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

by Taylor Branch

The Rock Hill jail-in was destined to be a failure by some standards, in that no stores were desegregated nor any further recruitments made. It was an unforgettable vicarious triumph for thousands of sit-in veterans, however, because the thirteen Rock Hill prisoners set a new standard of psychological commitment to be debated and matched. More important, they introduced the idea of roving jail-goers and mutual support. As students began to think of any jail in any town as potentially their own, a new kind of fellowship took hold on the notion that the entire South was a common battlefield.

The President believed that segregation, like colonialism, was an anachronistic addiction curable by the steady advance of modern attitudes. To him, this required the exercise of cool, detached reason in an atmosphere of public calm, which was incompatible with emotional demonstrations by either whites or Negroes.

Quite apart from the political dangers perceived, those closest to the President shied away from civil rights because they considered the racial controversies being publicized too prosaic, too small and quirkishly human, for the President’s attention. The Iowa legislature was debating a bill that would require the state’s barbers to know how to cut Negro hair. In baseball, the annual rash of spring training disputes featured a running story out of Bradenton, Florida, where owners of the best hotel agreed, after a long battle, to give rooms to Milwaukee Braves star outfielder Hank Aaron and other Negro players, provided they consented to take their meals behind a special partition in the dining room. Such entanglements of segregation were always being presented for comment in Washington, only to be brushed aside by the savviest advisers as inherently belittling to the President.

When this same Castro not only crushed the surprise invasion at the Bay of Pigs but also exposed as a clumsy lie the entire CIA cover story of American noninvolvement, the sting of President Kennedy’s humiliation spread instantly to millions of citizens.

The personal relationship between Hoover and Robert Kennedy was an Oriental pageant of formal respect, beneath which played out a comedy of private insults and mismatched quirks.

By prior designation, Burke Marshall did most of the talking for the Kennedy side. He explained to King his view of the severe constraints on the federal government imposed by constitutional federalism, as applied more rigidly in federal laws governing civil rights than in other fields. The Justice Department had little power to intervene in school desegregation cases or even police brutality cases except in very narrowly defined circumstances, Marshall explained, and its widest latitude by far lay in the protection of voting rights. There the Justice Department was, in the watchword of the Administration, “moving” by both conventional and unconventional methods.

To the Kennedy people, in fact, the most noticeable aspect of King’s private behavior was his quietness. He did not preach, bargain, or strike postures.

Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informant within Klavern Palace 13, had told his FBI handlers that the Birmingham police agreed to give the Klansmen fifteen unmolested minutes to beat the integrated riders.

“As long as you’re in church, Reverend King, and our men are down there, you might as well say a prayer for us,” he suggested. King did not laugh.* He excused himself to receive the latest alarms from lookouts, who had spotted no rescuers. With defenders brandishing weapons at points of entry to the church, King addressed Kennedy in a voice of taut urgency. “If they don’t get here immediately, we’re going to have a bloody confrontation,” he said. “Because they’re at the door now.”

Shouts of joy went up from the congregation, followed by prayers and a hymn of praise. It was a dramatic rescue straight out of Hollywood, except that the giant cloud of tear gas drifted slowly back over the church. Some of Abernathy’s deacons were obliged to block panicky people from fleeing into the hands of the mob, while others rushed to close windows. The sudden absence of ventilation, combined with an unusually warm May night and the body heat of fifteen hundred frightened people, quickly turned First Baptist into an acrid sauna. outside, the marshals fell prey to the gas too, as few of them had face masks.

“You shouldn’t have withdrawn the marshals,” King protested, with such force that Kennedy held the phone away from his ear. King’s distress spilled over as he said that Kennedy had abandoned his people to the hostilities of Patterson’s National Guard, acting now under plenary powers. There might be heart attacks or strokes, with so many people stuffed into the church under such stress. He asked what kind of justice there could be in a land where the authorities permitted churchgoers to be terrorized and then forced them to huddle all night under inhuman conditions. He said he felt betrayed.

The issue was not military capability but the public perception that Patterson was giving succor to the most despised name in Alabama. “You are destroying us politically,” he said. “John, it’s more important that these people in the church survive physically than for us to survive politically,” Kennedy said, clinging to the high ground that he had previously abandoned to King.

“That is not going to have the slightest effect on what the government is doing in this field or any other,” Kennedy snapped. “The fact that they stay in jail is not going to have the slightest effect on me.” “Perhaps it would help if students came down here by the hundreds—by the hundreds of thousands,” said King. “The country belongs to you as much as to me,” said Kennedy. “You can determine what’s best just as well as I can, but don’t make statements that sound like a threat. That’s not the way to deal with us.”

In Montgomery, King returned to Abernathy’s living room after his jolting conversation with Kennedy. “You know,” he said, “they don’t understand the social revolution going on in the world, and therefore they don’t understand what we’re doing.”

Kennedy had tripled draft calls and sought from Congress another $3.2 billion for weapons and fallout shelters. In short, he had moved the country toward a war footing over the disputed territory of Berlin, and in such a mood he was less inclined than ever to recognize the distracting problem of the Freedom Riders. At his press conference late in June, when the number of jailed Freedom Riders was approaching two hundred, the President volunteered nothing on the subject. Nor was he questioned about it.

A Gallup poll in June showed that 63 percent of all Americans disapproved of the Freedom Rides.

The strain of incarceration emerged in King’s lofty but plaintive comments about the Sumter County jailers. They had pushed his dignity into its final refuge: the pulpit. “I wish some people could be a little more courteous,” he said. “The guards in this jail call me ‘boy.’ I might note that I am the pastor of a church with four thousand members.”

They justified competitive maneuvers on the theory that their goals could not be advanced or protected without influence to offset King’s. This was SNCC’s classical revolutionary dilemma. To oppose their ally, they became more like what they said they opposed, beginning a cycle of imitation and rejection.

On October 1, 1961, W. E. B. Du Bois applied for membership in the Communist Party of the U.S.A. “I have been long and slow in coming to this conclusion,” Du Bois wrote in a public statement, “but at last my mind is settled.” He was ninety-three.

the old man decided that “capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.”

Now the boy was President. A conversation between President Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover touching the topic of sex was a remarkable event, as Hoover came from a different galaxy. In 1941, the same year that Kennedy began squiring Inga Arvad, Hoover warned America that if motels were allowed to proliferate along the highways, citizens would sleep unwittingly on mattresses still warm from “illicit relations.”

Connor also announced his candidacy for governor in that year’s election. One of his first steps in office, he pledged, would be to buy a hundred new police dogs to sic on any Freedom Riders who ventured into Alabama.

Of the handicaps early in the Birmingham crisis, perhaps the most serious was King’s image as a reluctant and losing crusader. He had been largely out of the public eye for eight months, since his retreat from Albany. His name had faded. He appeared to be a worthy symbol from the 1950s who had overreached himself trying to operate as a full-fledged political leader.

King wrote several scattered passages in response to the criticism that his demonstrations were “untimely.” He told the white clergymen that “time is neutral,” that waiting never produced inevitable progress, and that “we must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”

“Now, finally, your children,” he said, “your daughters and sons are in jail, many of them, and I’m sure many of the parents are here tonight.” Then he said simply, “Don’t worry about them.” That alone smothered some of the desperate fears and skittering rumors—tales true and false about rats, beatings, concrete beds, overflowing latrines, jailhouse assaults, and crude examinations for venereal disease. “They are suffering for what they believe,” he said, “and they are suffering to make this nation a better nation.”

“And another thing we must realize—this is not a racial conflict basically. I want you to understand me here. 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.”

“They may try to bomb a little more.” He drew gasps by announcing that a Negro pedestrian named Prince Green, of Coosa Street, was in the hospital after being shot from a passing car that evening. They would keep going through bombings and shootings. “I’m sorry,” King cried out, “but I will never teach any of you to hate white people.”

What King later remembered most vividly was that the President put a hand on his shoulder and almost whispered that he had to “get rid of” Levison and O’Dell. “They’re Communists,” Kennedy said. When King replied that he was not sure what that meant, as Hoover considered a great many people Communists, President Kennedy came back instantly with specifics: Jack O’Dell was a ranking member of the national committee of the American Communist Party. Stanley Levison’s position was too highly classified for him to give details, but the President could say that Levison was O’Dell’s “handler,” and King could draw his conclusions about Levison from that. These were the hard facts, said Kennedy. O’Dell was fully engaged in conspiracy as the “number five Communist in the United States.”

Kennedy’s point was that King must not let his personal esteem for Levison blind him to the enormous stakes he was playing for, or to the fact that ruthless opponents could turn a spark of truth into a blaze of scandal. “If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot us down, too,” Kennedy told King. “So we’re asking you to be careful.”

Wilkins’ cunning, which Rustin considered a character strength corresponding to one of Martin Luther King’s weaknesses—an exasperating instinct of avoidance. Rustin had been estranged from King for more than three years, since Adam Clayton Powell’s threat to use Rustin’s homosexuality to blackmail King. King had never spoken to Rustin about the breach—not then, nor in the excited caucuses of the past few weeks, when the idea of the great march had renewed their association.

Newsweek had published a bold special issue entitled “The Negro in America.” Among its splashy revelations was a feature entitled “The Big Man Is Martin Luther King,” and a nationwide poll showing that King commanded the support of 88 percent of American Negroes. Similarly, the Newsweek poll revealed that since the introduction of the civil rights bill, Negro voters favored President Kennedy by an astonishing 30 to 1 over any Republican opponent.

At first the FBI wiretap caught Levison chuckling over the irony that President Kennedy himself could perceive him as such a danger, given the fact that Levison had been arguing so recently to King that Kennedy was improving his civil rights performance and ought not to be the target of the March on Washington.

The President and King lacked the chemistry for small talk.

President Kennedy alluded to treacherous political games being played—segregationist Democrats maneuvering for pro-Negro amendments to make it easier for moderates to vote against the entire bill, liberal Republicans threatening to vote against the bill because it was too weak.

Malcolm X declared that integration was a training exercise for Negroes, run by whites. “You bleed when the white man says bleed,” he said, scolding a delighted crowd.

Malcolm revered Moses as a common prophet of Islam and Judaism, and also as the father figure of the Negro Christian church. “Nowhere in that Bible can you show me where Moses went to his people and said, believe in the same god that your slavemaster believes in, or seek integration with the slavemaster,” Malcolm said often. “Moses’ one doctrine was separation. He told Pharaoh, ‘…Let my people go.’” Malcolm X challenged King to prove how he could reconcile the ecumenical spirit of integration with the tribal cohesion of a Negro culture that was joined at the hip to Moses.

King still identified with both Kennedys, especially the President. They had many things in common, such as coarsely overbearing fathers and a penchant for noble romance. Each was a closet smoker, catnapper, and skirt-chaser. Between them they delivered most of the memorable American oratory of the postwar period.

By contrast, King was personally self-conscious. He worried about his looks, his tough skin, about what people thought of him and whether they might find out that he had ghostwriters for his books.

Kennedy’s best qualities remained his alone, untransferable to King, but the reverse was not true. In death, the late President gained credit for much of the purpose that King’s movement had forced upon him in life.

In his seminal history, A Thousand Days, which was written and published during the peak of the national movement, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., introduced civil rights in the thirty-fifth of thirty-seven chapters.

As for Robert Kennedy, King’s travail with him was largely over. The two of them had stumbled through relations from camaraderie to contempt. Kennedy had been more of an ally to the movement during the Freedom Rides than during Birmingham, which contradicted common notions of steady growth in his character.

Race, like power, blinds before it corrupts, and Hoover saw not a shred of merit in either King or Levison.

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.

For King, the rise of American liberalism was both a gain and a loss. Many of his admirers were quick to thank the movement for bringing religious homilies to national attention, and just as quick to dismiss him now as a Baptist preacher out of his depth. He reaped recognition and condescension hard upon each other. As a result, newcomers to derivative freedom movements programmed themselves to run amok, because they grossly underestimated the complexity, the restraint, and the grounding respect for opponents that had sustained King, Moses, and countless others through the difficult years.