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

by Taylor Branch

truth requires a maximum effort to see through the eyes of strangers, foreigners, and enemies.

Religious oratory became the only safe marketable skill, and a reputation for oratory substituted for diplomas and all other credentials.

The 1906 riot, along with a similar one two years later in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, provoked Atlanta University’s Du Bois to join with white Northern philanthropists to create the NAACP in 1909.

What was new to King at Morehouse was not an absence of fear but a willingness to question the fear that was there.

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.

What Niebuhr did was to invent his own distinction between the character of people acting in large social groups as opposed to their character as individual people. Human nature was such that individuals could respond to reason, to the call of justice, and even to the love perfection of the religious spirit, but nations, corporations, labor unions, and other large social groups would always be selfish. Society, Niebuhr argued, responded substantively only to power, which meant that all the forces of piety, education, charity, reform, and evangelism could never hope to eliminate injustice without dirtying themselves in power conflicts.

Even as a student, King believed that religion was alive only at its edges, and that doubt was as important as belief.

“There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair,” he declared. “There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July, and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an Alpine November. There…”

“If we are wrong—Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to earth! If we are wrong—justice is a lie.” This was too much. He had to wait some time before delivering his soaring conclusion, in a flight of anger mixed with rapture: “And we are determined here in Montgomery—to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream!”

“And I want to tell you this evening that it is not enough for us to talk about love,” he said. “Love is one of the pinnacle parts of the Christian faith. There is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which would work against love.” He said that God was not just the God of love: “He’s also the God that standeth before the nations and says, ‘Be still and know that I am God—and if you don’t obey Me I’m gonna break the backbone of your power—and cast you out of the arms of your international and national relationships.’”

The crowd cheered lustily even when King strayed from his text to explain the distinctions between eros, filios, and agape, the three Greek words for “love.” Rustin decided that he had overestimated the importance of content. Press commentators would say that King’s performance proved that his Montgomery leadership was no fluke. Rustin already knew that, but he puzzled over King’s ability to move widely divergent audiences with material that seemed suited to a college student’s notebook.

Hoover substantiated this ringing alarm by disclosing confidentially to the congressmen, and to selected senators as well, that a New York lawyer named Stanley Levison was both a secret member of the Communist Party, subject to orders from the Kremlin, and a guiding adviser to Martin Luther King. The message was clear: that the troublesome Negro revolution was Moscow’s skirmish line, and that only the omniscient Hoover knew the full details. “The threat from without should not blind us to the threat from within,” he wrote. More pointedly, in a January 8 classified memo to Robert Kennedy, Hoover extended the reach of suspicion. Not only did the Communists have influence upon King through Levison, he warned, but through King, in turn, Levison and the Communists had “access” to the Attorney General himself and to the White House. Because King had met personally with both Kennedy brothers—even taken a meal recently with the President—there was a specter of Communist influence at the highest levels.

“I don’t know what will happen,” he said. “I don’t know where the money will come from. But I have to make a faith act.”

But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and when you wife and mother are never given the r...

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…

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation,” wrote King, “because the goal of America is freedom…If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.”

“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.”

Already soaked beyond any worry of lost dignity, they sang one word, “freedom,” to the tune of “Amen.” As the firemen concentrated the hoses upon the singers, the crowd surged back toward the contested borders. Then the firemen advanced toward the holdouts, pounding them with water at close range. The holdouts sat down on the sidewalk to stabilize themselves. It was a moment of baptism for the civil rights movement, and Birmingham’s last effort to wash away the stain of dissent against segregation. For Captain Evans and the firemen, it was a mechanical problem of increasing the water pressure enough to overcome physical resistance on the pavement.

Andrew Young came out to make a cautionary speech. “We have a nonviolent movement,” he said, “but it’s not nonviolent enough.” He warned that no amount of provocation justified rock-throwing. “We must not boo the police when they bring up the dogs,” he added. “…We must praise them. The police don’t know how to handle the situation governed by love, and the power of God. During these demonstrations we must tell the crowd to behave.”

Earnestly, almost gingerly, he wound to the subject of love. “Now we say in this nonviolent movement that you’ve got to love this white man,” he told them. Above a cry of “Yes!” he said, “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.” Begging their indulgence, he recited again the distinctions among the three Greek words for “love.” This time he added a small new twist by stating that there was something mundane, even debased, about eros and filia. “Romantic love is inevitably a little selfish,” he declared. “You move your lover because there is something about your lover that moves you.” Titters punctuated his coy description until he moved on to agape. “And when 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!”

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.

They were engaged in a lively debate on the lesson topic, “The Love That Forgives,” when a loud earthquake shook the entire church and showered the classroom with plaster and debris. Grier’s first thought was that it was like a ticker-tape parade. Maxine McNair, a schoolteacher sitting next to her, reflexively went stiff and was the only one to speak. “Oh, my goodness!” she said. She escaped with Grier, but the stairs down to the basement were blocked and the large stone staircase on the outside literally had vanished. They stumbled through the church to the front door and then made their way around outside through the gathering noise of moans and sirens. A hysterical church member shouted to Grier that her husband had already gone to the hospital in the first ambulance. McNair searched desperately for her only child until finally she came upon a sobbing old man and screamed, “Daddy, I can’t find Denise!” The man helplessly replied, “She’s dead, baby. I’ve got one of her shoes.” He held a girl’s white dress shoe, and the look on his daughter’s face made him scream out, “I’d like to blow the whole town up!” By then, ten-year-old Sarah Collins had staggered out through the gaping hole in the wall where the stone staircase had been. She was partially blinded, bleeding through the nose and ears from concussion. Her brother ran around screaming that his sister was dead, and in the addled shock it was some time before anyone understood he did not mean Sarah but older sister Addi...

King also attended the funeral, though neither he nor Levison was aware of the other. He traveled alone, without even his constant road man Bernard Lee, and stood unnoticed on the street.

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. New interior worlds were opened, along with a means of understanding freedom movements all over the globe. King was swelling. 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.