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

by Taylor Branch

Borders and several other ministers launched a ferocious attack on King for allowing his choir to appear at a function that was not only segregated but also plainly sinful, inasmuch as its advertised purpose was to dance and drink whiskey in violation of Baptist doctrine. The more militant ministers decried the indignity of Negro choir members dressed in aprons and Aunt Jemima bandanas to serenade an all-white audience that not even Hattie McDaniel, who played “Mammy” in the film, was allowed to join. More conservative ones stressed the evils of dancing. Hemmed in on left and right, King argued that the extraordinary circumstances justified this one association with sin, but he could not stave off a resolution of censure.

At about this time, Spelman’s President Read finally triumphed in her ten-year guerrilla war against the chairman of the Atlanta University sociology department, Dr. Du Bois. Although she was neither a scholar nor an educator, her informal position as the Rockefeller representative gave her an overriding strength at all the schools, since she was also a Morehouse board member and the treasurer of Atlanta University, signing all its checks. Grumbling Negro faculty members nicknamed her Rockefeller’s white “overseer.” Her coup de grâce on Du Bois was simple and quiet: his name failed to appear on the faculty payroll list for the fall of 1944. The seventy-six-year-old Du Bois, who had written three books and dozens of scholarly articles since his noisy departure from the NAACP in 1934, came rudely to the end of yet another career. Nearly twenty years of writing and political turmoil still lay ahead of him when Atlanta University set him adrift without notice or ceremony.

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

Walter Chivers, his adviser and primary teacher in the department, conceived of racism in vaguely Marxist terms as a necessary byproduct of an economic system that benefited whites.

Colonized peoples in Asia and Africa denounced the hypocrisy of the democratic nations that doggedly reasserted sovereignty over them, and in a similar spirit America’s Negro soldiers demanded that they be given at home the rights they had fought for overseas. Whites resisted these demands, especially in the South, with a ferocity that put lynchings back into the headlines. Mobs assassinated no fewer than six Negro war veterans in a single three-week period that summer. In Georgia’s first multiple lynching since 1918, one of those six veterans died when a group of hooded men pulled him, his wife, and another Negro couple out of a car near Monroe, lined the four of them up in front of a ditch, and fired a barrage that left a reported 180 bullet holes in one of the four corpses. In the aftermath, state investigators in Monroe complained that “the best people in town won’t talk about this,” but they and the FBI would compile enough evidence to take before a grand jury, which declined to return an indictment.

The story of the Monroe lynching was one of many that the NAACP’s Walter White told to President Truman in the Oval Office that September. “My God!” exclaimed Truman. “I had no idea it was as terrible as that.” He promised to do something, and soon thereafter appointed a special commission to recommend legislation dealing with all deprivations of Negro citizenship rights. At a time when Negro leaders had trouble getting themselves into the White House at all, much less getting a delivered promise out of it, Truman’s action made him an overnight hero.

“To Secure These Rights,” most observers expressed shock that Truman allowed publication of an agenda so far in advance of public opinion. The report brought the phrase “civil rights” into common political parlance, replacing “the Negro question.” There was even greater shock the following February, just three days after the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi in Delhi, when Truman sent a special civil rights message to Congress asking for a federal anti-lynching law, among other things. Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, the South’s most responsible liberal on the race question, attacked the legislation as too radical for the white South, which stimulated the NAACP’s Walter White to call McGill a “weasel.”

They predicted correctly that the bill would go nowhere, but still there were distant rumblings indicating that the postwar world might become an altogether new age.

The article was vintage early King—taking a broad swipe at a topic of his own choosing, making provocative connections (in this case linking the selfishness of Morehouse students with the racism of Talmadge), working toward a synthesis of religion and intellect, and struggling against himself to express original ideas while indulging a fondness for platitudes.

He knew that he needed big ideas to go with his big words if he wanted to elevate his ministry above fundamentalism without sinking into permanent skepticism.

Reverend King snorted in protest for a few days. Seeing no need of further education, he did not want to lose his son, or his assistant pastor, and he was extremely suspicious of Crozer as a white seminary noted for its liberal leanings in theology.

philosophers King studied during his first year at Crozer was Walter Rauschenbusch, a German Lutheran-turned-Baptist whose experiences as a minister in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York at the close of the nineteenth century led him to write Christianity and the Social Crisis, the publication of which is generally regarded as the beginning of the Social Gospel movement in American churches.

Rauschenbusch rejected the usual religious emphasis on matters of piety, metaphysics, and the supernatural, interpreting Christianity instead as a spirit of brotherhood made manifest in social ethics. He saw the Christian ministry as an extension of the Old Testament prophets, who denounced pride, selfishness, and oppression as transgressions against the divine historical plan, which was to culminate in the Christian ideal of “love perfection” among all people.

Social gospel

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.

Niebuhr was turning against a strain of political and religious idealism that had been building since the epiphany of Count Leo Tolstoy, whose eyes had locked on three familiar words from the Sermon on the Mount: “Resist not evil.”

“Why had I always sought for some ulterior motive?” asked Tolstoy. “‘Resist not evil’ means never resist, never oppose violence; or, in other words, never do anything contrary to the law of love.” In his old age, the great Russian novelist was transformed into the intellectual father of modern pacifism. His book The Kingdom of God Is Within You had a profound influence on young Mohandas Gandhi when he was a student in England. Toward the end of Tolstoy’s life, Gandhi corresponded with him and named his first commune, in South Africa, Tolstoy Farm.

Tolstoy's pacifism

She fretted intensely that the urbane King clan would look down on her solid country folk as mere farmhands, but at the same time she did not want to appear to be trying to impress them. This was more than enough to knot the stomach of any bride, and Reverend King did not help her nerves by sweeping her and the bridegroom off for a private talk just before the ceremony.

to offer King two bits of practical advice. First, it was better in the long run to be a pastor than a prophet. Brilliant, lonely, romantic, and impractical, the prophet was the highest form of the preacher without a church, but, according to preacher folklore, he inevitably wound up a tragic and rather ridiculous creature, like a king without a kingdom. Second, King should be mindful of the fact that Dexter never expected to keep preachers long, and should avoid the trap of trying to be the kind of preacher Dexter wanted—an intellectual in the pulpit who gave little attention to the organization of the church itself.

To survive at Dexter, a preacher needed to pitch himself headlong into the committees, finances, and personalities—in short, into the guts of church control. Otherwise, the most eloquent preacher would be no match for the entrenched powers.

can’t touch King,” he said with resignation. It was an uncomfortable day for everyone. Nesbitt and practically everyone else at Dexter liked McCall personally, but the church was clearly moving toward King because of his class and originality.

Sunday of the month and about $75 for all other Sundays, and it would make King—straight out of school—the highest-paid Negro minister in Montgomery.

He asked that the parsonage be put into good living order, that the church pay for his commutation between Boston and Montgomery until he completed research for his Ph.D. dissertation at the end of that summer, and that the church understand his expectation of salary increases “as the Church progresses.” King’s approach was businesslike, but he probably did not drive as hard a bargain as Dexter would have allowed. After a quick meeting with the selection committee on April 18, Nesbitt accepted his terms in full.

5’6 1/2”, 166

Dexter on the part of his wife and father. Segregated, backward Alabama was among the last places Coretta wanted to live, as she had spent her entire life struggling to get away. In

more in keeping with their attainments. Although King tried to reassure her that the Dexter position would be temporary, she forced him to invoke what he called his authority as head of the household. King’s idea of the wife’s role in a marriage was traditional, much like his father’s, and he reminded his wife that he had made this clear before she accepted his marriage proposal. Even so, Coretta did not resign herself to Montgomery for months after she was physically there.

King, still wounded because his son was rejecting his natural succession at Ebenezer, tried to strike fear in him.

“I’m going to be pastor,” he told his wife and his father, “and I’m going to run that church.”

President Eisenhower commented that the American form of government makes no sense without a “deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.”

A Gallup poll showed that 94 percent of Americans believed in God, 68 percent in an afterlife.

On May 17-two weeks after King’s first sermon as pastor-designate of Dexter—Chief Justice Earl Warren handed down the Court’s decision in the Brown case, without advance notice.

The earth shook, and then again it did not.

There were no street celebrations in Negro communities. At Spelman College in Atlanta, sophomore Barbara Johns continued her longstanding silence about her role in the case, sensing muted apprehension among her fellow students. They seemed to worry that the great vindication might mean the extinction of schools like Spelman.

Southern politicians first announced that they would obey the Court and then changed their minds.

largely because the gap between the two races was so wide as to preclude vision, or even imagination, across it.

Universal Newsreels never mentioned the most important Supreme Court decision of the century. It was too controversial.

She became the first foreign citizen invited to address a joint session of Congress since General Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution.

This fact makes it crystal clear that the pastor’s authority is not merely humanly conferred, but divinely sanctioned.

A social and political action committee would promote membership in the NAACP and sponsor “forums and mass meetings” before elections to discuss the issues. “Every member of Dexter must be a registered voter,” he wrote, at a time when less than 5 percent of Negroes in Alabama were registered. One new committee would raise money

demonstrate it in one swift stroke. In perhaps the most critical and daring tactic, King named specific people for all the appointments to his plethora of committees.

they could validate his authority along with his recommendations, or could challenge them both. It was Thermidor, a royalist counterattack, with implicit warning that if the nobles resisted, King would leave Dexter before they could celebrate his arrival.

Even the stolid R. D. Nesbitt was telling the deacons that the new pastor had “revolutionized” Dexter within the first two months.

Six weeks after making his recommendations, King was able to report the collection of more than $2,100 on a single Sunday. This amounted to half his annual salary and was considered by his fellow clergymen to be an amazing feat for a church with only three hundred members on the books.

His “twoness” seemed to translate into sturdiness and balance, as his interest in Tillich’s abstractions did not crowd out his instinct for power within the practical confines of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Beneath his genteel, aristocratic manner—never without his big words or his dress fedora—there were only hints at first that King was balanced, holding within himself contending forces of great power.

desk sergeant—only to be told they were none of his damned business. Nixon hung up. This was serious. The normal courtesies he received as the universally recognized Negro leader were suspended, which must mean that the race laws had been transgressed.

her relatives with the idea privately, and chose to talk first alone with her mother and then with her husband. The proposal upset both of them. Raymond Parks came nearly undone. Having just felt primitive, helpless terror when his wife had been snatched into jail, he could not bear the thought that she would reenter that forbidden zone by choice. Now there was hope that the arrest could be forgiven as an isolated incident, but if she persisted, it would be deliberate. It would be political. “The white folks will kill you, Rosa,” he said, pleading with her not to do it.

“If you think it will mean something to Montgomery and do some good, I’ll be happy to go along with it,” she said.

her a prolonged harassment by young people who threw rocks through her windows, insulted her on the streets, and played tricks on her in the library. Her flighty sensitivity only provoked them to do worse. A little more than a year later, she would be found poisoned in her house, an apparent suicide. By way of explanation, whites would stress her emotional vulnerability or alleged mental problems, while Negroes remained certain that she had been persecuted to death on account of the “Battle of the Marne” letter.

again. To a largely uneducated people among

whom the most common occupations were maid and day laborer, the loss of what was for many their most important modern convenience—cheap bus transportation—left them with staggering problems of logistics and morale.

operation. When the Montgomery police commissioner dropped hints during the first week that he would order the arrest of any taxi drivers who charged less than the minimum forty-five-cent fare, it became clear that the emergency ten-cent fare—and therefore the “taxicab army”—was doomed. King immediately called his college friend T. J. Jemison, who, as secretary of the Nation...