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

by Taylor Branch

Why should we hire Negroes? You don’t hire Negroes.’” Kennedy introduced Civil Service Commission chairman John Macy for a quick summary of the numbers elsewhere: of 405 U.S. Treasury employees in Nashville, there were four Negroes, all clerks; of 249 Agriculture Department employees in Nashville, two Negro clerks; of 114 employees at Labor and Commerce, no Negroes at all. Rolling out similar statistics for other Southern cities, Macy endorsed the Attorney General’s view that it was better to address them early than “just wait until they flare up.”

In Jackson, the unburied corpse of Medgar Evers already was a shrine to the altered state of American race relations. His murder was eerie and providential, so flushed with history as to seem perversely proper—shot in the back on the very night President Kennedy embraced racial democracy as a moral cause. This was a mythical event of race, the first national one since Emmett Till’s death trip into the Tallahatchie River. In a subtle but important turn of perception, people referred to the killing as a political assassination instead of a lynching, adding both personal and historical connotations.

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.

Atlanta’s Mayor Ivan Allen stunned the political world by publicly endorsing the new civil rights bill, becoming the first and only elected Southern official to do so.

They revealed for the first time King’s talk of sex and his Negro vernacular, proving to Hoover that he was not the high-minded moralist he claimed to be. Hoover had no trouble seeing King as both a bloodless Communist puppet and a sybarite of unbridled desire—a “tom cat,” as Hoover called him.

Niebuhr thought Rockefeller’s spicy divorce and remarriage might have the political effect of turning the Republicans into “a reactionary party” built upon white voters in the South and West. Jackie Robinson expressed similar fears in a newspaper column headed “Is the GOP Going Lily White?”

When Kennedy suggested that it might be unwise to force showdowns with entire Southern states, Johnson said, “Yeah, but I want the governor of Texas and the governor of Arkansas and the governor of Georgia…to know that when they stand up there and come out for segregation, it may cost them the economy of that state.

“I refuse to become bitter,” he said, then moved to a final peroration on a theme that had inspired the multitude at his Detroit speech in June. “And so tonight I say to you, as I have said before, I have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” he began. “I have a dream that one day, right down in Birmingham, Alabama, where the home of my good friend Arthur Shores was bombed just last night, white men and Negro men, white women and Negro women, will be able to walk together as brothers and sisters.

A chorus of news cameras clicked as James Garner pushed through the crowd hand in hand with Negro actress Diahann Carroll; they were among dozens who had arrived on the Hollywood “celebrity plane” organized by Harry Belafonte and Clarence Jones. Even those who had attended a hundred mass meetings never had witnessed anything like Marlon Brando on the giant stage, holding up for the world an actual cattle prod from Gadsden as an indictment of segregationist hatred.

What the Republicans were “trying to do is to play to the South—with some success, these days.” Nationally, they had nothing to lose, as the Democrats already had most of the Negro vote, and if they could push the President into a crusade, then they could be safely for civil rights and still hang blame for Negro excess on the Democrats.

an exhaustive analysis revealed little or no Communist involvement in the march. The Communist Party’s most sensible members had long since quit by the tens of thousands, and those remaining were largely ineffectual misfits, damaged by years of persecution and welded to psychosis, Soviet dogma, and dreams of cataclysm. There was a note of triumph in Assistant Director William Sullivan’s appraisal of the march as a home-grown American protest.

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.

When the 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.

Race had taught him hard lessons about the greater witness of sacrifice than truth, but there was more. Nonviolence had come over him for a purpose that far transcended segregation. It touched evils beyond color and addressed needs more human than status or possessions. Having lifted him up among rulers, it would drive him back down to die among garbage workers in Memphis. 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.