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

by Taylor Branch

The Montgomery trial, like the King cases in Atlanta, played out along a hidden geological fault within Democratic politics. The paradoxes of race made it possible for controlled racial conflict between the South and the national party to benefit both sides. At the Democratic Convention of 1940, the national Democrats helped gain Franklin Roosevelt’s first heavy Negro vote simply by inviting a Negro minister to deliver a prayer. During this invocation, Senator “Cotton Ed” Smith stalked out of the convention to a hero’s welcome at home in South Carolina, where he delighted crowds with lightheartedly hateful speeches denouncing the Northerners for inviting a “thick-lipped, blue-gummed, nappy-headed Senegambian” to pray before the party of John C. Calhoun. Now, twenty years later, national Democrats could hope that two Kennedy phone calls about the King case might deliver the Negro vote in the North. At the same time, governors Vandiver and Patterson, by acting resolutely on the anti-Negro side, not only enhanced their own political popularity but also, paradoxically, helped convince white Southerners that it was still safe to vote the traditional Democratic ticket for President.