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

by Taylor Branch

If white realtors had trouble selling a house, they often advanced Stokes the down payment, letting him keep his “refund” when white buyers mobilized to keep him out of their neighborhood. Stokes would joke with his deacons about the justice of making the whites pay for their prejudice, and he donated a portion of the proceeds to the church.

Because Negroes had trouble finding motels and restaurants to serve them in the segregated South, he would pack blocks of cheese and quarts of milk in ice and take off on drives of non-stop poetry recital. Fellow travelers knew him to finish all of Keats in Alabama and get through Byron and Browning before hitting Farmville. Johns calculated distances in units of poetry, and if he tired of verse he waded into military history.

His son shrank from it, commenting publicly only once, after the Montgomery bus boycott, that “perhaps” he had “earned” his name. Reverend King supplied the wish and the preparation, but it remained for strangers in the world at large to impose Martin Luther King’s new name upon him.

The standing joke among the Crozer students who survived these courses was that Pritchard destroyed the biblical image of Moses in the first term and Enslin finished off Jesus in the second.

Keighton, like Augustine, emphasized that a large part of religion was public persuasion, as can occur when speakers of the highest gifts address the most difficult questions.

King came to accept the shorthand description of oratory as “the three P’s”: proving, painting, and persuasion, aimed to win over successively the mind, imagination, and heart.

In what was to become a permanent pattern of conversation between them, King gently teased his father about being old-fashioned, and Reverend King defended his methods by pointing to his own time-tested success in the world. The underlying battle of wills was a stalemate, the insurrectionary potential of which was not lost on relatives such as Rev. Joel King.

“However large the number of individual white men who…will identify themselves completely with the Negro cause, the white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so. Upon that point one may speak with a dogmatism which all history justifies.”

Even as a student, King believed that religion was alive only at its edges, and that doubt was as important as belief. In a paper obviously influenced by Hegel and Niebuhr, King wrote that “if a position implies a negation, and a negation a position, then faith carries disbelief with it, theism, atheism, and if one member of the pair comes to be doubted the result may be disastrous to religion itself.”

This sort of morally radioactive situation has always given religious institutions a powerful incentive to seek quiet, private solutions in matters of sex and the clergy.

When race is added as a third factor—as it was in this case by the fear that a McCall scandal would give ammunition to those who opposed Crozer’s recruitment of Negro students—the combination becomes so unbearably sensitive that discretion and hypocrisy govern almost instinctively. Historically, such avoidance would help explain how some four million mulattoes came into being in the United States with practically no recorded cases of legal or ecclesiastical disgrace ever attached to members of the dominant white culture.

The boycott was on. King would work on his timing, but his oratory had just made him forever a public person. In the few short minutes of his first political address, a power of communion emerged from him that would speak inexorably to strangers who would both love and revile him, like all prophets. He was twenty-six, and had not quite twelve years and four months to live.

It was for King the first transcendent religious experience of his life. The moment lacked the splendor of a vision or of a voice speaking out loud, as Vernon Johns said they did, but such differences could be ascribed to rhetorical license. For King, the moment awakened and confirmed his belief that the essence of religion was not a grand metaphysical idea but something personal, grounded in experience—something that opened up mysteriously beyond the predicaments of human beings in their frailest and noblest moments.

Therefore, King argued, the proper purpose of the desired civil rights laws was to take down “Whites Only” signs and to secure the ballot for Negroes who wanted to vote. “A law may not make a man love me,” said King, “but it can stop him from lynching me.”

King wrote a year later, in a public letter that darted between flattery and suspicion. “I would say that Nixon has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere. When you are close to Nixon he almost disarms you with his apparent sincerity…. And so I would conclude by saying that if Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.”

Edward Teller, the hydrogen bomb scientist, told Eisenhower that Sputnik was a worse defeat for the United States than Pearl Harbor.

Gandhi’s lifelong struggle to harmonize his own life with his philosophy. King found much to tease himself and Coretta about on these accounts. Embarking on a trip to study Gandhi, a man who had renounced wealth, sex, and all clothing except his loincloth, the Kings carried trunks stuffed with suits and dresses to wear at the most elegant of the hotels built during the British Raj. Their first act on the trip was to pay a large tariff for excess baggage.

Since the final collapse of the U.S. Communist Party after 1956, Hoover had anticipated a bureaucratic danger similar to the end of World War II: a completed mission.

Hoover, facing the logical superfluity of thousands of his agents, immediately authorized a new campaign to keep them occupied in extralegal harassments of Communists and other protest groups.

Hoover kept COINTELPRO highly secret, as it violated basic constitutional restrictions on internal police power.

In 1959, while carrying out the renewed investigation of Stanley Levison, the New York FBI office assigned four hundred special agents to internal security squads and only four to organized crime.

The Nashville students—destined to establish themselves as the largest, most disciplined, and most persistent of the nonviolent action groups in the South—extended the sit-in movement into its third state.

was the defining, animating zeal of the conference, so readily accepted that the students put the word “Nonviolent” into the name they chose for themselves: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. They were the first civil rights group ever to do so.

Eleanor Roosevelt continued to campaign for Stevenson, making scathing remarks about Kennedy as a puppet of his millionaire father and a coward in the battle against McCarthyism.*

On the other hand, he had grown up resenting the South’s one-party system because it allowed unchallenged Southern committee chairmen to dominate Congress, penalizing his home state. Having been taught that perpetuation of Southern oligarchs in Congress was related somehow to the exclusion of Negroes from politics, Doar resolved that it would be a service to history and to Wisconsin if he helped create an honest, Wisconsin-style two-party system in the South.

Most fundamentally, they had persuaded Southern federal judges to declare portions of the new act to be unconstitutional infringements on the rights of the states, which forced the Justice Department to win contrary opinions on appeal before the cases could go forward. This was taking years, and meanwhile the Southerners were discovering other methods of avoidance and delay.

Senator Kennedy responded directly to the challenge in a formal address to Protestant clergymen in Houston, endorsing “an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference…” Kennedy’s Houston speech effectively drove the religious issue underground for the remainder of the campaign, where it joined the equally explosive issue of civil rights.

The press office at campaign headquarters was also denying the story, on the orders of John Seigenthaler. When Robert Kennedy checked in by telephone that night, Seigenthaler told him about the press rumor: “Guess what that crazy judge says in Georgia? He says you called him about King not getting bail.” There was a long pause on Kennedy’s end of the line. “Did he say that?” “Yes,” replied Seigenthaler. “But don’t worry. I…put out a denial.” After another long pause, Kennedy said, “Well, you better…retract it.”

the most startling component of Kennedy’s victory was his 40 percent margin among Negro voters. In 1956, Negroes had voted Republican by roughly 60-40; in 1960, they voted Democratic by roughly 70—30.

Politics and personal beliefs aside, the Nixon campaign was fatally encrusted with the incumbent Eisenhower bureaucracy in Washington. It moved by memo, letter, and clearance, whereas the Kennedy people moved by telephone.

Still, one plain fact shined through everywhere: two little phone calls about the welfare of a Negro preacher were a necessary cause of Democratic victory. This fact mattered dearly to Republican county chairmen as well as Democratic mayors, to students of politics as well as crusaders on both sides of the civil rights issue.

That at the heart of this phenomenon was not just any preacher but Martin Luther King gave his name a symbolic resonance that spilled outside the small constituency of civil rights. Before, King had been a curiosity to most of the larger world—unsettling and primeval in meaning, perhaps, but as remote as the backseats of buses or the other side of town. Now, as a historical asterisk, a catalytic agent in the outcome of the presidential election, he registered as someone who might affect the common national history of whites and Negroes alike.

Such was the lesson of the King phone calls in the campaign, and the advisers were shrewd enough to recognize another sign hidden among the election results. In Fayette County, Tennessee—one of the two counties in Tennessee where John Doar of the Eisenhower Justice Department had sued to protect Negroes—twelve hundred new Negro votes helped turn the county Republican for the first time since Reconstruction. This landslide, going against the general Kennedy landslide, was interpreted to mean that Negroes in the South would reward those who helped them gain the right to vote.

The race issue was intruding on Kennedy’s early presidency so persistently as to be irksome. Even before the inauguration, he had been forced to pass over his first choice for Secretary of State, Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, because of Fulbright’s segregationist voting record.

The President believed that segregation, like colonialism, was an anachronistic addiction curable by the steady advance of modern attitudes.

John Seigenthaler soon found himself tearing down the highway from Birmingham to Montgomery with a White House telegram in his pocket. On this, the fifth day of what had begun as an ad hoc goodwill trip, he was pressed into higher service as an emissary of the President. He rushed directly to the Alabama capitol. Escorted into the governor’s office, he confronted not only Patterson but the wary faces of all the Alabama cabinet members, convened around a long table for an extraordinary night session.

As she did, two men stepped between Seigenthaler and the car door, one of them shouting “Who the hell are you?” With Seigenthaler frantically telling them to get back, that he was a federal agent, the other men brought a pipe down on the side of Seigenthaler’s head.

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.

From jail, John Lewis notified the Quakers by letter that he was withdrawing from the India program because he wanted to work full time in the South.

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.

James Forman, the new executive secretary of SNCC, and suggested that he organize a group of Freedom Riders to test the Albany train station. Forman liked the idea. He was a publicist who had come South from Chicago to write stories about the movement. Forman could be abrasive—he had been thrown out of the sharecroppers’ “tent cities” in Fayette County, Tennessee, on charges of “factionalism”—and he had brought to SNCC’s autumn meeting a taste for apocalyptic heroics that had struck Bob Moses as amusing.

By this, his first written assessment of King, Hoover marked him for FBI hostility in advance of any investigation.

“We want all of our rights,” he shouted. “…We want our freedom here in America, here in the black belt of Mississippi, here behind the cotton curtain of Alabama, here on the red clay of Georgia…We have lived with gradualism, and we know that it is nothing but do-nothingism and escapism which ends up in standstillism!”

King dropped his hands “like a newborn baby,” she said, and from then on she never doubted that his nonviolence was more than the heat of his oratory or the result of his slow calculation. It was the response of his quickest instincts.

“No, I mean the Republicans in Alabama,” said Sorensen, making the point that Kennedy would be safe from partisan attack at least in the Deep South: both parties would attack him.

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.”

The running battle between Hoover and Kennedy defined the larger political context for the escalation of activity against King, as FBI officials were protecting their anti-Communist intelligence apparatus. Enmity toward King was a driving force. O’Dell was a fresh rationale. The missile crisis was a spur and an opportunity. Finally, the original Levison wiretap was up for six-month renewal, which generated bureaucratic pressures to justify past surveillance by extending it.

That an intelligence agency took such a step in the belief that King was an enemy of freedom, ignorant of the reality that King had just set in motion the greatest firestorm of domestic liberty in a hundred years, was one of the saddest ironies of American history.

Neither prospect was attractive, as Hoover much preferred the license of political intelligence to the rigors and risks of law enforcement.

Although the image of the savage attack struck like lightning in the American mind, the reaction of Walter Gadsden lay buried in the deeper convolutions of race. True to his family, he later said the German shepherd had shocked him into the realization that he had been “mixing with a bad crowd” of Negroes when he went to observe the demonstration. He resolved to get off the streets and prepare for college.