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

by Taylor Branch

Birmingham, saying that SNCC and far more radical groups would come behind him. “King has got a…terrific investment in nonviolence,” said the President, “and SNCC has got an investment in violence, and that’s the struggle.” But Kennedy himself made no threats, offered no deals, sold no bargains. He resumed the plaintive theme of a rather helpless president in a representative democracy, saying no fewer than twenty-five times that he wished they could take just one step, “even a public relations action…anything that gives a hook that suggests that the prospects are better.”

jail, SNCC leaders planned a Selma “Freedom Day” campaign, which was a cross between Nash’s new idea and Bob Moses’ plan for a Freedom Vote in Mississippi.

All this came through on the FBI wiretaps, but the Bureau was less excited about such contact after Robert Kennedy approved the wiretap on King’s home and New York office. Long before any results could be obtained, Hoover made a supplementary request to wiretap all four telephone lines at King’s SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. On Monday, October 21, Courtney

Rebel troops overthrew the South Vietnamese government in Saigon that same November 1, assassinating President Diem and his brother who had commanded the secret police. The bloody coup shocked many Americans into an unsettling first awareness of the Vietnam War, as news accounts speculated delicately but persistently about clandestine U.S. support for the revolt. All through the breakthrough year of 1963, the Vietnam crisis had built as a haunting foreign echo of civil rights. On May 8, during the peak of Bevel’s children’s marches in Birmingham, Vietnamese soldiers had killed monks and civilians in Hue to enforce a government order prohibiting the display of Buddhist colors on Buddha’s birthday. Buddhist protest had seized world attention a month later, on the day of the Medgar Evers assassination in Mississippi, when a monk named Trich Quan Duc publicly immolated himself in downtown Saigon. Vietnam’s Catholic rulers contemptuously dismissed a string of later suicides as “Buddhist barbecues” inspired by the Communist enemy.

Americans awakening to the Vietnam crisis puzzled over the conduct on both sides. Given the overwhelmingly Buddhist population, it was as though a Jewish U.S. president had forcibly suppressed Christmas as a Communist conspiracy. Uncomfortable barriers of religion and race plagued Kennedy Administration officials most responsible for U.S. war policy in Vietnam, so that they “decided long ago,” wrote Max Frankel in the Times, “to discuss it as little as possible.” Privately, however, they split over the most divisive internal question of the entire Administration: whether it was moral, democratic, or necessary to overthrow Diem in order to preserve a war against tyranny in Vietnam. “My government’s coming apart!”

Although Nichols held no unorthodox opinions for an agent—saying that King was a communist of the kind who thought he was a liberal and didn’t understand the danger of people like himself—he wished someone else had the job that stretched years ahead of him. On November 8, he notified his superiors that the King taps were up and running.

An unlikely combination of Muslims, militants, and J. H. Jackson loyalists walked out to convene an alternative Grass Roots Leadership Conference. What united them against Franklin was an aversion to nonviolence and to King’s eagerness for fellowship with white people. “I’m sick and tired of singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’” declared one preacher. Conservative Baptists preached racial pride, SNCC veterans such as Gloria Richardson wondered what virtue of integration could induce black people to give up the right of self-defense, and keynote speaker Malcolm X declared that integration was a training exercise for Negroes, run by whites. “You bleed when the white man says bleed,” he said, scolding a delighted crowd.

Much of the emotion was still personal and evanescent, but Malcolm X did preach one line that drove a deep wedge between King’s movement and his church heritage. Malcolm revered Moses as a common prophet of Islam and Judaism, and also as the father figure of the Negro Christian church. “Nowhere in that Bible can you show me where Moses went to his people and said, believe in the same god that your slavemaster believes in, or seek integration with the slavemaster,” Malcolm said often.

Malcolm X challenged King to prove how he could reconcile the ecumenical spirit of integration with the tribal cohesion of a Negro culture that was joined at the hip to Moses.

Budget officials, keen to the ramifications of Pilcher’s game, insisted that such an interpretation of the regulation would require presidential approval, but Kennedy made no final decision before leaving on a trip to make peace between quarrelsome Democratic factions in Texas. As soon as he left, an army of White House craftsmen stripped the Oval Office for a quick remodeling in his absence.

Stanley Levison rode the train to Washington for the Kennedy funeral. He came back talking of “a whole city in which no one talked in a normal tone of voice.” People were whispering, moving in slow motion. In all the eerie mass pain he saw only one hopeful turn of emotion: the news commentators were not hysterical, but instead were talking about how much hatred there had been. “A feeling like that covering a country can be more important than anything else,” Levison told his secretary. He called King’s literary agent to say that the Birmingham book must be postponed yet again. “This book always seems to be in the shadow of tragic deaths,” he said—Medgar Evers, the four girls, and now President Kennedy.

person who could be influenced by extremists from either side. Struggling to regain his political realism, he remarked that he was “not at all pessimistic” about Lyndon Johnson on civil rights, because he saw Johnson as a liberal New Dealer at heart. King liked Johnson, which was good, and in certain areas Johnson had more ability than Kennedy. King also attended the funeral, though neither he nor Levison was aware of the other. He traveled alone, without even his constant road man Bernard Lee, and stood unnoticed on the street. Like Roy Wilkins, he was deeply hurt not to have been invited to the funeral Mass at St. Matthew’s.

What King had envied in President Kennedy was his self-esteem and his lack of perceptible angst. Although politically on the defensive nearly every time King communicated with him, Kennedy always possessed an independent sense of well-being. By contrast, King was personally self-conscious. He worried about his looks, his tough skin, about what people thought of him and whether they might find out that he had ghostwriters for his books.

Johnson seemed to be insecure in ways that aroused only occasional sympathy and no admiration from King.

Kennedy’s best qualities remained his alone, untransferable to King, but the reverse was not true. In death, the late President gained credit for much of the purpose that King’s movement had forced upon him in life. No death had ever been like his—Niebuhr called him “an elected monarch.” In a mass purgative of hatred, bigotry, and violence, the martyred President became a symbol of the healing opposites, King’s qualities, which had been much too earnest for the living man. President Johnson told the nation that the most fitting eulogy would be swift passage of his civil rights bill. By this and other effects of mourning, Kennedy acquired the Lincolnesque mantle of a unifying crusader who had bled against the thorn of race. Honest biographers later found it impossible to trace an engaged personality in proportion to the honor.

In his seminal history, A Thousand Days, which was written and published during the peak of the national movement, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., introduced civil rights in the thirty-fifth of thirty-seven chapters.

Hoover abruptly severed all but the barest pretense of professional obligation or courtesy on the very day of the assassination in Dallas. Without the intervening power of President Kennedy, a state of mutual hatred quickly set in. From the standpoint of personal injury to King, Robert Kennedy did perhaps his greatest disservice by remaining a caretaker Attorney General for another ten months, when the FBI ran unchecked.

USA,” and King as “an unprincipled opportunistic individual.” Sullivan summoned Agent Nichols and others to Washington for a nine-hour war council, the result of which was a six-point plan to “expose King as an immoral opportunist who is not a sincere person but is exploiting the racial situation for personal gain.” All the top officials signed a ringing declaration of resolve laced with four of the usual pledges to proceed “without embarrassment to the Bureau.” The underlying hostility did not make the officials that unusual among Americans of their station. Nor was it unusual that an odd man such as Hoover would run aground in his obsession with normalcy. Race, like power, blinds before it corrupts, and Hoover saw not a shred of merit in either King or Levison. Most unforgivable was that a nation founded on Madisonian principles allowed secret police powers to accrue over forty years, until real and imagined heresies alike could be punished by methods less open to correction than the Salem witch trials. The hidden spectacle was the more grotesque because King and Levison both in fact were the rarest heroes of freedom, but the undercover state persecution would have violated democratic principles even if they had been common thieves.

The antiwar movement and others would be child’s play compared with the politics of lifting a despised minority from oblivion.

White volunteers would be beaten severely or killed, he said, and their race and status would magnify the national reaction. To the extent that SNCC consciously used the students as white lambs of sacrifice, they must bear the burden of that moral and political choice.

student asked about the effects of Kennedy’s death, King said it was a blessing for civil rights. “Because I’m convinced that had he lived, there would have been continual delays, and attempts to evade it at every point, and water it down at every point,” he said, almost brightly. “But I think his memory and the fact that he stood up for this civil rights bill will cause many people to see the necessity for working passionately…So I do think we have some very hopeful days ahead.”

Legal segregation was doomed. Negroes no longer were invisible, nor those of normal capacity viewed as statistical freaks. In this sense, Kennedy’s murder marked the arrival of the freedom surge, just as King’s own death four years hence marked its demise. New interior worlds were opened, along with a means of understanding freedom movements all over the globe. King was swelling.

King had crossed over as a patriarch like Moses into a land less bounded by race. To keep going, he became a pillar of fire.