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

by Taylor Branch

My purpose is to write a history of the civil rights movement out of the conviction from which it was made, namely that truth requires a maximum effort to see through the eyes of strangers, foreigners, and enemies. I hope to sustain my thesis that King’s life is the best and most important metaphor for American history in the watershed postwar years.

On another matter of housekeeping, I regret having to leave the record on Stanley Levison slightly ajar. Since 1984, I have sought the original FBI documents pertaining to the Bureau’s steadfast contention that King’s closest white friend was a top-level Communist agent. On this charge rested the FBI’s King wiretaps and many collateral harassments against the civil rights movement. In opposing my request, the U.S. Department of Justice has argued in federal court that the release of thirty- to thirty-five-year-old informant reports on Levison would damage the national security even now.

but the whites were cushioned initially by post-World War II attitudes. Their superior status was relatively secure then; the notion of drastic change for the benefit of Negroes struck the average American as about on a par with creating a world government, which is to say visionary, slightly dangerous, and extremely remote.

Consolidated with four similar suits, it was destined to reach the U.S. Supreme Court as part of the historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. 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.

This was a violent time in Alabama—an era when a judge and jury sentenced a Negro man to death for stealing $1.95 from a white woman (commuted later by Governor Folsom) and when police officers often meted out harsher justice informally, beyond the meager restraints of a court. One Montgomery case stuck in Johns’s mind: officers stopped a man for speeding and beat him half to death with a tire iron, while Negroes watched silently nearby.

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.

By then, John D. Rockefeller was employing phalanxes of lawyers, bodyguards, and bureaucrats to protect him from those trying to beg or claim his money. In the spring of 1914, the “Ludlow massacre” secured his reputation as a principal villain in the history of labor unions, when Colorado militiamen attacked and burned a tent city of workers on strike against Rockefeller mining interests, killing six men by gunfire and thirteen women and children in the flames.

Soon they commenced a courtship in the old style—six years of teas, church socials, and chaperoned Sunday-afternoon rides in the Model T.

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.

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.

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. (White newspapers were slow to adopt this dignifying practice. The New York Times did not begin to capitalize “Negro” until 1950.)

In Depression Atlanta, roughly two-thirds of all adult Negro males were unemployed, and M.L.’s earliest recorded memories were of the long bread lines that stretched around many a corner in his neighborhood. Less than twenty years later, as a graduate student, he would begin an autobiographical sketch with his impressions of the bread lines, stating that the sight of them contributed to “my present anti-capitalistic feelings.”

A.D. once slid down a bannister at high speed into grandmother Williams, knocking her into a heap on the floor. As her relatives raced to her from all points in the house, and were shouting and moaning and wondering how to tell whether she was alive, a far deeper panic seized M.L. He ran upstairs to his room at the back of the house and threw himself out the window. A new round of cries from the children brought horror to the elder Kings, when, just as Mrs. Williams was beginning to revive, they had to run outside to their older son, who did not move until he heard that his grandmother was alive. Only gradually did it sink in that the shock of harm to the grandmother had driven M.L. blindly toward suicide.

Du Bois was known for prose that gracefully mixed cold, unsparing analysis with lyrical passages on the noble heritage of the Negro people and the justice of their cause. As a political leader, however, he suffered all the liabilities of an elitist intellectual. Even his supporters described his personality as difficult at best, and his haughtiness was so extreme as to inspire collections of Du Bois stories. Once complimented on the honor of being Harvard’s first Negro Ph.D., Du Bois is said to have icily replied, “The honor, I assure you, was Harvard’s.”

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 confessed that he became “enamored” of Niebuhr, who “left me in a state of confusion.”

In private, however, he came to describe Niebuhr as a prime influence upon his life, and Gandhian nonviolence as “merely a Niebuhrian stratagem of power.”

He put the question to her: would she be willing to fight the case, the way she knew they had wanted to fight earlier with Colvin and Smith? Rosa Parks did not have to be told twice what he meant, but she knew that it was a momentous decision for her family.

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.

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.

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? In the long run, what was a fourteen-dollar fine levied on Rosa Parks to a community that had calmed down after lynchings?

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.

the board members discussed their ultimate weapon—a federal lawsuit against bus segregation. Fred Gray, knowing that white Alabama would react to such a step as the social equivalent of atomic warfare, had been quietly seeking advice on the possibility since the first week of the boycott, when he wrote to NAACP lawyers in New York.

From the next day forward, Montgomery policemen stopped car-pool drivers wherever they went—questioning them, checking their headlights and windshield wipers, writing traffic tickets for minute and often imaginary violations of the law. Car-pool drivers crept along the road and gave exaggerated turn signals, like novices in driving school. Policemen ticketed them anyway. Jo Ann Robinson, known as a stickler in everything from driving to diction, would get no less than seventeen tickets in the next couple of months—some for going too fast, others for going too slow. Traffic fines mounted, diverting into the city treasury money that might have gone into the MIA car-pool fund.

one of the motorcycle policemen pulled up next to the driver’s window and said, “Get out, King. You’re under arrest for speeding thirty miles an hour in a twenty-five-mile zone.”

feeling welled up in King to an oration. “I did not start this boycott,” he said. “I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped, this movement will not stop. If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us.”

Said after his home was bombed

Hoover cut masterfully along the fault line of the Administration. He expressed no sympathy for civil rights and painted an alarming picture of subversive elements among the integrationists.

Levison became King’s closest white friend and the most reliable colleague of his life.

Although King largely rejected Communist doctrine, he never wavered in support of the victims of McCarthyism or in his sympathy with Communist advocacy for the oppressed. He also gave the American Communists enormous credit for their record on the race issue. Regardless of their doctrinal contortions, the Communists advocated and practiced racial equality far beyond any other political organization in the country.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched into space the world’s first man-made satellite, named Sputnik. News of the achievement produced a tremor of fear and wounded pride in American politics. Overnight, nearly everything about America was deemed second-rate—its scientists, its morals, its math teachers, even its road system.

He told the audience of having attended a convention of his fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, at which it was boastfully announced that the members spent $500,000 for liquor. “A handful of Negroes,” King said acidly, “…spent more money in one week for whiskey than all of the 16 million Negroes spent that whole year for the United Negro College Fund and for the NAACP. Now that was a tragedy. That was a tragedy…. I know this is stinging…”

the emergency room of Harlem Hospital, where King lay waiting on a gurney with the blade still in his chest. Fearing that he might die of the stab wound, the detectives wanted to get his identification of the woman on record.

Twenty years earlier, the FBI had mushroomed in size to guard against Nazi espionage. From a mid-Depression force of fewer than five hundred agents, the Bureau had more than tripled by Pearl Harbor, then tripled again by D-Day. Hoover never needed further education on the advantages of an intelligence agency over a law enforcement department. An intelligence agency enjoyed greater prestige, less danger of public failure, greater freedom and power through the mystique of secrecy, and an enhanced role for shaping national values and symbols.

The person he had in mind was Bayard Rustin, but he did not mention Rustin’s name at first, for fear of rekindling the sort of controversy that had driven Rustin out of Montgomery during the boycott. King knew well that it would be difficult to sell a homosexual ex-Communist to a group of Baptist preachers,

King was the first citizen in the history of Alabama to be prosecuted for felony tax evasion, the technical charge being that he had perjured himself in signing his tax returns for 1956 and 1958. Governor John Patterson, who as attorney general had led the fight against the bus boycott and the state NAACP, did nothing to contradict speculation that Alabama was stretching state power to its limits in order to make a political example of King. While signing the papers requesting King’s extradition from Georgia, Patterson made a merrily sarcastic public statement. “If you dance,” he quipped, “you must pay the fiddler.”

In its preliminary stages of bluster and petty bickering, Sullivan v. New York Times showed little promise of a landmark Supreme Court case. For King, the most discouraging aspect of the fracas was the pattern: whenever he appealed for help, a reaction seemed to follow that put him deeper into trouble and made help harder to find.

The U-2 was so important an event that millions denied its importance, rallied to the flag, and routinely denounced the Russians. What lingered beneath were memories of Ike’s humiliation, of the first great lie, the public debut of the CIA in a vaguely sinister context, and the first serious puncture in the American innocence that had swelled up since Eisenhower’s war.

Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson enjoyed the support of nearly every leading Democrat in Congress, but he and everyone else knew that no pure Southerner had run successfully for President in more than a hundred years.

“Why do you see him as so important?” Kennedy asked. “What can he do?” Belafonte paused. It was clear to him that Kennedy was not being snide or argumentative. The senator saw King as an unfamiliar preacher who had once led a bus boycott in Alabama and was now facing trial on income tax charges.

King returned home to Atlanta thinking there was not much difference between Kennedy and Nixon on civil rights. Both on principle and on the relative merits of the candidates, King was inclined to be neutral in the fall election.

Both candidates considered themselves overextended on race by pre-convention promises and formal party platforms. They downplayed the issue in the first of the four historic Kennedy-Nixon television debates on September 26. Focusing by agreement on domestic affairs, the two candidates agreed that America was wealthy, powerful, and free—but needed to be much more of each in order to fulfill itself and to compete with the mortal threat of worldwide communism.

The Kennedy campaign as a whole was scoring on the race issue at the expense of Henry Cabot Lodge, Nixon’s running mate. Lodge, caught up in the spirit of a Harlem rally just after Kennedy’s, had either promised or predicted that a Nixon Administration would appoint a Negro to the cabinet. Senator Kennedy pounced on this statement as “racism at its worst.” He and Lyndon Johnson each pledged that a Kennedy Administration would not consider race or religion at all in cabinet appointments—they would consider only “qualifications.”

“How could they do that?” Kennedy asked doubtfully. “Who’s the judge? You can’t deny bail on a misdemeanor.” Martin decided that Kennedy may have lost sight of the essential fact that King was a Negro—a detail Southern politicians carefully avoided in their protests against interference in the King case. “Well, they just did it,” said Martin. “They wanted to make an example of him as an uppity Negro. That’s why it’s so dangerous to us in the campaign. I’ve heard that Jackie Robinson is trying to get Nixon to hold a press conference and blame the whole thing on the Democrats. Those are all Democrats running things down there.” Martin stopped. For all he knew, the Jackie Robinson story, which he had invented on the way to Kennedy’s office, might be true.

Referring to Daddy King’s “suitcase of votes” declaration that he would vote for Kennedy in spite of his Catholicism, Kennedy mused to Wofford, “That was a hell of a bigoted statement, wasn’t it? Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father.” He grinned and added, “Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?”

Nationally, Kennedy had received 34,221,463 votes to Nixon’s 34,108,582, for a popular margin of two-tenths of one percent. The tiniest of changes—5,000 votes in Illinois and 28,000 in Texas—would have opened the White House to Nixon instead of Kennedy.

In 1956, Negroes had voted Republican by roughly 60-40; in 1960, they voted Democratic by roughly 70—30. This 30 percent shift accounted for more votes than Kennedy’s victory margins in a number of key states,

The King case leaped to national attention during the postmortem as the overlooked master clue. Most people in the country first learned of the saga retrospectively, as capsule summaries of the Kennedy phone calls were told and retold to establish the difference between the two candidates on civil rights: Kennedy had acted in response to King’s plight, whereas Nixon had not.

Others wrote stories clarifying that there had been two separate Kennedy calls—one by Senator Kennedy to Coretta King and another by Robert Kennedy to Judge Mitchell.

In Washington, the hindsight attention to the King story troubled the President-elect, who worried that the new perception of him as a man beholden to Negro voters would impair his ability to govern the divided country. Within days of the election, Kennedy adjusted to this adjustment of his image by sending out word that his administration did not contemplate seeking new civil rights legislation or supporting challenges to the filibuster rule in the Senate. This reassured his Southern supporters but punctured the enthusiasm of Roy Wilkins, who promptly criticized Kennedy for surrendering the Democratic platform before taking office.

Kennedy never mentioned segregation, civil rights, or race in his inaugural address, and to some degree the new President was using his political gifts to make his summons to freedom intoxicating to both Negroes and white Southern Democrats. Still, King had to find it encouraging that Kennedy occasionally condemned racial prejudice as “irrational,” and that he seemed so much more comfortable in the presence of Negroes than had Eisenhower.

The obvious advantage of “jail, no bail” was that it reversed the financial burden of protest, costing the demonstrators no cash while obligating the white authorities to pay for jail space and food. The obvious disadvantage was that staying in jail represented a quantum leap in commitment above the old barrier of arrest, lock-up, and bail-out. There were primal fears of chain gangs, of claustrophobia, and of assault by guards or hostile inmates, not to mention the lost college credits.