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

by Taylor Branch

touching off another long night of swarming demonstrations, sorties by the police riot tank, rock-throwing, and finally armed suppression that killed one Negro and sent twenty-one others to the hospital.

to thirty minutes of nightly news—the three Birmingham schools finally opened, but Wallace sent National Guard troops in to bar the Negro students.

By morning, President Kennedy had federalized and withdrawn the Alabama guard troops in Birmingham, allowing the five Negro students to attend classes there, whereupon a majority of the white students filed out in protest.

At West End High, white cheerleaders and football players organized a movement to support integrated classes against fellow students who marched and threw rocks to enforce a segregationist school strike.

Grier urged them to hurry along and then went upstairs to sit in on her own women’s Sunday-school class. 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 ...

some white people had just killed his daughter in church, but that same afternoon dignified, overwrought white strangers knocked at his door to express their condolences. Some of them arrived in cars bearing Confederate license plates.

Heading home from the rally, a pair of Eagle Scouts fired their new pistol at two Negro boys riding double on a bicycle, killing a thirteen-year-old perched on the handlebars; the Eagle Scouts told police they had no idea what made them shoot.

Officers killed one fleeing Negro by shooting him in the back of the head.

“What murdered these four girls? The apathy and the complacency of many Negroes who will sit down on their stools and do nothing and not engage in creative protest to get rid of this evil.” Marshall, relieved to learn that King planned no immediate demonstrations,

From firsthand observation, Marshall agreed with King’s fear that open racial warfare could erupt any hour.

No elected officials attended.

In conjunction, the two events etched a conflict of mythological clarity: purpose and suffering of blinding purity against a monstrous evil. Such extremes of reality were inherently unstable, but they opened new eyes.

That night, Diane Nash presented to King the germ of what became his Selma voting rights campaign in 1965. She was angry. Privately, she told King that he could not arouse a battered people for nonviolent action and then give them nothing to do.

After the church bombing, she and Bevel had realized that a crime so heinous pushed even nonviolent zealots like ...

They resolved to do one of two things: solve the crime and kill the bombers, or drive Wallace and Lingo from office by winning the rig...

His lack of interest annoyed Nash, who thought King was too eager to get to Washington for empty talks with politicians.

“There is a great deal of frustration and despair and confusion in the Negro community,” he told the President. “And there is a feeling of being alone and not being protected. If you walk the street, you’re unsafe. If you stay at home, you’re unsafe—there’s a danger of a bombing. If you’re in church, now it isn’t safe. So that the Negro feels that everywhere he goes, or if he remains stationary, he’s in danger of some physical violence.”

for sending federal troops to replace the state troopers in Birmingham. He wanted to know why a city that was 40 percent Negro should live under the bayonets of an all-white force with a record of stark brutality and unsolved crimes.

“We are in a revolutionary situation,” he said, “and all through history, it was a despised minority—the proletarians, the peasants, the poor—who recaptured the heights and depths of faith. And the country itself choked in its own fat, as we are inclined to choke in our own fat.”

Baldwin chafed at the limits of nonviolence, which he criticized as a psychological affliction peculiar to Negroes, saying that through all American history, “the only time that nonviolence has been admired is when the Negroes practice it.”

“People ask me,” said Niebuhr, “since I am such a strong anti-pacifist, how I can have this admiration for a pacifist? Well, I have a simple answer…King’s doctrine of nonviolent resistance is not pacifism. Pacifism of really the classical kind is where you are concerned about your own purity and not responsibility. And the great ethical divide is between people who want to be pure and those who want to be responsible. And I think King has shown this difference.”

As to a Negro policeman, Hamilton said Kennedy had no idea what personal abuse they were taking just for replacing Bull Connor. “I would say fifty percent of the morning force when I walk into City Hall, and when the mayor walks into City Hall, if I hold out my hand, they refuse to shake hands,” said Hamilton. “If I speak, they refuse to speak.” He said at least a third of the police force would quit rather than serve with a Negro.

Barbara Johns’s student strike in Farmville.

King’s “I Have a Dream” fame caused Ralph Abernathy’s long-simmering jealousy to spill over into indignant complaints that his hotel room was not appointed as finely as King’s, and finally into an inebriated elevator scuffle with a white man who did not share his low opinion of the room service.

Septima Clark followed Abernathy to his room to tell him bluntly that he was a spoiled man, full of unseemly spite, and while she was at it, she also reproached him for his habit of being deliberately late to church services in order to flaunt his mastery over the common people of the congregation. In particular, she reminded him of the time when she spoke in his church and he insisted on showing her his garden while sending word that the congregation should keep singing hymns until he got there. Abernathy retorted lamely that Clark did not know everything, but very likely he would have tolerated no such scolding from anyone other than the SCLC’s mother conscience.

have kept silence,” he admitted in his closing speech to the convention on September 27. “…In doing so, I have acted contrary to the wishes and the frustrations of those who have marched with me in the dangerous campaigns for freedom…I did this because I was naïve enough to believe that the proof of good faith would emerge. It is now obvious to me that this was a mistake.”

Still, Eskridge was not prepared for the husk he found on the vacant lot of an abandoned gasoline station. It was cordoned off by rope to keep cars from parking there, or from miring in the red mud. Inside, tending a squatter’s vegetable stand, was a silver-stubbled old relic in brogans without socks or shoelaces. Eskridge suspected that a prankster had directed him to one of the local winos.

There was a note of triumph in Assistant Director William Sullivan’s appraisal of the march as a home-grown American protest.

Hoover did not welcome a giant march for freedom by a race he had known over a long lifetime as maids, chauffeurs, and criminal suspects, led by a preacher he loathed.

light of King’s powerful demagogic speech yesterday he stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders…We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the stand-point of communism, the Negro and national security.”

FBI agents had discovered that among the President’s mistresses was a woman named Ellen Rometsch, who had fled her native East Germany in 1955 and made her way to Washington in 1961 as the wife of a soldier stationed in the West German Embassy. To the Bureau, this made Rometsch suspect as a possible East German spy.

On Friday, October 4, William Sullivan formally recommended that Hoover once again seek Kennedy’s approval for a wiretap on King’s home in Atlanta, “because of the communist influence in the racial movement shown by activities of Stanley Levison as well as King’s connection with him.” The proposal was a watershed for Hoover, especially since Kennedy had turned him down once already in July. “I hope you don’t change your minds on this,” he scribbled to Sullivan in an acid reminder of his brief apostasy. Possibly he was warning Sullivan to prepare for blame if Kennedy again crossed the Bureau on this vital question.

Politically, there was less reason to tap King than in July. Since then, King’s speech at the March on Washington had established him as a national spokesman for a significant minority of whites as well as the vast majority of Negroes. Also, the Birmingham church bombing had caused a perceptible increase in national sympathy for the Negro cause, and indirectly for King.

No law enforcement official could easily accept responsibility for tapping King when so many crimes against King’s movement remained unsolved.

That very day, Burke Marshall informed Robert Kennedy that Wallace’s state troopers had arrested three men believed to have done the church bombing and charged them with minor offenses—deliberately, said Marshall, to protect them from imminent arrest on capital murder charges. Marshall’s information came directly from Floyd Mann in Alabama, in secret. By his own high standards of crusading against criminal corruption, Kennedy had far more reason to slap a wiretap on Governor Wallace than on King.

This was the unspoken bait from Hoover, who was not above larding his intelligence reports with political gossip.

In time, the two soldiers asked for and received permission to dissolve their assignment without report, recommendation, or public comment, as though it never happened.

That Friday, Kennedy called Evans in again, this time “obviously irritated.” He had just learned that the Bureau was disseminating within the government a scalding report on King as “an unprincipled man,” one who “is knowingly, willingly, and regularly taking guidance from communists.”

Hoover let Kennedy suffer a bit. Implying

Germany.” Three days later, on November 1, Robert Kennedy approved an FBI request to wiretap Bayard Rustin.

Rebel troops overthrew the South Vietnamese government in Saigon that same November 1, assassinating President Diem and his brother who had commanded the secret police.

All through the breakthrough year of 1963, the Vietnam crisis had built as a haunting foreign echo of civil rights.

On May 8, during the peak of Bevel’s children’s marches in Birmingham, Vietnamese soldiers had killed monks and civilians in Hue to enforce a government order prohibiting the display of Buddhist colors on Buddha’s birthday.

Buddhist protest had seized world attention a month later, on the day of the Medgar Evers assassination in Mississippi, when a monk named Trich Quan Duc pub...

Given the overwhelmingly Buddhist population, it was as though a Jewish U.S. president had forcibly suppressed Christmas as a Communist conspiracy.

Privately, however, they split over the most divisive internal question of the entire Administration: whether it was moral, democratic, or necessary to overthrow Diem in order to preserve a war against tyranny in Vietnam.

“I’m sick and tired of singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’” declared one preacher.

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.

“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.

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.