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

by Taylor Branch

Behind Sullivan came Alabama Attorney General Gallion in the company of his assistants and a deputy sheriff. They made their way to John Lewis, who was pointed out to them as a Freedom Rider, and stood over him to read Judge Jones’s injunction. Struggling to his feet, Lewis managed to locate and revive Barbee and Zwerg. For safety, the three of them huddled near the same state officials who were serving them with an injunction that held them responsible for the riot. All three Freedom Riders were bleeding.

“Yeah, I did,” said Seigenthaler, waking to pain. “What happened?” “Well, we had a riot.” “Don’t you think you better call Mr. Kennedy?” “Which Mr. Kennedy?” “The Attorney General of the United States.” The lieutenant frowned. “Who the hell are you?” he asked. “I’m his administrative assistant,” groaned Seigenthaler, in a manner that convinced the lieutenant he was talking with a bona-fide big shot. He ran for help, carrying news that reporters picked up instantly. Seigenthaler passed out again. He awoke in the X-ray room of a hospital, lying beside a doctor who was talking on the telephone with Byron White in Washington.

A handful of whites ambushed two stray Negro teenagers half a block from the bus terminal, setting one briefly on fire with kerosene and breaking the other’s leg with a stomping. Other rioters built an enormous bonfire from the scattered contents of the Freedom Riders’ suitcases.

The Freedom Riders had broken out of Birmingham at a terrible price, but nothing could stop them now. John Lewis walked into Seay’s house fresh from the hospital, with a bandaged head, and received an emotional welcome in proportion to his wounds and his determination. He announced that even the two students left in the hospital were ready to go on. William Barbee soon made this message public with a statement to reporters at his bedside. “As soon as we’re recovered from this, we’ll start again,” he said. One floor above him, in the white section of St. Jude’s Hospital, Jim Zwerg cleared enough concussion from his head to tell reporters essentially what they had heard from Jim Peck in the Birmingham operating room six days earlier. “We will continue our journey one way or another,” said Zwerg. “We are prepared to die.”

cement-block processing building. As they moved out, the guards discovered two young white men from Chicago still lying in the back of a truck. “We refuse to cooperate, because we’ve been unjustly imprisoned,” said Terry Sullivan, in a speech that Lawson and the others had counseled him to shelve. The guards dumped the two Chicagoans out of the truck and dragged them by their feet through mud and grass and across concrete into the receiving room, where the prisoners were ordered to take off their clothes. When the two of them still did not move, guards shocked them with cattle prods until they writhed on the floor, screaming in pain. The guards finally tore off their clothes.

The prisoners were left waiting there for what seemed like an eternity before being marched to shower rooms, where they bathed under the gaze of shotguns. More than one of them felt stabbing rushes of identification with the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps. Then they went on another naked march along cement corridors to the maximum-security wing, where, locked two to a cell, they endured another long wait before the guards brought their only prison clothes—a T-shirt and a pair of pea-green boxer shorts.

Not all the Freedom Riders willingly accepted the sacrifice. One of them had to be pried away from his mattress by the guards. Nor did all share the religious ethos of the cell block. Stokely Carmichael, among others, remained aloof from the religious devotionals, and many of the Freedom Riders envied or resented the advanced Gandhism of the Nashville students.

From the Montgomery bus boycott to the confrontations of the sit-ins, then on to the Rock Hill jail-in and now to the mass assault on the Mississippi prisons, there was a “movement” in both senses of the word—a moving spiritual experience, and a steady expansion of scope. The theater was spreading through the entire South.

In miniature, the Freedom Riders were compressing into one summer the psychology of the first three centuries of Christianity under the Roman Empire. Perpetually on the brink of schism, apostles of nonviolent love were fanning out into the provinces to fill jails, while their confederates were negotiating with the emperors themselves for full citizenship rights, hoping to establish their outlandish new faith as the official doctrine of the state.

So sensitive was King’s name in public debate that the white Southern Baptist Convention—which was trying to make peace with President Kennedy after its shrill warnings against putting a Catholic in the White House—forced its seminary to apologize publicly for allowing King to discuss religion on the Louisville campus.

King still yearned for a life of prestigious, intellectual repose such as he had tasted in his pipe-smoking graduate-school days. Two weeks after the Jackson rally, he added to his schedule for the coming year a commitment to teach a Morehouse seminar on his favorite philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche.

King’s memory of Mother Pollard saying “My feet is real tired” during the bus boycott and then, jumping ahead five years, pointed out that the contemporary Freedom Rider was not “an elderly woman whose grammar is uncertain” but students who were “college-bred, Ivy League clad, youthful, articulate, and resolute.” Many readers doubtless puzzled over this as an odd point to single out, and perhaps a snobbish one besides. But King did not wish merely to marshal credentials for himself or his cause—he wanted desperately to communicate how much those protesters were willing to sacrifice. Unlike similarly educated whites, their hold on middle-class respectability was extremely tenuous. Any slip—a lost job, a scrape with the law, a psychological breakdown, a personal scandal—could easily send them sliding back into the oblivion of the Negro underclass.

In the history class, a young boy rose to ask Charles McDew whether the course would cover “the War for Southern Independence.” “The war for what?” McDew replied. He was puzzled until he realized that this was one of the diehard Confederate terms for the Civil War, and that even the young Negro crusaders in his class had absorbed unconsciously a great deal of the Southern point of view. Moses, McDew, and the other teachers knew they faced obstacles as subtle as they were enormous.

The FBI abhorred embarrassment and public failure, for example. Most of its agents were Northern Catholics, not Southerners. The Bureau’s traditional cooperation with local authorities was nearly always undercut by rivalry—with sheriffs and policemen resenting the high and mighty Bureau, and the FBI agents looking down on the provincial ways of the locals. Doar stressed that it was a practical imperative to study and cajole the Bureau, and to fasten the FBI’s vast institutional pride to the new job of enforcing the civil rights laws.

It was generally accepted that the twelve special ones crammed into one cell were Communists, and few Magnolians had seen a real Communist before. Some asked the guards to point out Moses, whose name was being circulated as their leader.

By his own account the seriousness of the movement had not sunk in until he arrived at Parchman Penitentiary in a truck with the first Freedom Riders and saw the guards there beat, shock, and strip the two prostrate Chicago pacifists. Reagon was fearless, but most of his SNCC elders regarded him as a kid who was a little too eager to keep up.

Sherrod preached Lawson’s theme that Supreme Court edicts piled high as the clouds were irrelevant so long as Albany’s Negroes enforced segregation upon themselves by cowering before the police.

The sheriff was a full head taller than Ware, outweighed him by more than a hundred pounds, and possessed all the psychological advantages of a white sheriff in a Black Belt county where the air of feudalism still mingled with the heat. King alleged that the sheriff had committed a monstrous violation of Ware’s civil rights.

This time Gray decided that he could not duck King and the segregation issue. He told his viewers that a “cell of professional agitators” was mounting a rebellion that “smacks more of Lenin and Stalin than of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.” He knew enough about the internal splits in the Albany Movement to refer to its weaknesses, but he also subscribed to the white folklore that any Negro rebellion was necessarily the work of the NAACP.

He closed with a tribute to segregation as “a system that has proved over the years to be peaceful and rewarding,” and a call for an end to disruption. “What we need is tolerance,” said Gray, “not tantrum.”

Claude Sitton’s reprise on Albany in the next Sunday’s New York Times, headed “Rivalries Beset Integration Campaign,” traced the quarrels to the sit-ins of 1960. In a more sensational article entitled “Confused Crusade,” Time quoted Roy Wilkins in scathing appraisal of SNCC: “They don’t take orders from anybody; they don’t consult anybody. They operate in a kind of vacuum: parade, protest, sit-in…When the headlines are gone, the issues still have to be settled in court.”

In Albany, Charles Jones and Cordell Reagon were more abrasive than Sherrod in their judgment of King. They called him “De Lawd,” a SNCC nickname mocking both King’s pomposity and the submissiveness of ordinary church folk. They also intimated that they had orchestrated the Albany negotiations toward precisely the result that followed: King’s removal from Albany, bearing the onus of a weak settlement. This remained their secret almost as much as Anderson’s mental crisis remained King’s. They privately endorsed a weak settlement in order to promote a strong movement, privately sought King’s release from jail and then criticized him for not staying there. They justified competitive maneuvers on the theory that their goals could not be advanced or protected without influence to offset King’s.

Then came the last year of postwar innocence. “What can you say,” John Glenn exclaimed after orbiting the globe, “about a day when you have seen four beautiful sunsets?” Mickey Mantle won the Most Valuable Player award; John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Intellectuals and Hollywood directors still showcased cigarette smoke as a positive image, paying little attention to obscure health warnings from Britain’s Royal College of Physicians. The first of the baby-boom children turned sixteen, snatched up their driver’s licenses, and created a new stage of life within Detroit’s shiny creations. The Ford Motor Company designed tiny cars to compete with the German Volks-wagen, but Henry Ford publicly dropped the idea as un-American.

Future writers chose 1962 as the year of nostalgia, the perfect setting for surf comedies and carefree romances. Still, forebodings of ideological dislocation ran beneath popular enthusiasms for achievement, new dance steps, gadgets, and peaceful change. On October 1, 1961, W. E. B. Du Bois applied for membership in the Communist Party of the U.S.A. “I have been long and slow in coming to this conclusion,” Du Bois wrote in a public statement, “but at last my mind is settled.” He was ninety-three. Born a year before Mohandas Gandhi, during the Andrew Johnson impeachment trial of 1868, he was a year younger than the historic First Baptist Church (Colored) of Montgomery. More than sixty years after breaking the color line on Harvard doctorates, fifty after founding the NAACP, thirty after surrendering his beloved Crisis magazine to a “sportswriter” named Roy Wilkins, and ten after being hauled manacled into federal court for advocating peace talks in Korea, the old man decided that “capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.” Still haughty in manner and freethinking in scholarship, Du Bois was an unlikely candidate for the discipline of a working-class party.

His statement found its way into King’s files as well as J. Edgar Hoover’s. King cited the defection by “one of the most brilliant Negro scholars in America” in one of his warnings about the limits of Negro patience: “There can be no doubt that if the problem of racial discrimination is not solved in the not too distant future, some Negroes, out of frustration, discontent, and despair, will turn to some other ideology.” He did not speak publicly of Du Bois again for six years.

Hoover might have hailed the Du Bois statement as a vindication of the FBI’s long-standing diagnosis of subversive tendencies, but he took no public notice of it. This supreme rebuke to Du Bois—that his last insult to American values failed to draw even recognition in mainstream politics—starkly illustrated his insignificance in the white culture. Although Hoover was waging a major battle over the security threat posed by the American Communist Party, the Du Bois defection was peripheral to him because he needed examples that would register with Attorney General Kennedy and with the public at large. Du Bois did not.

The running battle between Kennedy and Hoover took place on different ground. Kennedy wanted to shift the Bureau’s priorities drastically from domestic intelligence to organized crime. Citing the FBI’s own private figures that the American Communist Party had shriveled further since its collapse in 1956—until some fifteen hundred FBI informants within the party supplied a hefty part of its budget and membership—he insiste...

Kennedy was appalled to learn that there were only a dozen FBI agents targeted against organized crime, as opposed to more than a thousand in political security work. He would have preferred something close to a reversal, and it annoyed him almost beyond endur...

By the end of Robert Kennedy’s first year as Hoover’s nominal boss, worn edges were beginning to show. In December, Kennedy told a British journalist that the U.S. Communist Party “couldn’t be more feeble and less of a threat, and besides its membership consists largely of FBI agents.” In sharp but indirect rebuttal, Hoover told a House committee the next month that the U.S. Communist Party was “a Trojan Horse of rigidly disciplined fanatics unalterably committed to bring this free nation under the yoke of international communism.” Hoover substantiated this ringing alarm by disclosing confidentially to the congressmen, and to selected senators as well, that a New York lawyer named Stanley Levison was both a secret member of the Communist Party, subject to orders from the K...

Finally, while the Bureau could show that Levison and King were close friends in the civil rights movement, there was no evidence as yet to show that either one of them followed the orders or even the wishes of the American Communist Party, let alone the Kremlin. In short, the January 8 memo had exaggerated the subversive linkages in order to get a message through to Kennedy, and Byron White’s sudden embrace of the alarm now called for the Bureau to show its hand. This potential embarrassment rose instantly to J. Edgar Hoover for decision. “King is no good any way,” he scrawled on the memo outlining the problem. “Under no circumstances should our informant be endangered.” By this, his first written assessment of King, Hoover marked him for FBI hostility in advance of any investigation.

Kennedy, trying not to offend a NATO ally, took essentially the same position he maintained during the conflict in Albany, Georgia: that it was a matter for the local parties to decide for themselves. This earned him a barrage of criticism for his implied recognition of merit in the Dutch colonial claims. With his shy humor and dogged grit, Kennedy gamely faced hecklers in more than one country. Later he reflected that no amount of East-West debate on the claims of democracy against communism would dispel the global preoccupation with race and economics. “There wasn’t one area of the world that I visited,” he said later, “…that I wasn’t asked about the question of civil rights.”

The first of the bad news was that Maheu and Giancana claimed immunity from prosecution on the grounds that their wiretap was sanctioned by the CIA. Officials from the CIA, in turn, had confirmed through gritted teeth that Maheu and Giancana indeed had been working for them in a series of top-secret attempts to assassinate Cuban premier Fidel Castro by means of Giancana’s gangster connections. Giancana, while plotting these missions, had asked Maheu and the CIA to make sure that his mistress, Phyllis McGuire, was not two-timing him while he was away, and the agency officials had decided that they were in no position to refuse. All this was only the beginning. Further investigation, plus the wiretaps themselves, had revealed that Phyllis McGuire nursed her own complaints about the relationship, including the fact that Giancana maintained a second mistress, in California, named Judith Campbell.

Sinatra also had introduced Judith Campbell to John Kennedy, it turned out, and both John and Robert Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe, among others, in a serial exchange of lovers.

His affair with Campbell was strictly business, bestowing enormous hidden power upon him because he shared a mistress with the President of the United States.

The ramifications of this one Las Vegas arrest could spell disaster for the Administration. It meant that the CIA and the Kennedy brothers had poisoned the U.S. government’s chances of prosecuting Giancana and associated gangsters for any of their crimes. They had exposed the U.S. government to disgrace as one that pursued murder in partnership with gangsters, and exposed the President to blackmail as a consort of gangster women. Hoover summarized the whole package with professional detachment, but private satisfactions converged from many directions. This was the CIA that had driven his Bureau out of foreign intelligence work since World War II? These were the Kennedys who were pressuring him to declare war on gangsters such as Giancana? These were the people who belittled his far-flung vigilance against domestic subversion?

With little fear of rebuke, Hoover continued to rebuild his direct White House channel by sending an identical copy of his February 27 memo to Kenneth O’Donnell. That same day he ordered the New York and Atlanta FBI offices to search their files thoroughly for information on Martin Luther King. A week later, Hoover formally requested Attorney General Kennedy’s authorization to place wiretaps in the office of Stanley Levison. Kennedy approved.

On the night of March 15, New York FBI agents broke into Levison’s office to plant the bugs, which were called “misurs” in the bureau’s standard abbreviation for “microphone surveillances.” Technicians hooked up the telephone wiretaps on the afternoon

Also, in confronting the President about his sexual escapades, Hoover was fortified by the experience of having done so twenty years earlier. During World War II, FBI agents watching a Danish reporter named Inga Arvad (who was suspected as a spy because she had known Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, and other top Nazis) had discovered that she was having an affair with Kennedy, then a Navy lieutenant. Acting on FBI accusations, the Navy had punished Kennedy with a transfer, and Hoover had denied Kennedy a written absolution from suspicions of disloyalty, refusing even personal appeals from his friend Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. Afterward, when Lieutenant Kennedy continued the affair, FBI agents had bugged their trysts to obtain tape recordings of Navy talk mixed with pillow talk. Hoover did not forget the episode. Upon Kennedy’s election to the presidency in 1960, he asked his assistant Cartha “Deke” DeLoach to retrieve the Kennedy-Arvad tape recordings from the FBI files for review. DeLoach, who had heard only rumors about the tapes, recalled them as involving Joseph Kennedy, not his son, but the Director said firmly, “No, it was the boy.”

Hoover came from a different galaxy. In 1941, the same year that Kennedy began squiring Inga Arvad, Hoover warned America that if motels were allowed to proliferate along the highways, citizens would sleep unwittingly on mattresses still warm from “illicit relations.” A generation later, motels having sprung up everywhere, this same Hoover went to the White House for a discussion that would have made a Borgia or Medici feel at home. When it was over, President Kennedy buzzed Kenneth O’Donnell. “Get rid of that bastard,” he commanded. “He’s the biggest bore.”

For King, the year had begun as it would end: being dragged toward Birmingham. While Hoover and the Kennedys sparred over communism, King was beseeching the Administration to keep Fred Shuttlesworth out of jail.

Lowery disclosed to his colleagues that he stood to lose between $150,000 and $200,000. This was real money, the new birthright of preachers who had succeeded despite the millstone of a segregated economy. Together with jail and violence, such financial persecution was driving the SCLC’s leadership from the toughest parts of the South. Shuttlesworth had moved to Cincinnati. Phifer, his cellmate, was taking a church in New York, and the recent bombing of his home had convinced C. O. Simpkins to move from Shreveport to Chicago. Adapting to harsh realities, King handled the delicate diplomacy of bringing in Northern white lawyers to supersede Southern Negro ones.

Twenty-four hours after Levison praised Wachtel in an April 10 talk with King, a summary of the wiretapped conversation was placed on the desk of FBI Director Hoover. “Who is he?” Hoover asked tersely about Wachtel, and his curiosity sent Bureau officials scrambling to investigate.

being—the wiretaps, the investigations, the acute political sensitivity that caused the FBI Director himself to spend time scanning these wiretap summaries—were products of a side to King’s life that was clandestine even to him. From the point of view of the technicians and supervisors on the Levison surveillance, the operation of the bugs in particular was a painful chore. Unlike wiretaps, for which recorders could be activated automatically by phone calls, the bugs required continuous human monitoring. The sounds could be loud or maddeningly faint, depending on how far away Levison happened to be from the microphones in his wall, and the monitors faced the disadvantage that his visitors, being in each other’s physical presence, did not identify themselves the way callers tended to do on the telephone.

They discovered that “Jack” was Jack O’Dell. The supervisors expressed special interest in what these two discussed with Levison, as Bureau records showed that Jones had a suspicious political background and that O’Dell was an outright Communist. These two names were investigative coups. Their conversations with Levison went to FBI headquarters by red-flag express for analysis of Communist Party influence. The results were almost entirely disappointing along that dimension. Levison’s conversations were full of real estate talk about ground leases, rental payments, and city tax appeals. What he discussed endlessly with both O’Dell and Jones was the SCLC’s fund-raising.

Levison’s work in King’s behalf, while intense to the point of obsession, turned out to be mundane stuff for an alleged Communist agent. The lack of a Kremlin-style conspiracy did not mean that the surveillance was barren of use to the FBI, however, as it generated usable political intelligence. On March 30, for instance, both the microphone and the wiretap picked up Levison’s incoming phone call from Wyatt Walker, who said that King wanted his opinion about the vacancy on the Supreme Court. Justice

“True peace is not merely the absence of tension, but it is the presence of justice,” King told the audience. “And I think this is what Jesus meant when he looked at his disciples one day and said, ‘I come not to bring peace but a sword.’ Now certainly he didn’t mean he came to bring a physical sword. Certainly he didn’t mean that he did not come to bring true peace. But Jesus was saying this in substance: that…whenever I come, a conflict is precipitated between the old and the new. Whenever I come, tension sets in between justice and injustice…The tension which we see in the South today is the necessary tension that comes when the oppressed rise up and start to move forward toward a permanent, positive peace.”

Marchers and boycotters “should not minimize work through the courts. But…legislation and court orders can only declare rights. They can never thoroughly deliver them. Only when the people themselves begin to act are rights on paper given life blood.”

expressing the very highest respect for law. There is nothing new about this. Go back with me if you will to the Old Testament. See Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego as they stand before King Nebuchadnezzar. They made it clear: ‘We cannot bow.’ Come if you will to Plato’s Dialogues. Open the Credo or the Apology. See Socrates practicing civil disobedience. Academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. Come to the early Christians. See them practicing civil disobedience to the point that they were willing to be thrown to the lions to stand up for what they believed. Listen to Peter as he says, ‘We must obey God rather than man.’ Come up to the modern world. Never forget that everything that Hitler did in Germany was legal.

“No, we are not willing to wait any longer,” King cried. “We want freedom now!” This set off a pandemonium that King stilled only with a solemn reprise on the likelihood of persecution and death, and he closed with a flourish of inspiration from the prophets. He had done it again—come into the NAACP’s own house and stolen a crowd. Although his summons was objectionable to NAACP leaders in spirit and direction, it contained too much power and too little specific heresy to be challenged.

Chauncey Eskridge, and by noon Eskridge was analyzing it with Billy Graham’s public relations specialist. His advice—“Nothing should be published while you are in prison…hold everything until released”—postponed a notion that would reappear within a year as King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”