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

by Taylor Branch

Undoubtedly some of the tensions were the legacy of slavery’s division between the lowly field hands and the slightly more privileged house servants, the latter more often mulattoes.

as all roads converged at the Negro church. It served not only as a place of worship but also as a bulletin board to a people who owned no organs of communication, a credit union to those without banks, and even a kind of people’s court. These and a hundred extra functions further enhanced the importance of the minister, creating opportunities and pressures that forged what amounted to a new creature and caused the learned skeptic W. E. B. Du Bois to declare at the turn of the twentieth century that “the preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil.”

Truman’s order reminded everyone that the source of Montgomery’s new identity was the Yankee government itself, which was imposing a regimen of full-fledged race-mixing at the two huge air bases.

The Negro professional class in Montgomery was pitifully small: one dentist and three doctors for 50,000 people, as opposed to 43 dentists and 144 doctors for a roughly equivalent number of whites.

The backbone of the Negro middle class was its educators—the faculty at Alabama State and the public school teachers—but they were utterly dependent on the goodwill of the white politicians who paid their salaries.

Like Booker T. Washington, he espoused hard, humbling work in basic trades, as opposed to W. E. B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth” strategy, which called first for an assault on the leadership classes by an educated Negro elite. Like Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, Johns advocated a simultaneous campaign for full political rights.

Like Du Bois, he believed fiercely in the highest standards of scholarship and never suffered fools at all, much less gladly. But like Washington, he believed that the dignity and security of a people derived from its masses, and that without stability and character in the masses an elite could live above them only in fantasy.

Had the student strike begun ten or fifteen years later, Barbara Johns would have become something of a phenomenon in the public media. In that era, however, the case remained muffled in white consciousness, and the schoolchild origins of the lawsuit were lost as well on nearly all Negroes outside Prince Edward County.

insofar as the Kings encountered anything better than obstruction in the white world, it could be traced more often than not to the influence of a most unlikely source, John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller’s impact upon Negro Atlanta can be dated from a Sunday service in June 1882 at the Erie Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, which he attended with his wife and in-laws.

The Baptists were descended from the Anabaptists of sixteenth-century Germany, who had rebelled against Martin Luther for not going far enough in his break with the Catholic Church. They were the extreme democrats, hostile to complex theological doctrines and to any church practice that fostered the authority of the clergy.

Rockefeller himself always loathed the weakness of the poor and the messy obstructions of democracy, but he would cling to the church of the common people.

As a result, Atlanta would not develop along the usual pattern of a Negro inner city surrounded by whites. The two races would move outward into their own suburbs.

Northerners acquiesced in the renewed hegemony of Southern whites. The reigning idea was that racial quarrels, while accomplishing nothing since the Civil War, had interfered with business, diverted reform campaigns from more productive fields, and hindered America’s new efforts to win a commanding position in the battle for global influence.

A year later, Laura Spelman Rockefeller died, and the old man was obliged to keep her body in storage for three months until his lawyers worked out a truce with Ohio officials who threatened to arrest him under a $311 million tax judgment if he set foot in Ohio to bury her.

Most Negroes, not being large property owners, had no need of fire or automobile insurance. Negro insurance companies created their own market by inventing policies tailored to their clientele—small ones, designed to pay for funerals and doctor’s bills, occasionally for education.

More creatively, he saw that if an insurance company could go door to door for its money rather than wait for customers to bring it to the office, so could a church. Therefore, King made every effort to recruit insurance salesmen and executives for membership at Ebenezer.

In the spring of 1934—a little more than two years after taking the pulpit at Ebenezer—Mike King asked his membership to send him on a summer-long tour of Europe, Africa, and the Holy Land. It was a trip that the richest of people might have envied in those hard times, and for a Negro sharecropper’s son to step right up to such a fantasy so soon after landing his first full-time job, so soon after attaining basic literacy, stretched even the bounds of the American Dream.

This was King’s moment, the watershed of his life, and he honored the occasion by changing his name from Michael to Martin, becoming Martin Luther King. For consistency, he also changed the name of his older son to Martin Luther King, Jr. The change of name was one of the most important events in the younger King’s early life.

Name changes have always been part of religious history, used to announce the existence of a “new person.” Jacob became Israel, Saul of Tarsus became Paul, Simon became Peter, and the first act of every new pope is to choose a special name for his reign.

Under slavery, a name was the property of the master and not of the slave, so that a slave’s name frequently changed at the auction block and sometimes on the whim of the master. Among the joyous feelings most frequently mentioned by freed or escaped slaves was the freedom to choose a name. A name was no longer incidental. “For it is through our names that we first place ourselves in the world,” Ralph Ellison wrote.

The terms “black” and “negro” (the latter traceable to the earliest slave traders, who were Spanish and Portuguese) were widely disparaged because the slavemasters had preferred them, and also because their literal meaning excluded hundreds of thousands of mulattoes, whose color was not black. “Colored” was thought to be more inclusively accurate, but among other drawbacks it failed to distinguish the former slaves from Orientals and Indians. Moreover, the term “colored” implied that whites were not colored, or that coloring was a property added somehow to basic human qualities. Alternatively, some argued for the word “African,” but this only raised a continuing dispute as to whether the term referred to race or the place of origin. By the late nineteenth century, the term “Negro” came to be widely accepted, after newspapers in New Orleans mounted a campaign to capitalize the first letter.

The NAACP adopted the respectable-sounding “colored people” at its founding in 1909, but the next year the first Negro-owned daily newspaper to circulate throughout the nation tossed out all the contending names in favor of its own invention, the word “Race,” which was the semantic equivalent of a placebo.

In 1934, the year of M.L.’s baptism and Reverend King’s trip to Europe, the NAACP split asunder in an ugly public controversy that revealed once again the trick mirrors around the issues of race and racial identity,

At the center, as usual, was W. E. B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP and editor for twenty-four years of its magazine, The Crisis. The brilliance of his attacks on Booker T. Washington’s policy of racial accommodation and his call for full-scale protest of all injustices against Negroes had positioned him to succeed Washington in national leadership after the latter’s death in 1915.

A variety of frustrations had swelled within Du Bois during the 1920s, and during the Depression he had come to focus most of his ire upon his nominal boss, Walter White.

By 1934, Du Bois had come to a rather bitter turn. His fame did not change the fact that he was sixty-six years old, with no savings, and being overtaken by younger, more practical men. In addition to these problems, he faced his own growing pessimism—telling himself that the South was just as segregated, and the North more so, than they had been before he and the NAACP began their labors. Such thoughts boiled up into his shattering editorial for the January 1934 Crisis, in which he turned the entire NAACP philosophy on its head. Negroes should face the fact that they would die segregated, he declared, in spite of all justice and their best efforts. Therefore, to hate segregation was inevitably to hate themselves, and it would be far better to embrace voluntary segregation in schools, colleges, businesses—both for reasons of psychic well-being and to build concentrated strength for later fights.

Du Bois received very little support, as even his long-standing admirers believed his comments would bolster the old white racist argument that Negroes fared better under segregation. His bureaucratic enemies within the NAACP denounced him for the heresy of proposing to “embrace Jim Crow.”

At another level, the controversy showed, like others before and after, that racial isolation and racial outreach can each be taken as foolish and cowardly or as wise and brave, depending on historical mood and circumstance.

Like The Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind contributed heavily to a national consensus that for sixty years had been building on a foundation of nationalism, Social Darwinism, and psychological avoidance. The result was that no remotely accurate history of post-Reconstruction race relations survived in the majority culture, even in advanced scholarship.

The national consensus became so strong that the very subject of race was reduced to distorted subliminal images—as captured in the two films—and sophisticated white Americans took it for granted that the Civil War sprang from causes that had little if anything to do with race.

The opening of Gone With the Wind swept aside ordinary life. Even the theater critic of the Daily Worker wanted so badly to praise the film that the U.S. Communist Party had to fire him for capitalist heresy, as The New York Times rather gleefully reported.

The big news during King’s last year at Morehouse came out of Washington. Truman became the first American President to address an NAACP convention, and when the commission he had appointed the previous year released its report, “To Secure These Rights,” most observers expressed shock that Truman allowed publication of an agenda so far in advance of public opinion. The report brought the phrase “civil rights” into common political parlance, replacing “the Negro question.”

Harry Emerson Fosdick had preached a widely publicized sermon at New York’s Riverside Church earlier that year in which he argued that the Communist movement had stolen two dormant aspects of traditional Christian appeal: the psychology of conversion, and the Social Gospel’s commitment to the oppressed. King read The Communist Manifesto and some interpretations of Marx and Lenin before framing an objection to communism that would serve him the rest of his life.

he came to reject communism because of its “historical materialism and ethical relativism,” meaning Marx’s doctrine that economic forces alone determine the path of history and Lenin’s teaching that what was good in politics was to be defined continuously by the vanguard party according to the needs of the revolution. King objected that these cold, scientific doctrines left no room for moral forces to act in history, or for moral standards to rise above the Machiavellian, tyrannical tendencies of politics.

For that reason, Moral Man and Immoral Society caused a howl of betrayal among practically all nonfundamentalists interested in religion, because Niebuhr attacked the Social Gospel’s premise that the steady advance of reason and goodwill in the modern age was capable of eradicating social evils.

Niebuhr ridiculed Dewey’s notion that ignorance was the principal cause of injustice, stating instead that it was “our predatory self-interest.” There was no evidence, said Niebuhr, that human beings became less selfish or less predatory as they became better educated. War, cruelty, and injustice survived because people were by nature sinful. Niebuhr accused the liberal world of being “in perfect flight from the Christian doctrine of sin.”

What Niebuhr did was to invent his own distinction between the character of people acting in large social groups as opposed to their character as individual people. Human nature was such that individuals could respond to reason, to the call of justice, and even to the love perfection of the religious spirit, but nations, corporations, labor unions, and other large social groups would always be selfish. Society, Niebuhr argued, responded substantively only to power, which meant that all the forces of piety, education, charity, reform, and evangelism could never hope to eliminate injustice without dirtying themselves in power conflicts. He ridiculed, for example, the notion that moral suasion would ever bring fundamental economic and political rights to the American Negro in Detroit or anywhere else.

Acknowledging that the Marxists understood the need for power to establish justice, he attacked them for pretending to have discovered a science of history even though Marx offered only an “apocalyptic vision” of triumph over selfishness and oppression, “in the style of great drama and classical religion.” Believing unreservedly in their false science, Niebuhr wrote, Marxists fell easily into blind tolerance of the injustice inherent in their creed, which, “charged with both egotism and vindictiveness,” proclaimed it the destiny of Marxists to speak for the poor and to exact vengeance upon the non-poor. According to Niebuhr, the inevitable result was a naïve credulity as well as “a policy of force and fear.”* He denounced Stalin’s “policy of ‘liquidating’ foes”—in a book published in 1932, years before most observers in the United States realized that such a policy really existed.

Mainstream liberals, such as the editor of the Christian Century, were disturbed by the Marxist themes that remained in his work, while Marxists hated him for criticizing Stalin.

During the intervening eighteen years, Hitler had changed Niebuhr’s theory of immoral society and implacable evil from a theologian’s semantic invention to the most hotly debated topic on the globe.

If Niebuhr was correct, however, any Social Gospel preacher was necessarily a charlatan, and the Negroes among them were spiritual profiteers, enjoying the immense rewards of the Negro pulpit while dispensing a false doctrine of hope.

In his book, Niebuhr attacked pacifists and idealists for their assumption that Gandhi had invented an approach that allowed religious people to be politically effective while avoiding the corruptions of the world. For Niebuhr, Gandhi had abandoned Tolstoy the moment he began to resist the color laws in South Africa. Gandhi’s strikes, marches, boycotts, and demonstrations were all forms of coercion, which, though nonviolent, were contrary to the explicit meaning of “Resist not evil.” Niebuhr applauded what Gandhi was doing but not the sentimental interpretations that placed Gandhians above the ethical conflicts of ordinary mortals. For Niebuhr, such a belief was dangerously self-righteous as well as unfounded.

In later years, King never tried to stem the rivers of ink that described him as a Gandhian. Part of his acquiescence was a product of public relations, as he knew that within the American mass market there was a certain exotic comfort in the idea of a Gandhian Negro. King mentioned buying a half-dozen books about Gandhi in a single evening, but he never bothered to name or describe any of them. He almost never spoke of Gandhi personally, and his comments about Gandhism were never different than his thoughts about nonviolence in general. By contrast, he invoked Niebuhr in every one of his own major books, always with a sketch of Moral Man and Immoral Society.

He had long since invented a coded rating system for eligible women, calling an attractive woman a “doctor” and a stunning one a “constitution,” saying that she was “well-established and amply endowed.”

Augustine had made Christianity at least as respectable philosophically as Manicheanism, Neo-Platonism, and astrology, its chief rivals among Mediterranean intellectuals in the early fifth century A.D. His doctrines of church authority helped the Vatican survive the Middle Ages, the eight hundred years that followed the destruction of the Roman Empire.

President Eisenhower commented that the American form of government makes no sense without a “deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.” This statement annoyed liberal and conservative intellectuals alike, but the general public seemed to approve.

All sources, including E. D. Nixon, agree that the long discussion at Rosa Parks’s home that first night was confined to the prospect of a legal challenge to the arrest, without mention of a boycott, and no one denies that before morning the women had written an independent letter calling for a boycott. These facts support King’s original division of the credit.

Nixon has been slighted by popular history and patronized by supporters of King. Openly wounded by this treatment, Nixon has probably exaggerated his role in response. And the Montgomery women have been ignored to a greater extent even than Nixon.

Rufus Lewis seized the moment. He and Nixon had never liked each other much, having been personal and class rivals for decades. Lewis feared that Nixon’s intimidating speech was a preplanned signal for someone to propose that Nixon himself head the new boycott organization, and in that light it was quite fortunate that King had arrived just then to speak in a manner that both challenged Nixon and agreed with him. All this went through Lewis’ head in a flash, and he quickly took the floor to move that Dr. M. L. King be elected president.

Idealists would say afterward that King’s gifts made him the obvious choice. Realists would scoff at this, saying that King was not very well known, and that his chief asset was his lack of debts or enemies. Cynics would say that the established preachers stepped back for King only because they saw more blame and danger ahead than glory. No leader had promised all Montgomery to secure justice for Claudette Colvin, and what would have become of his reputation if he had?