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

by Taylor Branch

“Gentlemen, I have a duty to provide you with the Gospel,” he said, “and I have a right to provide you with food. As far as I’m concerned, I will sell anything except whiskey and contraceptives. Besides, I get forty calls about fish for every one about religion.” When the deacons failed to endorse this license, Johns abruptly resigned and walked out the door. Nesbitt was detailed to seek him out and arrange a truce.

As it was, the membership was divided over an exasperating problem: Johns was both the highest and lowest, the most learned and most common, the most glorious reflection of their intellectual tastes and most obnoxious challenge to their dignity.

Some of them moved to take over the stage, whereupon Barbara Johns took her shoe off and rapped it sharply on a school bench. “I want you all out of here!” she shouted at the teachers, beckoning a small cadre of her supporters to remove them from the room.

When the skeptical lawyers said that the NAACP could not sue for better Negro schools—only for completely integrated ones—the students paused but briefly over this dizzying prospect before shouting their approval.

“Anybody who would not back these children after they stepped out on a limb is not a man,” he declared, and the assembly voted to proceed with an attack on segregation itself.

Had the student strike begun ten or fifteen years later, Barbara Johns would have become something of a phenomenon in the public media.

The idea that non-adults of any race might play a leading role in political events had simply failed to register on anyone—except perhaps the Klansmen who burned a cross in the Johns yard one night, and even then people thought their target might not have been Barbara but her notorious firebrand uncle.

was proud of her but simply refused to compliment her, as he had refused to compliment people all his life, for fear of implying that he had ever expected less.

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.

Then the judge asked why anyone would want to preach on so inflammatory a subject as murder between the races. “Because everywhere I go in the South the Negro is forced to choose between his hide and his soul,” Johns replied. “Mostly, he chooses his hide. I’m going to tell him that his hide is not worth it.” The judge soon dismissed Johns with a warning that he would bring trouble on himself if he persisted.

He went on at some length contrasting the murder of Negroes with the “lynching of Jesus,” making points at the expense of each set of killers and victims, and he concluded with a prediction that violence against Negroes would continue as long as Negroes “let it happen.” When he finished, the crowd that spilled into the street fairly hummed with mixed dissension and determination.

From the pulpit, he would append to a tour de force sermon some remarks on his bargain prices and the quality of the produce in the basement. Sales increased, but a number of the members believed that Johns had crossed the threshold of defilement.

but neither they nor anyone else dreamed that as a result of it the white authorities in Farmville would close the entire public school system for five years, rather than compromise the practice of racial segregation.

Beasley had just gone through another smooth transition, installing Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy as the seventh pastor of “Brick-a-Day Church” in its history—since the exodus from the white church in 1867.

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.

before. It was a pitiful tale. Nearly a hundred unschooled, poorly clothed girls were crammed into the basement of an Atlanta church, on a floor of dirt and mud, the only private classroom being the coal storage area. There were four strong-willed teachers, all of them white, college-educated spinsters from the North. As it turned out, the two who came to Cleveland had taught Rockefeller’s wife back before the Civil War, when women were first pushing their way into schools and the abolitionist societies. Mrs. Rockefeller was fiercely proud of her former teachers. At the close of the service, the Atlanta visitors took up a collection for their school, netting $90.72. Rockefeller quietly came forward to pledge another $250. It was his first gift to Negro education.

All the surprise guests, including young John junior, were called upon to speak, but only Mrs. Spelman offered an address of any length, recalling the days when her Cleveland home was a stop for Sojourner Truth and her runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. The only meals she ever remembered cooking herself had been those served to young Negro runaways, she said proudly. Before the end of the ceremony, the trustees announced that henceforth the college would be called Spelman, after the Rockefeller in-laws. The news made the students burst into cheers, and the proper headmistress—always distressed by emotional displays of any kind, especially those common to Negro religious gatherings—rose to hush them. She called on the students to pledge solemnly that they would remain loyal to the school and never bring reproach upon its new name.

He housed the Spelman students in an old Union Army barracks pending the completion in 1886 of Rockefeller Hall, the first brick building on the new Spelman campus.

That same year, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., announced that his family would donate enough money to build four more structures along the tree-lined quad at Spelman.

As the town grew, these holdings caused white developers to avoid most of the southwest quadrant of the city, and the Negro educational complex provided a pool of professional people to expand outward into that territory along stratified class lines.

The two races would move outward into their own suburbs.

Until the 1920s, Spelman required its students to rise at four thirty in the morning to wash and iron their clothes. The school always demanded proficiency in both homemaking and the classics. As late as the 1940s, students could not leave the campus without special permission, and they had to wear gloves and a hat even in the summer.

Among its graduates the next year was a Rev. A. D. Williams, who married Jennie C. Parks of Spelman on October 29, 1899. Alberta, their only child who survived infancy, became Martin Luther King’s mother.

when Social Darwinism was rising to full strength in American politics. For race relations, this meant a rush backward, as whites in the South and North generally agreed that there were more important things to do in the world than to contend with each other over the status of the Negro, which was then fixed by science as lowly.

Southern whites had revolted against the political structure of Reconstruction, first establishing that Negroes would not be allowed to dominate any legislative body by numerical majority. From there, a march by degrees eliminated Negroes from governing coalitions, then from the leverage of swing votes on issues that divided the whites (such as populism and the recurring proposals to ban the sale of alcohol), and finally from any significant exercise of the vote.

Northerners acquiesced in the renewed hegemony of...

The reigning idea was that racial quarrels, while accomplishing nothing since the Civil War, had interfered with business, diverted reform campaigns from more productive fields, and hindered America’s new efforts to wi...

liberals spoke of racism as the linchpin of the progressive movement, meaning that progress could be made only when white supremacy ...

In Washington, the last Negro congressman was sent home to North Carolina in the spring of 1901.

White mobs killed nearly fifty Negroes over the next three days. The Constitution’s banner headlines included “Governor Calls All Troops Out,” “Chased Negroes All the Night,” “Too Much Talk Was His Doom,” “Riot’s End All Depends on Negroes,” “He Used a Dead Body to Ward Off Bullets,” and a sidebar from Delaware called “Whip with Nine Thongs Avenges White Women Assaulted by Negro.”

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.

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.

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.

Meanwhile, under pressure of old age, the new income tax law, inheritance taxes, and the U.S. government’s antitrust case against Standard Oil, Rockefeller accelerated his charitable contributions, giving $100 million to the new Rockefeller Foundation and another $50 million to his General Education Board, which supported Baptist colleges.

Rockefeller charity as a consequence of govt tax policy

the Model T gave him the means to pursue the most coveted profession open to unschooled Negroes, the ministry.

After taking some tests at a local school for Negroes, he was stunned to learn that he could be admitted no higher than the fifth grade. He was twenty years old.

Win?” In it he defended the efforts by liberal theologians such as Albert Schweitzer to reconcile religious faith with both science and modern historical scholarship. The Christian faith did not require strict adherence to such doctrines as the virgin birth of Jesus, he declared, pointing out that virgin birth was not unique to Christianity or even to religion but was common to many great figures of antiquity—claimed for Pythagoras, Plato, and Augustus Caesar, as well as for Buddha, Lao-tze, Mahavira, and Zoroaster. He also spoke against other elements of doctrine, such as the belief that Jesus’ death was “a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice,” theologically necessary as “substitutionary atonement” for the sins of believers.

Anyway, said Fosdick, he did not wish to be known as the pastor of the richest man in the United States. “I like your frankness,” Rockefeller said after a brief pause, “but do you think that more people will criticize you on account of my wealth than will criticize me on account of your theology?”

On October 5, 1930, more than six thousand people tried to cram their way in to hear Fosdick’s first sermon in the new church, where two generations later Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would deliver some of the most important sermons of his life.

His first job was to negotiate enough credit to get the padlock removed, so that he could hold services in the hope of raising enough money to make the church solvent. His career was at stake, as was his well-being in the delicate mix of cross-currents within his own family. Seldom if ever was a preacher’s nature better suited to the critical challenge of his life. As a preacher, Mike King was everything Vernon Johns was not—practical, organized, plainspoken, and intensely loyal to the things and people at hand. His

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. Alternatively, some argued for the word “African,” but this only raised a continuing dispute as to whether the term referred to race or the place of origin. 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.)

The name question was never settled to everyone’s satisfaction. The NAACP adopted the respectable-sounding “colored people” at its founding in 1909, but the next year the first Negro-owned daily newspaper to circulate throughout the nation tossed out all the contending names in favor of its own invention, the word “Race,” which was the semantic equivalent of a placebo. In

Negroes should face the fact that they would die segregated, he declared, in spite of all justice and their best efforts. Therefore, to hate segregation was inevitably to hate themselves, and it would be far better to embrace voluntary segregation in schools, colleges, businesses—both for reasons of psychic well-being and to build concentrated strength for later fights.

Dubois about face

Du Bois “picked up a brick and tossed it through the biggest plate-glass window he could see.”

(His attacks on Booker T. Washington had rebounded sharply against Du Bois among the white philanthropists who supported Negro education.)

Walter White and other NAACP officials knew that they could not denounce all segregated institutions without appearing to criticize the Negro church and the Negro college, and they did not want to support some kinds of segregation while opposing others, for fear of sounding inconsistent. In bringing these contradictions to the surface, Du Bois tied the NAACP in knots. NAACP board chairman Joel Spingarn decreed that the anti-segregation policy ruled out all meetings in Negro churches and schools and all fund-raising events at nonintegrated institutions. This policy would have shut down the organization entirely had it not been quietly reversed.

From there, he went on to insult his boss in print with the charge that White was really a white man anyway, who fought segregation because he wanted to be with white people.

At another level, the controversy showed, like others before and after, that racial isolation and racial outreach can each be taken as foolish and cowardly or as wise and brave, depending on historical mood and circumstance.

Down in Atlanta, Reverend King ventured into politics on both sides of the Du Bois issue. In 1935, he led several hundred people to the courthouse, where they registered to vote. The

Many Negroes said openly that they would not register for fear of economic reprisals. Others opposed the march because it would “make trouble,” and still others because they believed it was part of a deal with white politicians. The march was not repeated. In 1936, King became the spokesman for a group of Negro schoolteachers who wanted to force the city to raise their salaries to the level of teachers in the white schools. This campaign was more in keeping with the thrust of Du Bois’s new challenge, and some people opposed it for that very reason, arguing that improvements in segregated institutions only strengthened segregation. Some of the poorer Negroes in Atlanta objected to the idea of making the relatively privileged schoolteachers a primary concern, when so many people had no work at all, and some of the teachers themselves shied away for fear of their jobs. All this, plus negative actions of various kinds by white liberals and conservatives alike, added up to more conflict than the teachers cared for, and King abandoned the project after a few meetings.