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

by Taylor Branch

The “Letter from Birmingham Jail” did not spring quickly to acclaim. It remained essentially a private communication for some time, in spite of Wyatt Walker’s labors to attract the attention of the passing world. Its Gandhian themes did impress some of James Lawson’s contacts, who offered to publish the letter in the June issue of Friends, the Quaker journal, but ordinary reporters saw no news in what appeared to be an especially long-winded King sermon. Not a single mention of the letter reached white or Negro news media for a month.

Birmingham movement with his pen, but the reverse was true: unexpected miracles of the Birmingham movement later transformed King’s letter from a silent cry of desperate hope to a famous pronouncement of moral triumph.

Moore had covered some seventy miles by Tuesday evening, when a reporter from radio station WGAD in Gadsden stopped him on the road for an interview. Asked his purpose, Moore said, “I intend to walk right up to the governor’s mansion in Mississippi and ring his doorbell. Then I’ll hand him my letter.” The letter was a civil rights plea asking Barnett to “be gracious and give more than is immediately demanded of you.” Of shouted threats that he would never make it alive, Moore said that he had grown up in Mississippi. “I don’t believe the people in the South are that way. I think a lot of this stuff is just made up.” The reporter left Moore on a remote stretch of U.S. Highway 11, near Attala. A passing motorist discovered the body a mile down the road, shot twice through the head at close range. A call from a farmhouse telephone brought sirens and reporters upon the murder scene. Moore lay face up in the grass, still wearing his signboards.

King. No self-respecting adult could use their children for battle fodder, they said, as even the early Christians had not encouraged their children to face the lions at the Colosseum.

From his workshops, where hundreds of Birmingham’s children were pressing themselves forward for the D-Day march, Bevel brought to King a simple formula: any child old enough to belong to a church should be eligible to march to jail. Nearly all the young volunteers were Baptists, like King and himself, and Baptist doctrine required only a conscious acceptance of the Christian faith as a condition of both church membership and personal salvation. By common practice, churches allowed the youngest school-age children to become members. That settled it right there, Bevel insisted. How could he and King tell six-year-old church members that they were old enough to decide their eternal destiny but too young to march against segregation? How could they keep church members out of a nonviolent movement that embodied Christian teachings? King knew that Bevel was overwrought for good reason, as his wife was at that moment out on William Moore’s route down Highway 11. He also knew that it was absurd to form a jail march based on church teachings as addressed to the afterlife.

Having submitted his prestige and his body to jail, and having hurled his innermost passions against the aloof respectability of white American clergymen, all without noticeable effect, King committed his cause to the witness of schoolchildren.

Already soaked beyond any worry of lost dignity, they sang one word, “freedom,” to the tune of “Amen.” As the firemen concentrated the hoses upon the singers, the crowd surged back toward the contested borders. Then the firemen advanced toward the holdouts, pounding them with water at close range. The holdouts sat down on the sidewalk to stabilize themselves. It was a moment of baptism for the civil rights movement, and Birmingham’s last effort to wash away the stain of dissent against segregation.

For Captain Evans and the firemen, it was a mechanical problem of increasing the water pressure enough to overcome physical resistance on the pavement. Ideally suited for the task were special monitor guns that forced water from two hoses through a single nozzle, mounted on a tripod. The fire department advertised these attachments as miracles of long-range firefighting, capable of knocking bricks loose from mortar or stripping bark from trees at a distance of one hundred

“But lawyer Vann!” Gaston gasped. “They’ve turned the fire hoses on a little black girl. And they’re rolling that girl right down the middle of the street.” The monitor guns made limbs jerk weightlessly and tumbled whole bodies like scraps of refuse in a high wind. One look made Gaston sign off the telephone. Outside, brave songs turned to screams, and bystanders threw bricks and rocks at the hoses. When the water drove them back out of range, some of them sneaked into buildings so they could lob their projectiles from above. Eventually, they hit two firemen and Life photographer Charles Moore.

In consultation with Bull Connor, they decided that they had to drive the Negroes back together. To do that, they needed an intimidating weapon more mobile than the hoses. The police commanders deployed eight K-9 units at the corner of Ingram Park farthest from the church. First sight of the dogs brought shouts of fright and rage from the milling crowds.

An AP photographer standing nearby caught the sight that came to symbolize Birmingham: a white policeman in dark sunglasses grasping a Negro boy by the front of the shirt as his other hand gave just enough slack in the leash for the dog to spring upward and bury its teeth in the boy’s abdomen. And most compelling was the boy himself, who was tall, thin, and well dressed, leaning into the attacking dog with an arm dropped submissively at his side and a straight-ahead look of dead calm on his face.

preachers noted that this tender solicitude for Negro children had never produced much concern over their consignment to miserable schools or other injuries of segregation.

Hard upon this surge of internal strength radiated the national news that a thousand Negro children had marched to jail in two days, and before the far-flung American public could begin to absorb such a troubling novelty, violence, the universal messenger, was racing toward their living rooms with pictures of water hoses and dogs loosed on children. Marshall’s pain, like the stridency of Birmingham’s white leaders, revealed an underlying defensiveness, and their appeals to the welfare of Negro children drew them toward King’s ground.

Rev. A. D. King, home from a mass meeting at which Bevel had been the principal speaker, was in bed at his parsonage when the first bomb struck at about 10:45 P.M. He ran through the smoke to find his wife Naomi dazed but unhurt in the living room, and together they were evacuating their five children through the back door when a second, larger dynamite bomb blew a hole eight feet high in the brick façade and sent the front door flying in chunks against the back wall of the living room.

a door-sized hole blasted into the reception area of the Gaston Motel beneath Martin Luther King’s second-floor suite, knocking out the main water and electrical lines, and, in a vacant lot across the street, three house trailers twisted and buckled from an explosive that evidently landed farther from the motel than intended. With more than two thousand Negroes jamming the park, the scene was reminiscent of the massive confrontations there over the past nine days, except that now all the Negroes came from the taverns and dance halls of the surrounding commercial district, which had been emptied of their Saturday-night customers. “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth!” shouted one. Rocks flew, and soon a car parked outside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was overturned and set on fire.

Negro preachers maintained a desperate liaison in the middle zones. They agreed that the preachers should labor to disperse the rioters while the commanders tried to hold back their police lines, but they had more sense than control. A burning grocery store lit up the park, and sporadic looting broke out.

A. D. King arrived at the Gaston Motel about 1:30 A.M., the uprising near his home having finally died down. He rushed into Kelly Ingram Park with the loudest megaphone, and soon could be heard above the other preachers: “Our home was just bombed…Now if we who were in jeopardy of being killed, if we have gone away not angry, not throwing bricks, if we could do that and we were in danger, why must you rise up to hurt our cause? You are hurting us! You are not helping! Now won’t you please clear this park.”

Claude Sitton of the Times wrote that “the ‘thonk’ of clubs striking heads could be heard across the street.” Karl Flemming of Newsweek called the violence more sickening than the worst of the Ole Miss riot. Wyatt Walker found his wife on the floor, felled by a trooper’s rifle butt. Lingo’s savage attacks swiftly

“The argument for sending troops in is what’s gonna happen in the future,” said Kennedy. “…The governor has virtually taken over the state. You’re going to have his people around sticking bayonets in people and hitting people with the clubs, guns, etcetera. You’re going to have rallies all over the country…people calling on the President to take forceful action.” However, among the arguments against sending troops was the difficulty of explanation. Unless the Administration was willing to brand the state troopers as the threat to public order—in effect, to declare war on Alabama—it would have to justify the use of federal troops as a means of quelling the Negroes, not the whites. Racially, this would be the reverse of Ole Miss and the Freedom Rides, and with Army troops patrolling the Negro neighborhoods, the reluctant white moderates in Birmingham might take advantage of the federal shield.

“Therefore, you’d have the Negroes knocked down again without getting an agreement.” This prospect caused Burke Marshall to speak up. “If that agreement blows up,” he said wearily, “the Negroes will be, uh…” His voice faded away. “Uncontrollable,” suggested the President. Marshall nodded. “And I think not only in Birmingham,” he added, as one of the few white people who shared King’s premonitions about the outward ripples from Project C.

“I talk to him freely,” Marshall replied. “I’ll tell you what he intends to do, Mr. President. He intends to go to this church and call upon the people to [stay off the streets], as the Attorney General says, and then tomorrow, he intends to go around the city and visit pool halls, saloons, and talk to the Negroes, and preach against violence. Those are his intentions.”

Bursting into the church, Abernathy obliterated this contrived decorum. He announced President Kennedy’s support for the settlement. But, he shouted above prolonged cheers, he was resting his hopes on even greater powers than the U.S. Army or the White House. He was looking to the Almighty God who had listened to Paul and Silas in the Philippi jail, to Daniel in the lions’ den, to the three devout Jews in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace.

the Riverside reporters walked the tense streets outside, they recorded a frustrated diatribe from Bull Connor himself. “Well, the son of a bitch,” Connor sneered. “He’s the only one that’s caused any violence. You can quote me as saying that if you put ‘son of a bitch’ in front of it…The biggest racketeer that ever hit America. Shakedown artist…He’s down there in the pool room now, preaching nonviolence.”

When Patterson sat down, a bandaged but dapper Wyatt Walker came forward. “It does not take long to introduce Jackie Robinson,” he said snappily. “You can do it as quick as you can say Jackie Robinson.” And the gray-haired baseball immortal drew a river of sighs and cheers that eclipsed even King’s. “I don’t think you realize down here in Birmingham what you mean to us up there in New York,” said Robinson. “And I don’t think white Americans understand what Birmingham means to all of us throughout the country.” Normally a facile public speaker, Robinson said haltingly that he could not express himself, could not explain it, that the only thing he could think to tell them was that when he left New York his three children had wanted to come with him to go to jail too, because they had seen Birmingham children going to jail for what they believed in. “I can’t help getting emotional about this thing,” he said. “…And I wish that this same kind of enthusiasm that has shown right here in this church tonight could be shown to Negroes through America.” “I am convinced that the agreements

“And another thing we must realize—this is not a racial conflict basically. I want you to understand me here. We are not going to allow this conflict in Birmingham to deteriorate into a struggle between black people and white people. The tension in Birmingham is between justice and injustice.” Their goal was to enlist “consciences,” not skin colors, he said, as their cause was as broad as religion and democracy.

They would keep going through bombings and shootings. “I’m sorry,” King cried out, “but I will never teach any of you to hate white people.”

King could no longer defer the threat of Communist infiltration in the SCLC, Marshall warned. Specifically, he must sever relations with Stanley Levison, who was a Communist functionary, and with Jack O’Dell, whom Levison had “planted” inside the SCLC to influence the civil rights movement.

Marshall contradicted him. This was not paranoid mush, he said, but hard intelligence from the very pinnacle of the U.S. government. Levison was something much more dangerous than an old New York radical; he was “a paid agent of the Soviet Communist apparatus.” Marshall told King that he was authorized to say no more. When King asked to see proof, the point Marshall stressed was that neither he nor King was in a position to second-guess the highest U.S. national security experts, and even if they were, the politics of the moment rendered their doubts irrelevant. The controlling fact was that President Kennedy was about to “put his whole political life on the line” with the civil rights bill, and the President simply could not make himself vulnerable to charges of Communist association.

Now the Attorney General found it worth paying tribute to Hoover in order to gain a measure of control over King. Here was a man who was boring in on the White House, threatening to transform or destroy its domestic political base, and yet he held no public office, displayed no personal ambitions that could be traded on, succeeded by methods such as going to jail, and thrived on the very upheavals that most unsettled the Administration. These qualities, on top of the prosaic fact that at first sight King would be mistaken for a waiter at most Washington establishments, put him beyond the reach of the Kennedys’ political and social language. With King talking of a demonstration that might turn the capital into a giant Birmingham, Robert Kennedy sought to check his momentum. He would gain a bargaining hold if King admitted that his movement was poisoned. He would gain the upper hand if King conceded to the government the unilateral right to define what was poisonous. But King shrugged off Robert Kennedy too. He kept asking for proof, saying that these terrible spy terms did not ring true of the men he had known so well,

Everybody he knew in the movement had been called a Communist for years, himself included. People across the South were calling even Robert Kennedy a Communist, and a reporter had recently asked the Attorney General to his face if he was a member of the party.

Conservatives in Congress were denouncing the idea of a march on Washington as a Communist tactic, Kennedy confided. J. Edgar Hoover had similar worries and would not hesitate to leak them, especially since the Bureau knew that King had two Communists working for him.

“They’re Communists,” Kennedy said. When King replied that he was not sure what that meant, as Hoover considered a great many people Communists, President Kennedy came back instantly with specifics: Jack O’Dell was a ranking member of the national committee of the American Communist Party. Stanley Levison’s position was too highly classified for him to give details, but the President could say that Levison was O’Dell’s “handler,” and King could draw his conclusions about Levison from that. These were the hard facts, said Kennedy. O’Dell was fully engaged in conspiracy as the “number five Communist in the United States.”

In closing, President Kennedy pulled out a scrap of paper. He said it was the latest poll, showing that his national support had plunged from 60 to 47 percent in the few days since he came out strongly for civil rights. None of those in the room ever could locate this dire poll—the President was famous for pulling fresh ones from his pocket for dramatic effect—but they had no doubt that the fight in Congress would be desperate. “I may lose the next election because of this,” said Kennedy. “I don’t care.” He was committed, and he needed their help.

gained recognition to ask whether the President in fact opposed the idea of a march on Washington, as indicated by press reports. His question invited the President to plant himself firmly against the idea, which offered him the best chance to scuttle the march but left no dignified avenue of retreat if the Negroes marched anyway. “We want success in the Congress,” he replied, “not a big show on the Capitol.” A. Philip Randolph was the first to speak up on the other side. “The Negroes are already in the streets,” he declared, and he told why he thought it was rightly so. To Randolph, this made the question academic. He said the situation was different from his near-march of 1941. “There will be a march,” he announced with his booming bass voice and clipped accent. The only question was what form it would take, whether it would be violent or nonviolent, well or poorly led.

In West Berlin—Hitler’s capital, a city haunted by the last holocaust and literally torn apart by threat of the next—150,000 Germans shouted his name at the foot of the Berlin Wall as Kennedy gave the speech of his life: Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was Civis Romanus sum. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner. There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin! There are those who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin! …All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein Berliner.

If a speech could be said to shake the world, this one did. The ear-crushing response thrilled Kennedy to the point of dread. Upon a word from him, or perhaps merely a raised arm, the hysterical crowd might have torn down the Berlin Wall with bare hands, and for an instant the thought chilled him as power gone mad again in Germany. As he climbed aboard Air Force One to leave, Kennedy said, “We’ll never have another day like this one as long as we live.”

cheers followed nearly every sentence. Among the few insertions to fit the time and place was a new call for a “march to Washington more than a hundred thousand strong” in support of the civil rights bill. “Let’s not fool ourselves,” said King. “This bill isn’t going to get through if we don’t put some work in it and some determined pressure.”

“There are some white people in this country who are as determined to see the Negro free as we are to be free,” he declared. In his final peroration, he delivered a longer and richer version of the “Dream” sequence that became famous two months later in Washington. He quoted Amos’ vision of justice, Jefferson’s democratic intuition, and finally the epiphany of Isaiah, ending: “I have a dream that one day ‘every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.’ I have a dream this afternoon that the brotherhood of man will become a reality…”

In those few days, a president of Irish descent went abroad to Germany while a preacher of African descent went inland to Detroit, both to stir the divided core of American identity. The proconsul defended the empire of freedom while the prophet proclaimed its soul. They inspired millions of the same people while acknowledging no fundamental differences in public. Together, they traced a sharp line of history. Where their interpretations of freedom overlapped, they inspired the clear hope of the decade. Where incompatible, they produced conflict as gaping as the Vietnam War.

It was Monday, June 24, fifty-four days after Bevel’s first children’s march in Birmingham, twelve days after the assassination of Medgar Evers. Stanley Levison missed the tribunal, having left the previous week for his annual vacation month in Ecuador. Some ventured jokes about what kind of Soviet agent would duck out just when his minions had the capitalists on the run, but the jokes fell flat. King somberly framed the dilemma. “I have just come out of Detroit, and it’s clear that the masses of people are with this movement,” he said. “But I’m dialectical enough to know that it’s your moment of greatest heights that could also be the beginning of your undoing.”

Young recalled, that Levison and O’Dell should sue the FBI for defamation and force the Bureau’s evidence out in court, if they dared. “Sue? Why should I sue?” interjected O’Dell, who had been brooding like a prisoner on death row. “I don’t consider it a slander!” He said he was proud of his association with Communists who had dedicated themselves to fighting racism. All of the people in the room knew most of them—they were some of Du Bois’s people, and Ben Davis, the hard-line vice chairman of the party, now sick with terminal cancer. O’Dell said he had never done anything to betray Dr. King. As the only one there who did not call King by his first name, he already felt less a colleague than a defendant, and soon he sputtered into rage. “Hoover can kiss my ass!” he said. “I am not the issue!” The issue was control of the movement, he said, and whatever Dr. King decided, he should not kid himself into believing that Hoover and the Kennedys would be satisfied with this one execution.

already was eating at Harry Belafonte, who was as close to Levison as any of them. Belafonte was saying you could not allow a witch-hunt into the movement—that’s how you self-destructed, piece by piece, that’s how Hitler came into power.

Levison was the star in absentia of a drama at home that was similarly fantastic. In many respects it was an American echo of the Alfred Dreyfus scandal in France, with the crucial distinction that the hysteria played out behind a wall of government secrecy. King was determined to resist President Kennedy’s personal order to banish Levison. Clearly, since he could not fire someone who did not work for him, Kennedy’s demand meant that the Administration laid claim to govern not only King’s hiring practices but also his friendships and contacts—even the advice he could seek and the words he could hear.

For King, who labored to maintain a receptive spirit of agape toward his bitterest enemies in civil rights, few prospects were more repugnant than shunning a dear friend as unfit for human contact.

His first line of defense was the proof. In July, King sent word that he would take no action until the Administration delivered the evidence promised by President Kennedy in the Rose Garden. This notice put Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall into a stall, as they could not fulfill th...

Reuther jumped in to correct the President’s approach. “You gotta get small groups of these fellows,” he said urgently. In Detroit, he had picked key auto executives. “And I said, ‘Look, you can’t escape this problem, and there are two ways of resolving it: either by reason or riots. Now the civil war that this is gonna trigger is not gonna be fought at Gettysburg, it’s gonna be fought in your backyard, in your plant, where your kids are growing up.’”

Not all white newspapers were attuned at first to the depth of the impression King had made. The Washington Post, for example, highlighted Randolph’s speech and made no mention of King’s. By contrast, The New York Times featured a story headlined “‘I Have a Dream…’ Peroration by Dr. King Sums Up a Day the Capital Will Remember,” by James Reston, on a front page containing no fewer than five different stories on the march, arranged in a collage around two large crowd photographs. It was perhaps the zenith of the Times’s pioneer devotion to the civil rights movement.

All King brought to Washington was a plea for federal assistance, but the Kennedy Administration, warned by Marshall, foreclosed such hopes. Early in the day, Robert Kennedy announced that he saw no legal basis for sending marshals or troops to Birmingham.

A pall hung over the private discussion in the Cabinet Room. King opened with a gloomy monologue on the twenty-eight unsolved bombings in Birmingham and the current tinderbox of segregationist martial law. “There is a great deal of frustration and despair and confusion in the Negro community,” he told the President. “And there is a feeling of being alone and not being protected. If you walk the street, you’re unsafe. If you stay at home, you’re unsafe—there’s a danger of a bombing. If you’re in church, now it isn’t safe. So that the Negro feels that everywhere he goes, or if he remains stationary, he’s in danger of some physical violence.”

“People ask me,” said Niebuhr, “since I am such a strong anti-pacifist, how I can have this admiration for a pacifist? Well, I have a simple answer…King’s doctrine of nonviolent resistance is not pacifism. Pacifism of really the classical kind is where you are concerned about your own purity and not responsibility. And the great ethical divide is between people who want to be pure and those who want to be responsible. And I think King has shown this difference.”