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

by Taylor Branch

The Atlanta protest lasted only one day before being smothered under the combined influence of the Negro and white power structures, who appealed for reason and negotiation.

Some student leaders complained bitterly of vanity and obstructionism on the part of their elders. C. A. Scott, editor of the Atlanta Daily World, had required them to pay the full advertising rate to print their manifesto—either out of greed, they said, or out of a desire to protect himself with the white people against charges of aiding the protest. The students also resented Scott’s patronizing editorials, which praised them for having a worthwhile objective but consistently urged them to quit making trouble and leave things in steadier adult hands.

In early May, all 160 million Americans participated in a national air-raid alert, the seventh since U.S. officials had acknowledged that the Russians might be capable of raining nuclear warheads down on the Western Hemisphere. As before, schoolchildren crawled under their desks, Wall Street closed, television screens went blank, and American leaders set examples by scurrying into underground bomb shelters. The consumption of electricity in New York dropped 90 percent for half an hour.

the bitterness of the McCarthy years while building its “economic miracle” through an unbroken generation, with no sign of slowdown in sight. Americans had licked polio. Cancer was next. A majority of employees wore white collars, and economists puzzled over the enigma of surplus, wondering what else people could want. “Gone for the first time in history is the worry over whether a society can produce enough goods,” Time had announced. Automobiles were everywhere, and those who turned on their car radios were most likely to hear the strings of the Percy Faith orchestra playing the winsome “Theme from A Summer Place,” which was the number one song that spring. By the end of the year, adults and kids alike were trying the new dance craze called “the twist,” introduced by an orphan singer from Philadelphia named Chubby Checker. There was a rapprochement between age groups. Adults were cooler, teenagers less wild.

“Why do you see him as so important?” Kennedy asked. “What can he do?” Belafonte paused. It was clear to him that Kennedy was not being snide or argumentative. The senator saw King as an unfamiliar preacher who had once led a bus boycott in Alabama and was now facing trial on income tax charges. What was King in comparison with the nearly universal appeal of Belafonte or Jackie Robinson, who could sway Negro voters without alienating white ones? Belafonte tried to explain to Kennedy his belief that the Negro vote no longer could be contested on the basis of popularity, because civil rights was building to the status of a sacred cause. He said he was not a religious man himself but had seen and felt King’s impact. Its strength was not reflected in either the white or Negro press. “Forget me,” he advised Kennedy. “Forget Jackie Robinson and everybody else we’ve been talking about. If you can join the cause of King, and be counselled by him, then you’ll have an alliance that will make the difference.”

Belafonte called King almost immediately with a report on Kennedy, whom he described as unschooled and unemotional but very quick. He recommended that King make every effort to get to know Kennedy. King was receiving the same advice from Harris Wofford, who was promoting Kennedy to King and King to Kennedy. Like Belafonte, Wofford was a Stevenson man. Even after joining Kennedy’s staff, in fact, he kept up his contact with the reluctant candidate from Illinois. He wrote a letter commending King to Stevenson, a copy of which he sent King “in strictest confidence,” hoping to make sure that no one in the Kennedy camp would discover that he was still consorting with the enemy.

“The thing that disappoints me about the Southern white church is that it spends all of its time dealing with Jesus after the cross, instead of dealing with Jesus before the cross,”

“You didn’t do a thing but preach about the death of Jesus,” he said. “If that were the heart of Christianity, all God had to do was to drop him down on Friday, and let them kill him, and then yank him up again on Easter Sunday. That’s all you hear. You don’t hear so much about his three years of teaching that man’s religion is revealed in the love of his fellow man. He who says he loves God and hates his fellow man is a liar, and the truth is not in him. That is what offended the leaders of Jesus’s own established church as well as the colonial authorities from Rome. That’s why they put him up there.”

“There is a world of disparity between the idealism of Jesus and the practices of men,” he said. “But Jesus is not crazy. We are crazy. The church has not formally denounced the Sermon on the Mount. It has merely let it slide. I want to deal with Jesus before the cross. I don’t give a damn what happened to him after the cross.”

In Atlanta, Donald Hollowell dispelled a far more intense gloom that morning when he trumpeted the news that Judge Mitchell had changed his mind and signed an order to release King on $2,000 bond. In

He spoke of God and courage and fear, and then chose that moment to make the announcement he had promised Harris Wofford earlier that day. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” he declared. “But now he can be my President, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this. He has the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right. I’ve got all my votes and I’ve got a suitcase, and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.” The crowd roared approval, and roared again when Ralph Abernathy said it was time to “take off your Nixon buttons.” But King himself, almost visibly compressed by the sudden shift from prison to politics, spoke more personally about jail as a test of faith. “We must master the art of creative suffering,” he said. All he said about the presidential election was that he would never let a candidate’s religion determine his vote.

“Well, you better…retract it.” To Seigenthaler’s astonishment, he admitted rather sheepishly that he had made the call to the judge from New York. Kennedy explained that he had gotten steamed up on reflecting that the act of a lynch-law judge was “screwing up my brother’s campaign and making the country look ridiculous before the world.”

Personally and politically, he was overjoyed that Kennedy’s radical about-face may have contributed to King’s release, but as a corporate lawyer and former law professor he disapproved strongly of Kennedy’s call to a sitting judge as a clear violation of the legal canon of ethics.

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.

A dejected President Eisenhower, stunned by what he regarded as a “repudiation” of his eight years, first blamed Henry Cabot Lodge for promising a Negro cabinet member. By “sticking his nose into the makeup of the cabinet,” Eisenhower fumed privately, Lodge “cost us thousands of votes in the South, maybe South Carolina and Texas.” Soon, however, the President reversed himself to say that the Nixon campaign had been too little concerned with Negro votes, not too much. He then blamed the loss on “a couple of phone calls” by John and Robert Kennedy in the King case. What happened between Eisenhower’s instinctive reaction and his considered one was a nationwide detective search for the secret of the 1960 election. Everyone seemed to have a private theory about what had been the decisive factor—whether stolen votes in Chicago or Nixon’s makeup man for the first debate. As legions of analysts sifted the results, it did not take them long to discover that the most startling component of Kennedy’s victory was his 40 percent margin among Negro voters. In 1956, Negroes had voted Republican by roughly 60-40; in 1960, they voted Democratic by roughly 70—30. This 30 percent shift accounted for more votes than Kennedy’s victory margins in a number of key states, including Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and the Carolinas. On the day after the election, Republican National Chairman Thruston B. Morton declared that his party had taken the Negro vote too much for granted.

Still, one plain fact shined through everywhere: two little phone calls about the welfare of a Negro preacher were a necessary cause of Democratic victory. This fact mattered dearly to Republican county chairmen as well as Democratic mayors, to students of politics as well as crusaders on both sides of the civil rights issue. That something so minor could whip silently through the Negro world with such devastating impact gave witness to the cohesion and volatility of the separate culture.

That at the heart of this phenomenon was not just any preacher but Martin Luther King gave his name a symbolic resonance that spilled outside the small constituency of civil rights.

to preserve the predominantly racial characteristics that have contributed to Western civilization over the past two thousand years,” Kilpatrick told the NBC audience, “and we do not believe that the way to preserve them lies in fostering any intimate race mixing by which these principles and characteristics inevitably must be destroyed.” In addition to sex and civilization, Kilpatrick cited a host of legal precedents against the sit-ins and then denounced them as a “boorish exhibition” of “plain bad manners.”

Steve king

The Iowa legislature was debating a bill that would require the state’s barbers to know how to cut Negro hair. In baseball, the annual rash of spring training disputes featured a running story out of Bradenton, Florida, where owners of the best hotel agreed, after a long battle, to give rooms to Milwaukee Braves star outfielder Hank Aaron and other Negro players, provided they consented to take their meals behind a special partition in the dining room.

“If, for instance, the law-enforcement personnel in the FBI were integrated, many persons who now defy federal law might come under restraints from which they are presently free.” This one sentence rocketed up through that portion of the FBI bureaucracy keeping watch for the appearance of criticism in the public domain.

There, in public view, Screws beat Hall with fist and blackjack for at least fifteen minutes, then dragged his lifeless corpse feet-first into a jail cell. Although no state murder charges were brought, federal prosecutors presented evidence of such egregious brutality that an all-white jury convicted the sheriff under a Reconstruction statute designed to

The Supreme Court reversed Screws’s conviction by a twist of reasoning that even the defense lawyers had not offered. The government had failed to prove that Screws had attacked Hall with the specific intent to deprive him of his civil rights, the Court ruled. Prosecutors had shown merely that Screws intended to kill him. This was the Court’s strict interpretation of the word “willfully” in the statute.

Incredibly, it meant that henceforth federal prosecutors in such cases had to prove that the defendants were thinking about constitutional violations while they committed heinous, primordial crimes. This was the Screws precedent, from a decision written by liberal Justice William O. Douglas in 1944. Within the tiny fraternity of civil rights prosecutors, the decision was an unpleasant echo of Dred Scott. And no matter how badly they wished to discard the case as a wartime aberration, like the Japanese internment cases, it was controlling law still.

three white females, three white males, and seven Negro males, ranging in age from twenty-one to sixty.

There was also strapping, square-jawed Albert Bigelow, a Harvard-trained architect and former Navy captain, whose World War II experience had converted him into so ardent a pacifist that he had skippered his protest craft Golden Rule into atomic test zones out in the Pacific.

The CORE press office had interested only three reporters, all Negroes, in covering the Freedom Ride. Simeon Booker of Jet magazine tried to ease his qualms by notifying the FBI of CORE’s hazardous project. Then Booker slipped into the Justice Department for one of those thirty-second, bob-in conversations, telling the Attorney General and his aide John Seigenthaler that there would probably be trouble. “Okay, call me if there is,” Kennedy replied briskly, adding, “I wish I could go with you.” It reassured Booker to know that the Attorney General of the United States knew in advance of his trip with this quixotic band of Freedom Riders, but the glib tone of Kennedy’s remark made Booker wonder whether his apprehensions had registered fully.

May 4 in two groups, one on Greyhound and the other on Trailways. According to plan, they scattered throughout each bus in various combinations—some whites in the back and Negroes in the front, with at least one interracial pair of seatmates and a few riders observing less conspicuously from traditional seats.

Thirteen days, fifteen hundred miles, and scores of bus stations stretched between them and their destination in New Orleans.

To avoid compliance with the integration ruling, the county government had transferred most of its school property to hastily organized private schools for white children.

Nearly all the Negro children had gone without schooling for two years.

“Southerners have a special respect for candor and plain talk,” he said. “…You may ask: will we enforce the civil rights statutes? The answer is: yes, we will.”

“For I cannot believe,” he said, “that anyone can support a principle which prevents more than a thousand of our children in one county from attending public school—especially when this step was taken to circumvent the orders of a court.” Promising action tempered by fairness, he offered a deliberate contrast with the Eisenhower image. “We will not stand by and be aloof,” he said. “We will move.”

as Kennedy shyly took his seat at the end, and then they broke into applause for a full thirty seconds, as measured by one reporter, in tribute to his persuasiveness or his courage, or both.

One of the attackers threw a punch that caught Lewis in the mouth, making the first loud pop of fist against flesh on the Freedom Ride. Lewis sank to the ground. More whites surged toward the primitive sounds of violence. Albert Bigelow, next in line behind Lewis, stepped forward to put his body between Lewis and those kicking him. Bigelow’s erect posture and determined passivity—such an alien sight in a fistfight—did not keep the attackers from darting in to strike him on the head and body. Three or four thudding blows dropped Bigelow to one knee, and as one of the attackers lunged toward Bigelow he knocked Genevieve Hughes, the third Freedom Rider in line, sprawling to the floor.

the captain asked Lewis and Bigelow whether they wanted to press assault charges. Both said no—this was not in the spirit of nonviolent resistance. Their refusal displeased the captain, who seemed upset that his politically risky offer to arrest local white boys was going to waste.

King and Wyatt Walker returned to Atlanta in time to have dinner on Saturday night, May 13, with the Freedom Riders. They celebrated a successful journey through nearly seven hundred miles of upper Dixie, and King spoke glowingly of their example and their willingness to continue on through the fiercest segregationist states of the Deep South.

“You will never make it through Alabama,” King whispered emotionally, and Booker, not knowing what to say, tried to make light of it by telling King that he was keeping close to the hulking Farmer. “He’s the only one I can outrun,” quipped Booker, adding that they planned to leave Farmer behind to occupy any white hoodlums who might chase them.

Still, the signs offered slight deterrence compared with the large crowd of men bearing clubs, bricks, iron pipes, and knives.

Enraged, the mob began pounding on the bus with pipes and slashing the tires. Those inside shouted that the driver should leave before the bus was disabled. The driver did not argue. He revved the engine and backed up. The numb, terror-stricken passengers watched Anniston policemen move in from positions on the fringe of the crowd to direct the bus out of town, as though they had suddenly awakened to a traffic problem.

pursuit. About fifty cars, containing as many as two hundred men, soon were stretched out behind them as the Freedom Riders headed for Birmingham. Not far outside Anniston, the bus began to list to one side, and the driver realized that some of the slashed tires were going flat. Helpless, he pulled the bus off the highway, shut down the engine, and scampered off into the countryside.

This time the mob used bricks and a heavy ax to smash the bus windows one by one, sending shards of glass flying among the passengers inside. The attackers ripped open the luggage compartment and battered the exterior again with pipes, while a group of them tried to force open the door. Finally, someone threw a firebomb through the gaping hole in the back window. As flames ran along the floor, some of the seats caught fire and the bus began to fill with black, acrid smoke. When the choking passengers realized that the fire could not be contained, they gave way to panic. In the front, state investigator E. L. Cowling saw that the mob was no longer trying to force entry but now was barricading the door to seal them in the fire. Desperate and weak from the smoke, Cowling brandished his revolver and the attackers fell back. When he managed to get the door open, Albert Bigelow and others herded the passengers to the exit. The mob, frenzied by the sight of them but made panicky by Cowling’s gun, danced around the perimeter of the smoke billowing through the door, taking swings at those escaping. Henry Thomas, the SNCC student from Howard, staggered into the clear and was felled by a blow to the head. The others tumbled out behind him, and the attacks continued until arriving Alabama state troopers fired warning shots into the air. The mob retreated to their cars, and the troopers eventually ferried the passengers to Anniston Hospital. A photographer took a shot of the flames lea...

The Freedom Riders reboarded the bus with their sandwiches, noting that this was the first time the local whites seemed to be more on edge than they were. Charles

Eight of them jumped on the bus just ahead of the driver and stood in the aisle as he flipped on the tour-guide microphone. “We have received word that a bus has been burned to the ground and passengers are being carried to the hospital by the carloads,” he announced nervously, giving the first report on the fate of the Greyhound. “A mob is waiting for our bus and will do the same to us unless we get these niggers off the front seats.”

that they were all interstate passengers with a legal right to sit anywhere on the bus, but the sentence was not yet completed when one of the whites standing over the front seat crashed his fist into Person’s face. Another reached over to hit Herbert Harris. The whites yanked the two students into the aisle, kicking and slugging them from both ends of the confined space. As they did, group leader Peck and Walter Bergman, the retired professor from Michigan, jumped out of their seats at the back and ran forward, horrified, to protest. They did not get very far. One of the white men turned from the two students and hit Peck with a blow that knocked him backward over two seatbacks. Another fist dropped Bergman to the floor. Suddenly, the fury of the mob turned on the two downed white Freedom Riders. Some lifted Peck from the seat to rain blows on his bloodied face, while others stomped on the chest of the prostrate Bergman.

Ku Klux Klan would ambush the Freedom Riders at the bus terminal there. Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informant within Klavern Palace 13, had told his FBI handlers that the Birmingham police agreed to give the Klansmen fifteen unmolested minutes to beat the integrated riders.

The Birmingham SAC kept a record of the many warnings he had passed along, as though the official notices conveyed responsibility to the police. It was an uncomfortable exercise for a law enforcement officer with advance knowledge of a crime. With almost transparent chagrin, he informed Director Hoover in Washington that he had been obliged to deliver his last warning on Sunday, May 14, to Detective Tom Cook, an officer he knew to be an active collaborator with the Klan, as Cook was “the only man on duty.”

Charles Person and Jim Peck, the latter’s face and shirt caked with blood, stepped first from the bus to the landing. As the designated testers for Birmingham, they stood quietly for a moment, surveying avenues of escape that appeared little more promising than the terminal itself. Peck, deciding that he could not bring himself to ask Person to carry on with the objectives of the Freedom Ride, glanced at his partner for a sign of his intent. “Let’s go,” Person said simply, heading slowly for the white waiting room as planned. Peck fell in behind him. Walter Bergman and some of

the others followed.

violence. On their approach, a confused Klansman muttered that they should kill the Negro, Person, because he must have hurt the obviously wounded white man, Peck, but as they came forward Peck said they should not hurt Person. This gesture of cross-racial friendship ignited the crowd’s rage, and the Klansmen roughly shoved Person back toward the Negro waiting room. When he turned and tried to walk through them once more, a Klansman shoved him sideways against a concrete wall. Others came up behind him. “Hit him,” someone shouted, and a Klansman obliged with a fist to Person’s face. Person rose with a bloodied mouth, only to be hit again. This time he fell back into the arms of a Klansman, who held him to receive a third blow, after which he fell to his knees. Peck moved to help him up and was flattened by a rain of five or six punches. Then about a dozen Klansmen surrounded the two men and pummeled them with kicks, pipes, and objects that looked to one horrified bystander, Howard K. Smith, like heavy key rings. FBI informant Rowe

contributed lustily to the beatings.