion of a riot.

“Who the hell are you?” With Seigenthaler frantically telling them to get back, that he was a federal agent, the other men brought a pipe down on the side of Seigenthaler’s head. Then the crowd, crushing in to seize Sue Harmann, kicked his unconscious body halfway under the car.