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

by Taylor Branch

“There can be no doubt that if the problem of racial

discrimination is not solved in the not too distant future, some Negroes, out of frustration, discontent, and despair, will turn to some other ideology.”

It is history’s wry paradox that when Negroes win their struggle to be free, those who have held them down will themselves be freed for the first time.”

“True peace is not merely the absence of tension, but it is the presence of justice,” King told the audience. “And I think this is what Jesus meant when he looked at his disciples one day and said, ‘I come not to bring peace but a sword.’ Now certainly he didn’t mean he came to bring a physical sword. Certainly he didn’t mean that he did not come to bring true peace. But Jesus was saying this in substance: that…whenever I come, a conflict is precipitated between the old and the new. Whenever I come, tension sets in between justice and injustice…The tension which we see in the South today is the necessary tension that comes when the oppressed rise up and start to move forward toward a permanent, positive peace.”

But…legislation and court orders can only declare rights. They can never thoroughly deliver them. Only when the people themselves begin to act are rights on paper given life blood.”

Go back with me if you will to the Old Testament. See Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego as they stand before King Nebuchadnezzar. They made it clear: ‘We cannot bow.’ Come if you will to Plato’s Dialogues. Open the Credo or the Apology. See Socrates practicing civil disobedience. Academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. Come to the early Christians. See them practicing civil disobedience to the point that they were willing to be thrown to the lions to stand up for what they believed. Listen to Peter as he says, ‘We must obey God rather than man.’ Come up to the modern world. Never forget that everything that Hitler did in Germany was legal. It was illegal to aid and comfort a Jew in the day of Hitler’s Germany. And I believe that if I had lived there with my present attitude I would have disobeyed that law, and I would have encouraged people to aid and comfort our Jewish brothers. If I lived in South Africa today, I would join Chief Luthuli as he says to his people, ‘Break this law. Don’t take this unjust pass system where you must have passes. Take them and tear them up and throw them away.’”

can hear the blood of Emmett Till as it calls from the ground!”

Since he viewed Albany as part of a universal moral issue, with only one clear and just resolution that ought to be as compelling to a white reporter in Iowa as to himself, it nettled him to see people of all opinions stand aside to analyze the results as though segregation might be vindicated, or nonviolence falsified,

King knew that Kennedy and Barnett still had more in common with each other than either had with him.

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From Savannah, where John Wesley first landed from England with his Anglican theology shaken by Whitefield’s preaching on the voyage, Whitefield’s influence spawned Baptist congregations and later Wesleyan (Methodist) ones.

I think this is bad history of Whitfield's influence on the Wesleys.

the Bureau would refuse to warn King as it routinely warned other potential targets, such as Shuttlesworth. The FBI assigned full enemy status to King, who had staked his life and his religion on the chance that enemy-thinking might be overcome.

Augustine’s warning: “Those that sit at rest while others take pains are tender turtles, and buy their quiet with disgrace.”

my face, for your hands are full of tar. For the people that I sent you to serve are in need, and you are doing nothing but being concerned about yourself.’ Seems that I can hear God saying that it’s time to rise up now and make it clear that the evils of the universe must be removed. And that God isn’t going to do all of it by himself. The church that overlooks this is a dangerously irrelevant church.”

Hoover much preferred the license of political intelligence to the rigors and risks of law enforcement.

If King felt fury, it was not against Bull Connor or the most virulent of racists, as there were more unfathomable sins than theirs, but against the aloof moderates and blind pietists who refused to see that King was offering them a way out of a maddeningly obvious and relatively easy evil—the sins against brotherhood.

a “God-troubled” man,

folk singer Pete Seeger soon took Bob Dylan on his first pilgrimage to the South.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumblingblock is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice, who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action,” who paternalistically believes that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom…

Here was the early church reincarnate, with King rebuking the empire for its hatred, for its fearful defense of worldly attachments.

Douglass insisted that slavery existed only because it was respectable, and that it was respectable because men such as Jones were wrongly accorded the gentlemanly respect due Christians.

A century later, religious respectability remained the crux of the issue that incensed King as he wrote Jones’s great-grandson and namesake, Bishop C. C. Jones Carpenter. As instigator and first signatory, Carpenter had hand-carried the clerical letter attacking the Negro demonstrations to the Birmingham newspapers, exercising great care against interception or editorial changes.

Carpenter chided King on the grounds that protest lacked Christian respectability,

“One day the South will recognize its real heroes…One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers.”

“If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.”

Not a single mention of the letter reached white or Negro news media for a month.

The church had paved the way for the movement by swallowing up not only the fear of death but also distinctions of race and age and all the compromises of everyday sanity.

King committed his cause to the witness of schoolchildren.

The police don’t know how to handle the situation governed by love, and the power of God.

itself. “The problem with us is that we are too afraid of dying,” he said, “and too afraid of going places that will cause us to die.” Instead of worrying about the Birmingham jail, he advised the fearful, “when you go home tonight you better stand up in the corner and not go to bed, because more folk have died in the bed than any place I know.”

“And God knows, he needs our love…. And let me say to you that I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love.”

you rise to love on this level,” he declared, “you love those who don’t move you. You love those that you don’t like. You love those whose ways are distasteful to you. You love every man because God loves him!”

the first Negro in the twentieth century known to have tried to register in Holmes County.

“Of course Officer Watkins and myself were sitting between two negroes,” Officer Allison reported to Bull Connor, “and they really gave us the treatment.”

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.”

Duke University announced the admission of its first Negro students.

We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it. And we cherish our freedom here at home. But are we to say to the world—and much more importantly, to each other—that this is the land of the free, except for Negroes, that we have no second-class citizens, except Negroes, that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race, except with respect to Negroes? Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them…. We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and a people…A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change,

peaceful and constructive for all.

“Sit me up!” he ordered sharply, then, “Turn me loose!” These were the last words of Medgar Evers, who was pronounced dead an hour later.

Two men demanding integration chained themselves to the gallery of the Ohio legislature.

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.

Kennedy stressed the mixed marriage as a sign of instability, describing both Jones and Harry Belafonte as questionable types animated by guilt and beguiled by celebrity glitter and wealth.

since the introduction of the civil rights bill, Negro voters favored President Kennedy by an astonishing 30 to 1 over any Republican opponent.

By this time, King had lowered his personal barriers to Jones, offering him the essential secrets of his private life. Unerringly, King chose to reveal himself to men and women who could absorb the news without developing blisters of uneasiness between themselves and him. They did not scorn him as a fallen preacher, nor lapse into paralyzing discomfort. These were people who tolerated or even applauded King’s demon delights as a humanizing revelation that bonded them even closer to him and his public purpose. Often they accepted King more easily than he accepted himself. They saw sexual adventure as a natural condition of manhood, or of great preachers obsessed by love, or of success, or of Negroes otherwise constrained by the white world, and they objected to King’s mistresses no more than to the scores of concubines who had soothed King David during the composition of his Psalms. Some of them grew tired of King’s insistence that it was a sin, and of his endless cycles from hedonism to self-recrimination and back. In any case, they adjusted—whether by sigh, sly wink, or eager imitation—and such adjustment defined an innermost circle around him: Abernathy, Walker, Young, Jones, Bernard Lee, and a small network of others, mostly preachers. These were his road buddies, the people he could travel with and let go.

Although he knew King’s regular mistress in the New York area,

The civil rights movement helped revive the seventy-one-year-old theologian, who, despite severe depressions and failing health, was beginning a reprise on his pre-Depression days as a race radical in Detroit.

a haphazard affair conducted by Elizabeth

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“And this is where nonviolence breaks with communism or any other system that would argue that the end justifies the means, for in the long run the end is pre-existent in the means, and the means

represents the ideal in the making and the end in process.”

“If you want to organize anything,” he kept saying, “assume that everybody is absolutely stupid. And assume yourself that you’re stupid.”