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

by Taylor Branch

A chastened King held a press conference too. “We declare a day of penance beginning at twelve noon today,” he said, calling for “all supporters of the Albany Movement to pray for our Negro brothers who have not yet learned the nonviolent way.” It was a public ritual of contrition and purification that echoed Gandhi’s cancellation of huge protests in 1919 and 1922, and it proved no less controversial among King’s colleagues.

of the entire civil rights generation. Landing two days later on the front page of The New York Times, correspondent Claude Sitton’s story began: “‘We want our colored people to go on living like they have for the last hundred years,’ said Sheriff Z. T. Mathews of Terrell County.” Sitton went on to describe how Mathews had burst into the church ahead of several armed deputies, and then, while the deputies scowled and rubbed their guns and tapped their heavy flashlights menacingly in their palms, had lectured from the pulpit on why no more than the current 51 Negroes, out of the county’s 8,209, need be registered to vote.

Only the bizarre contortions of racial politics explained King’s modesty: he seized more of the limelight, and made a more powerful statement, by remaining hidden in jail than he could hope to make before millions on television. Chief Pritchett, who wanted King out of jail almost as badly as Spivak, kept promising that King could check back into jail easily, without hitch or chicanery, but King insisted that there were too many risks. Besides, to leave jail so soon after making such an effort to get in would make him look like some sort of luxury guest. These and other considerations recommended an ingenious solution: King would ask Spivak to accept Dr. Anderson in his stead. This would allow King to stay in jail, and he would be able to get Anderson out quickly with an unimpeachable excuse.

The President had asked the Attorney General for a report after the last King jailing, but so far nothing had been heard of it. “Moreover,” said Anderson, “I feel as though the President can make a firm statement himself as regards the matter.” The FBI was investigating instances of violence and illegal arrest, he added, but the President had directed no response “as a result of this cumulative material.” President Kennedy was on holiday that Sunday, sailing in his sloop Victura off Hyannis Port—not far from Martha’s Vineyard, where King had planned to spend the entire month of August.

At a Tuesday-morning press conference, devoted mostly to the thalidomide drug scandal and underground testing of nuclear weapons, a reporter asked President Kennedy what he proposed to do about Albany. Kennedy stumbled at first in his response, saying that care was needed because of the confused tangle of local and federal jurisdictions. He paused and then added a thought as though getting it off his chest: “Let me say that I find it wholly inexplicable why the city council of Albany will not sit down with the citizens of Albany, who may be Negroes, and attempt to secure them, in a peaceful way, their rights. The United States Government is involved in sitting down at Geneva with the Soviet Union. I can’t understand why the government of Albany, the city council of Albany, cannot do the same for American citizens.”

“outside agitators” left town. In the Albany Herald, James Gray eulogized the “Negro-wooing Government,” and wryly mourned the political demise of his friends the Kennedy brothers as “two ambitious Bostonians, who have been as practically connected with the American Negro in their lifetimes as Eskimos are to the Congo Democrats.”

Suggesting that “too much success has drained him of the captivating fervor that made him famous,” Time quoted one anonymous Negro saying that King “doesn’t even speak for the Baptist ministry, let alone 20 million Negroes,” and another saying that marching to jail was not an intelligent way to desegregate Albany: “Some of us think we can do the job less wastefully.”

Marilyn Monroe died on the night of August 4 in her bedroom across the country. Attorney General Kennedy attended Mass the next morning at the Church of St. Mary in Gilroy, California, outside San Francisco. Already there were reports of mysterious phone calls and gaps in Monroe’s last hours, and subsequent decades lent more credence to the Hollywood gossip. Following later disclosures about President Kennedy’s associations with Frank Sinatra’s friends, as intercepted by J. Edgar Hoover, investigators of various quality unearthed glimpses of Monroe’s star-crossed liaisons with both Kennedys.

But one felt a terrible unreality about her—as if talking to someone under water. Bobby and I engaged in mock competition for her; she was most agreeable to him and pleasant to me—but then she receded into her own glittering mist.” From Atlanta, Dora McDonald sent her thoughts to King at the Albany jail. “Poor Marilyn Monroe,” she wrote. “She needed something to live for. It’s a pity for anyone to feel that life is not worth living at 36.”

Anderson, and Slater King guilty as charged, he imposed upon each of them a $200 fine and sixty days in jail. Then he suspended the sentences on condition that the defendants violate no laws.

That afternoon, the FBI wiretap on Stanley Levison’s office phone picked up a call to Levison at his home. His secretary, sounding uncomfortable, told her boss that she did not want to ruin his weekend, but a court summons had just arrived in connection with a financial dispute at one of his rental properties.

The racial dispute came to approximate a kindergarten standoff. “King or No King,” declared the Herald, “City Avows No Compromise.”

At the same hour, King was returning from nearby Lee County, where the first jolt of late-summer violence hastened the decline of the Albany Movement. Arsonists had just firebombed the Shady Grove Baptist Church, in which SNCC volunteers had conducted a registration meeting four days earlier. The Lee County sheriff completed his investigation within two hours, speculating that an electrical storm might have started the fire, but FBI agents pursued leads pointing clearly to political sabotage. All that remained of the tiny church was a lonely chimney, and the charred remains of the clapboard walls and pine benches still were smoldering when King, wearing his customary suit and dress shoes, stepped gingerly across a dirt field off the remote stretch

Back in Albany, he faced gloomy tactical realities. It was obvious that the city officials, having made the compromises necessary to relieve the public pressure of King’s imprisonment, were laying down a stern challenge to the Albany Movement. The whites were demonstrating that they too could be galvanized by humiliation and pain, and in the face of their raw power the Negroes found their options much reduced. Mass marches were out of the question, as the wrung-out souls at the mass meetings no longer volunteered for jail.

Reviews of King’s performance in Albany were harsh. Laurie Pritchett announced publicly that he knew—and that King knew—the cause of integration was set back “at least ten years” by events in Albany. The NAACP’s Ruby Hurley observed tartly that “Albany was successful only if the objective was to go to jail.” Slater King concluded that the Albany Movement had spread its demands too broadly, and movement critics compiled a catalog of King’s tactical mistakes. The NAACP’s Crisis magazine was preparing an article by two movement professors at Spelman, Staughton Lynd and Vincent Harding, which encompassed nearly all the conflicting criticisms: King’s shortcomings as an absentee media star, his failure to rely more heavily on the courts, his insensitivity to local whites, his reluctance to go to jail more frequently, errors in handling the bus strike, and so on.

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. Still, he knew better than to stand completely on righteousness. The world tested causes by combat, and King had known since Montgomery that a movement even of the purest spirit cannot survive without victories.

In Birmingham, some six weeks after leaving the Albany jail, he reached for the politic view of Albany, insisting that the struggle already was a success. Negro voter registration had more than doubled there in 1962, King told his audience in Birmingham, and had risen by some 30,000 in all of Georgia. One result, he declared, was the victory of the racial moderate Carl Sanders in the recent governor’s race. He said the movement already had won over Pritchett and other leading whites of Albany, who were going through the motions of defending a system they believed was, and ought to be, doomed.

King retired to analyze shortcomings of the Albany Movement by his own lights. Much of his appraisal was implicit in his conception of the next campaign. In strategy sessions, he said he wanted the SCLC in “on the ground floor.” Having learned that it took time to seize the attention of the outside world, he wanted to control the timing and rhythm of the next campaign. In Albany he had been a latecomer, arriving after the mass arrests had peaked, but he was drawing most of the criticism anyway. Nobody was calling Albany a tactical failure for SNCC or the NAACP. From the bus boycott through the Freedom Rides and on into Albany, King always had entered popular movements more or less haphazardly. Now, since his public stature made anything he did a referendum on his principles, pragmatism demanded that he design his own test. He needed advance planning, training, and mobilization on a specific rather than a general target area. In short, he needed control of a concentrated effort, maximizing both his risk and his chances for spectacular success. To his staff, King announced his resolve to swear off spontaneous rescue missions. “I don’t want to be a fireman anymore.”

Meanwhile, Ross Barnett went to see the Ole Miss Rebels play the Kentucky Wildcats at Jackson’s Memorial Stadium. The war fever of the political crisis boosted the normal emotions of the football rite to the heights of pandemonium, and by halftime the crowd was shouting “We want Ross!” in a deafening roar. Barnett made his way to the fifty-yard line, where he raised a fist of defiance and cried out over the loudspeakers: “I love Mississippi!” The roar intensified, and Barnett, nearly overcome, rose above it to let loose another shout: “I love her people!” Then at the peak: “I love our customs!” These three short sentences were enough to ignite pre-battle ecstasy. People were ready to die. This was as close to, and yet as far from, the fervor of a Negro mass meeting as segregationists came. No one could know that this football game would be the last militant race rally among respectable whites for at least a generation.

“You know,” he remarked, “that’s General Grant’s table.” He said goodnight, but then stopped Schlei on his way down to face the White House press corps with the documents. “Don’t tell them about General Grant’s table,” Kennedy cautioned. He did not want to antagonize the South any further with reminders of the Civil War.

Kennedy had stopped him on his way out of the Justice Department to say, “Hey, Nick. Don’t worry if you get shot…’cause the President needs a moral issue.” Katzenbach laughed at the warm irony and the taut grin. This was the Kennedy panache—bright amateurs dashing cavalierly into semi-war.

Oxford airport. The field was lined with Army trucks, buses, jeeps, cars, and assorted government planes, plus piles of tents and riot equipment. Other supplies included dramatic items like giant searchlights.

While some shouted the rhythmic cheer “Go to Cuba, nigger lovers, go to Cuba!” others lobbed pebbles, then rocks, at the lines of marshals standing outside.

Now that the federal government had “invaded” Ole Miss and defiled it with Meredith, he told Doar and Katzenbach, the feds could defend themselves.

President Kennedy’s speech disposed of the Meredith case so convincingly that some troop commanders in Memphis released their men from DEFCON 2 alert (prepare to move immediately). Desire and pronouncement were being overrun by fact, however, as the President quickly discovered.

Within an hour of the President’s speech, the first shotgun blasts rang out at Oxford. One marshal was bleeding profusely from a neck wound, and his colleagues, lacking either first-aid equipment or an ambulance, despaired for his life. A few minutes later the first high-powered rifle shot hit a border patrolman in the leg. As casualties mounted, the marshals placed their wounded along the wall inside the Lyceum.

Attorney General, whereupon she heard the assistant say in a precise, disembodied monotone that “a reporter for the London Daily Sketch, whose name is Paul Guihard, G-U-I-H-A-R-D, was killed in Oxford just now. His body was found with a bullet in the back, next to a women’s dormitory.”

Soldiers stood on the Grove, holding back students who had gathered to witness the surrender. Meredith—unknown and withdrawn, temperamental, practical, of military bearing and yet erratically sentimental—said it was then that he heard Mississippi whites call him “nigger” for the first time in his life. An hour later, escorted by marshals, he attended his first class in Colonial American history.

Firsthand experience with Ole Miss made the President doubt his old Harvard professors, who taught that Northern fanatics trampled upon an innocent South after the Civil War. “It makes me wonder,” Kennedy said privately to Sorensen, “whether everything I learned about the evils of Reconstruction was really true.”

The soldiers remained practically unnoticed at Ole Miss until the last five hundred departed late in the summer of 1963, after Meredith received his degree. The climate of the times helped contain the story. Had the riot occurred later, in the era of the “live network feed,” synchronized scenes of the Ole Miss rioting before, during, and after President Kennedy’s national address might have been broadcast with jarring effect, making the President appear Pollyannish or incompetent. As it was, however, the sequence of events was blurred to his advantage, making the riot appear to be a rude answer to Kennedy’s timely appeal. Friendly newspapers went to great lengths to adjust the speech to the riot. The New York Times went so far as to report that Kennedy “qualified his optimism most carefully” in his address, “and indeed made clear that the Government was waiting anxiously to see how Mississippi officials and citizens behaved.”

Kennedy’s political advisers, realizing that all their efforts to accommodate Mississippi had served only to blanket the South with bumper stickers screaming FEDERALLY OCCUPIED MISSISSIPPI and KENNEDY’S HUNGARY, were reinforced in their belief that taking risks for integration invited political suicide. As for Negro leaders, all of whom praised President Kennedy in public for doing what was necessary to get Meredith registered, the sense of victory was hollow.

Martin Luther King complained privately that President Kennedy had summoned the nation to nothing more positive than a grim obedience to law. In Kennedy’s nationwide address there had been talk of burdens and closed books but not a word of freedom, fresh beginnings, or renewed hope. For King, by contrast, the issue went far beyond his identification with Meredith to touch his core conviction that human beings could transcend enemy-thinking.

As much as he admired President Kennedy for his stylish command of the modern world, King knew that Kennedy and Barnett still had more in common with each other than either had with him. Their performance at Oxford, he wrote, “made Negroes feel like pawns in a white man’s political game.” He blended this lament into a bleak assessment of 1962 as the year civil rights lost ground in national politics. No longer the “dominant issue” of domestic debate, it had receded since the year of the Freedom Rides and of the Kennedy Administration’s early cry, “We will move!” King too had receded, as measured by his ineffectiveness in Albany, and his criticism of the Administration no doubt reflected his fear that no matter how mightily he shouted and sacrificed, he remained a cork in Kennedy’s ocean, left to rise and fall with its tides.

meant that the Bureau would have to corroborate its allegations against Levison. Alternatively, admitting that the allegations came only from the Childs brothers, Hoover would have to make his prized informants available for cross-examination in court. Neither prospect was attractive, as Hoover much preferred the license of political intelligence to the rigors and risks of law enforcement.

of J. Edgar Hoover himself, he blinked. The Levison-King investigation remained in the confines of political intelligence, where Hoover wanted it. Shortly thereafter, the Bureau’s internal report on the unsuccessful effort at corroboration was filed away, marked DO NOT DISSEMINATE.

Randolph’s impatience was such that for months he had been talking with Bayard Rustin about reviving his 1942 plans for a march on Washington, with which he had bluffed President Roosevelt into integrating the nation’s war industries.

President Kennedy, bound by his own inclinations and by the Southerners of his party, had worked himself into a corner where on all sides he received less criticism for doing nothing substantive in civil rights than for doing a little bit. Governor Rockefeller seized the moment to attack Kennedy’s civil rights record. At an NAACP rally in upstate New York, he proclaimed what Clarence Mitchell had been saying in private. Trenchantly, Rockefeller attacked Kennedy’s much-publicized plan to make racial progress through presidential appointments, charging that the President’s most critical appointments had been four Southern judges of well-known segregationist views.

In his sermon, King replied that evil was beyond the responsibility of God as well as beyond the reach of man. He ridiculed as hypocrites those who supinely left the cause of righteousness to supernatural beings. These were the “big Negro preachers” in Cadillacs and all the timid souls of false piety who allowed comfort or habit to subvert the demands of conscience. Hammering

They could not cast the demon out, he told the congregation, because evil was too deeply rooted in human character. No human faculty, known or unknown, developed or undeveloped, could touch it—not the liberal reason of a dozen Enlightenments, nor all the wildest dreams of scientific progress fulfilled. “The humanist hope is an illusion,” King said.

The examples of hope that King rolled out came not from the struggles of everyday life but from the pantheon of immortals. He spoke of “Simon of Sand” converted into “Peter of Rock,” of “persecuting Saul into an Apostle Paul,” and of “the lust-infested Augustine into a Saint Augustine.” He quoted Tolstoy’s claim of utter transformation: “‘What was good and bad changed places…The things I used to do, I don’t do them now. The places I used to go, I don’t go there now. The thoughts I used to think, I don’t think them now.’” King referred to legendary sinners who had redirected the torment of their inner confessions to produce historical miracles. The evidence of their conversions was a changed world.

than the injustices of society, not less. If a sinner like King could produce a miracle of public morality in Birmingham, what became of Moral Man and Immoral Society? What then became of Niebuhr’s theology? Worshippers at Ebenezer often saw through such muddles. When King seemed depressed and out of sorts, they came out of his sermons shaking their heads over his powerful rumblings, remarking that he was a “God-troubled” man, surely on the verge of shaking up the white man’s world.

but all his mountain of lists and calculations seemed pitifully small next to the core identity of an American city. In the end, Project C was no social science formula, approximation of political risks, or rational exercise of any kind, not even one touched by genius. It was a cold plunge.

Bull Connor and his K-9 corps confronted the marchers on the sidewalk before a large crowd of bystanders. Unnerved by the sight of the dogs, a nineteen-year-old demonstrator named Leroy Allen pulled a clay pipe out of his pocket, whereupon two dogs swarmed over him, felling him to the pavement.

The dreamy grit of the Mississippi students framed an irresistible story of violence and innocence, such that Claude Sitton and other leading reporters stayed with Bob Moses in Greenwood.

Ever sensitive to political danger, the Mississippi legislature added a requirement that names of new voter applicants be published in the newspapers for two weeks prior to acceptance. Another new law allowed current voters to object to the “moral character” of applicants. Facing these laws, plus the shootings and padlocked churches, no Mississippi Negro could hope to slip quietly in or out of the courthouse.

In December 1962, Moses conceded to the Voter Education Project that “we are powerless to register people in significant numbers anywhere in the state.” He listed three conditions for change: (1) the removal of the White Citizens Council from control of Mississippi politics; (2) action by the Justice Department to secure safe registration for Negroes; and (3) a mass uprising of the unlettered, fearful Negroes, demanding the immediate right to vote. “Very likely all three will be necessary before a breakthrough can be obtained,” wrote Moses.

Mississippi authorities attacked the registration project more actively by shutting off distribution of federal food surpluses in two Delta counties. COFO workers, confronted with a famine in the heart of their registration area, sent out nationwide appeals for emergency relief. At first only restricted circles responded—Freedom Ride veterans, members of civil rights groups, students who drove South with carloads of donated canned goods—but the project grew over a bitter winter as grim facts reinforced Mississippi’s unsavory reputation.

as though speaking from a pulpit. “I have heard numerous religious leaders of the South call upon their worshippers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law,” he wrote, “but I have longed to hear white ministers say, ‘follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother.’”

have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love.” In supreme irony, the prisoner in the hole mourned over the most respectable clergymen in Alabama as lost sheep who were unable to find the most obvious tenets of their faith.

King raised the question he thought should have occurred to the white preachers. “But for what purpose?” he asked them, and he answered his own question: “To preserve the evil system of segregation.” For all his nonviolent preaching about how it was wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends, King wrote, “it is just as wrong, or even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.” He quoted T. S. Eliot to that effect. Then he returned soulfully to his lament. “I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation,” he wrote. “One day the South will recognize its real heroes…One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers.”