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

by Taylor Branch

There was no doubt about the identity of the actual killer. Representative E. H. Hurst, driving Billy Jack Caston’s pickup truck, had followed Herbert Lee to the cotton gin and pulled up beside him. Lee slid away from Hurst, across the front seat of his own pickup and out the passenger door. Hurst ran around the trucks to confront him. According to Hurst, Lee then moved to attack him with a tire iron, whereupon Hurst struck Lee on the head with his pistol, which went off accidentally. Sheriff Caston and the town marshal arrived quickly on the scene and said they found a tire iron under Lee’s body. Two ey...

Moses finally located the Negro witness at a small house in the country. Louis Allen was a forty-two-year-old logger with a seventh-grade education. He had a wife and three children; a fourth child had died of what Allen described as epilepsy. During World War II service in New Guinea, he had come down with ulcers, which had made the arduous work of cutting and hauling raw timber difficult ever since, but Allen did better with logs than with farming. Because he lacked capital and access to any of the three Negro lawyers in...

Allen related such details about himself openly, and was equally frank with Moses about what he had seen at the cotton gin. Lee didn’t have a tire iron or anything else, he said. Lee had told Hurst that he wouldn’t talk to him as long as Hurst had a gun out, and Lee had jumped out of his truck near where Allen had been standing. Hurst then had run around the truck and shouted, “I’m not playing with you this morning!” Then he shot Lee in the head from a few feet away. Allen had testified about the tire iron because that’s what he was told to say, and he went along to protect his own life and his family. But he hated to lie about Lee, whom he knew to be an upstanding Negro farmer in the county. Allen told Moses what he had told his wife: “I didn’t want to tell no story about the dead, because you can’t ask the dead for forgiveness.”

Trapped between victim and executioner, Moses realized that to push Allen forward might be to kill him. Yet to counsel silence

would be to add his own complicity to the injustice of the Lee homicide.

The genesis of the message lay in FBI Director Hoover’s memo notation (“Why not?”) during the Freedom Rides in May, demanding to know why the FBI had not thoroughly investigated the troublemaker King.

Essentially, he could say nothing, because the evidence was classified to protect the FBI’s intelligence sources. By the inverted logic of spy cases, the more important the charge, the more closely held was the evidence and the more constrained was the government in taking action.

An unhappy Wofford told King, in words he said had been carefully chosen by his superiors, that the United States government considered Stanley Levison a prime security threat. It was not a matter of leftist beliefs or Communist sympathies, Wofford added, or even of membership in the Communist Party, but that Levison had been identified at the highest levels of the U.S. government as a key element of the Soviet espionage network, a “direct link to Moscow.” The Kennedy Administration was warning King confidentially, but in the strongest terms, to cease all contact with Levison.

King eventually fell silent in Wofford’s office. The government made it a question of trust, he said finally, and he had far more reason to trust Levison than he did to trust J. Edgar Hoover.

One night during the chaotic first week of the makeshift school, an extremely nervous visitor called on Moses at the Masonic Temple. Louis Allen told Moses that he had been summoned before a grand jury that was to consider the coroner’s findings in the Herbert Lee murder. Allen said he did not want to lie again. He wanted to know if Moses could arrange for the federal government to protect his life if he testified against E. H. Hurst. Admiration welled up in Moses, along with the bittersweet thrill of a murder solved and the joyful hope that some justice might be done in spite of Amite County’s blanket of fear. Moses advised Allen to keep silent until he could make inquiries in Washington.

FBI agents eventually returned to Liberty to comply with Doar’s request. Louis Allen took the fateful step and told them officially that he had seen no tire iron and that Hurst had simply shot Herbert Lee in a rage. The agents also reinterviewed the only other witness, a white man who had testified that he saw Herbert Lee raise a tire iron against Hurst. Now this witness conceded that he never saw the tire iron until “it was removed” from beneath Lee’s body. The passive construction “was removed” appeared four times in the FBI interview report, without any sign that the interviewing agent ever asked who it was that had removed the tire iron. Such neglect of logical, urgent investigative leads drove Doar to despair. The judge who had presided at the coroner’s inquest was interviewed, as Doar requested, but the interviewing agent did not obtain the minutes of the inquest, nor even report that he had asked for them.

Moses, leading to the decision that the Justice Department would file no indictment in the Herbert Lee case. This cruel finality compounded the moral conundrum haunting both of them. They knew that without a federal indictment there would be no effective protection for Louis Allen. Therefore it would be almost pointless, as well as dangerous, for Allen to testify against Hurst in the grand jury. Moses and Doar found themselves in the miserable position of cautioning Allen against the consequences of telling the truth—warning him in effect that he should lie again. For Moses it was a betrayal of Allen’s courage and of his own philosophical approach to his mission in Mississippi. Even worse, it was too late to pull back. Nearly everyone in the county, it seemed, already knew of the renewed FBI investigation and of Allen’s willingness to accuse Hurst before the grand jury. Allen was a marked man even after he declined to do so. Whites who had bought his loads of pine logs for years began to say they did not need them. Donis Hawkins’ gas station cut off his credit, and so did Daryl Blaelock’s. Allen’s ominous plight left Doar and Moses with the worst of both worlds: they had exposed him to mortal risk without gaining even a chance of justice. From the standpoint of Allen’s well-being, it would have been better had they advised him from the beginning to lie or keep silent—to follow the rules for good niggers in Mississippi. Louis Allen had perceived this clearly on the day of t...

This is dreadful

Reagon was fearless, but most of his SNCC elders regarded him as a kid who was a little too eager to keep up.

Boyd soothed himself with the thought that Sherrod was accomplishing what no Albany pastor, including himself, could do—he was attracting a growing number of eager teenagers into church two, three, four times a week.

Chatmon’s worries unsettled even the boldest and most restless of Albany’s Negro leaders. Some members of the prestigious Criterion Club suggested that they be run out of town, or, as C. B. King put it to Sherrod, “have opined that the community might be well advised to divest itself of your presence.” A prominent Albany Negro placed “an urgent and distressing call” to NAACP regional headquarters in Atlanta, warning that the two young SNCC activists were about to seduce the local youth into suicidal demonstrations. Three NAACP officials rushed down to Albany to try to restore discipline against such a possibility.

In anticipation of such a crisis, he had studied the performance of Alabama authorities during the Freedom Rides. Concluding that their chief error had been to permit violence, which drew publicity and forced federal intervention, he had lectured his officers on how to enforce the race laws without nightsticks or guns. To the City Commission, Pritchett announced that he had instructed his men to make no arrests under the segregation laws themselves, which were vulnerable to legal attack, but to defend segregation under laws protecting the public order. He said he had put the entire Albany police force on alert status “during the period of expected tension.” All vacation time was canceled. The commissioners thanked him for his sophisticated preparations.

Although this was the tamest of demonstrations by Freedom Ride standards, Sherrod reported that “from that moment on, segregation was dead.”

Sherrod preached Lawson’s theme that Supreme Court edicts piled high as the clouds were irrelevant so long as Albany’s Negroes enforced segregation upon themselves by cowering before the police.

which a Negro field hand named Charlie Ware made the mistake of flirting with the white overseer’s Negro mistress.

On the night of the 1961 barbecue, Johnson drove to Charlie Ware’s house and proceeded to beat his wife intermittently until Ware came home. Then Johnson beat Ware on the head, arrested and searched him, and drove to Newton, a town so tiny it could not support a restaurant. Parked outside the Baker County jail, with Ware handcuffed beside him on the front seat, Johnson picked up his radio transmitter and said, “This nigger’s coming on me with a knife! I’m gonna have to shoot him.” He fired two .32-caliber bullets into Ware’s neck. “He’s still coming on! I’m gonna have to shoot him again,” said Johnson, and fired a third time.

This, at any rate, was the account of the FBI agent who investigated the shooting after doctors later brought Ware miraculously back to life, with no permanent injuries except those caused by vertebra fragments that seeped into his spinal fluid.

A grand jury promptly indicted Ware for felonious assault upon Sheriff Johnson. Later in July, officers transported Ware from the hospital to the jail. He was still there in November, when C. B. King appealed to a judge to free him on the grounds that Ware was not a risk to flee and that he suffered both mental and physical aftereffects of the shooting, with blood still dripping from his ears. The judge refused to lower the bail bond, forcing the impoverished Ware to remain in jail more than a year until trial, but in the meantime C. B. King filed a civil suit against Sheriff Johnson in federal court, arguing that Johnson’s story was preposterous on its face. The sheriff was a full head taller than Ware, outweighed him by more than a hundred pounds, and possessed all the psychological advantages of a white sheriff in a Black Belt county where the air of feudalism still mingled with the heat. King alleged that the sheriff had committed a monstrous violation of Ware’s civil rights.

“positive actions” took place on November 22, only five days after the founding of the Albany Movement. Three high school students from Chatmon’s Youth Council walked into the white sections of the bus station to confront the officers stationed there during the continuous “alert.” After they refused orders to move on, even in the commanding presence of Chief Pritchett himself, they were hauled off to jail under the fixed gaze of several dozen bystanders. Tom Chatmon bailed them out within an hour, but Albany had its first arrests on the day before Thanksgiving.

He took up a post outside the station, from which he directed the herd of students toward the colored waiting room. All obeyed him except two, Blanton Hall and Bertha Gober. They broke away to “go clean-sided,” which was the local Negro slang for entering the white waiting room. The distraught dean, forbidden to pursue them there, peeked in from the outside along with gaggles of awestruck students. A policeman quickly approached Hall and Gober in the line at the white ticket window and said, “You’ll never get your ticket there.” The two students asked why, nervously and politely standing their ground. A detective laid the groundwork for arrest by advising them that their presence was “tending to create a disturbance,” and when they still did not move from the line, Laurie Pritchett ordered them to jail.

On Saturday morning, Blanton Hall and Bertha Gober each received in jail an official notice from Albany State, that “as a result of your being apprehended and arrested…you are hereby suspended indefinitely as a student.”

Their a capella singing took the service away from established control by either the preachers or the organist. The spirit of the songs could sweep up the crowd, and the young leaders realized that through song they could induce humble people to say and feel things that otherwise were beyond them. Into the defiant spiritual “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” Sherrod and Reagon called out verses of “Ain’t gonna let Chief Pritchett turn me around.” It amazed them to see people who had inched tentatively into the church take up the verse in full voice, setting themselves against feared authority.

It would be impossible to convince the gawking white bystanders and their representatives on the City Commission that this joyous spectacle did no serious damage to segregation.

Pritchett’s temper snapped. “Officers, move out!” he shouted to his reserves, and to the celebrants he thundered, “Don’t move! You’re under arrest.” He waded into the crowd to point out the culprits he wanted: the nine Freedom Riders, plus Gober and Jones. Some of them already were inside the waiting cars, with others strewn among people suddenly frozen in surprise. The arresting officers made only one mistake: in the confusion, they seized an Albany State student and missed one Freedom Rider.

The student movement had been working almost two years toward a chance to fill up the jails, and now in Albany they finally might do it. When Reagon doubted that even such a feat could make segregation crumble, Sherrod laughed. “My uncle always told me that enough pressure can make a monkey eat pepper,” he said.

As soon as he realized that they were all being arrested, an ecstatic Charles Sherrod cried out, “We are going to stay in jail! We shall overcome!” It took more than two rain-soaked hours to clear the alley.

Page 51 of The New York Times of Wednesday, December 13, contained an AP story headlined “Albany, Ga. Jails 267 Negro Youths.”

Negro maids were going to jail under false names, to conceal the arrests from their white mistresses; kids were going to jail two and three times. The people of the Albany Movement were discovering miracles in themselves every day, Lee reported, and at the peak of their fervor they invoked the name of Martin Luther King. The adulation was astonishing. Lee found that whenever he identified himself as youth field secretary for the SCLC, people almost fainted with recognition and clutched him in hopeful wonder, saying, “You’re with Martin Luther King?” He thought King should consider coming to Albany, but he warned Walker that a few of the local leaders spoke poorly of King and would probably oppose it. Walker asked crisply for their names.

“Negroes are almost entirely a working people,” King said. “There are pitifully few Negro millionaires and few Negro employers.” He likened the sit-ins to the pioneer sit-down strikes of the 1930s. Chiding the labor delegates gently for their persecution of Randolph, he summoned them to “admit these shameful conditions” of segregation within unions and to “root out vigorously every manifestation of discrimination…. I am aware that this is not easy nor popular,” he conceded, “but the eight-hour day was not popular nor easy to achieve” either. Nor were child labor acts or minimum wage laws. “Out of such struggle for democratic rights you own both economic gains and the respect of the country,” said King, “and you will win both again if you make Negro rights a great crusade.” It was a “white” speech, restrained and formal, but by then he had long since disarmed a skeptical, even hostile audience.

Among professional politicians, the AFL-CIO speech was received as the most important development concerning King since his Time cover in 1957 and his Atlanta arrest just before the 1960 election. Such events stretched King’s influence beyond his given constituency. Even those analysts inclined to minimize the significance of the Negro vote now had to consider King’s demonstrable impact on organized labor.

James Forman, recently bailed out of jail, spoke against the idea of inviting King to Albany, saying they already had a strong “people’s movement” that could only be weakened by a preacher of such renown. People would look to King as a messiah, and less to themselves. Charles Jones remained silent, knowing that such objections to King would sound petty and arcane to this group of fervent admirers. He also sensed a sharp edge of competitiveness against King glinting through Forman’s speech. C. B. King chided Forman for exactly that reason, saying that the real question was not King’s alleged demerits but whether the Albany leaders were in over their heads, as he believed.

Friday, December 16, brought the first morning in a week without marches or arrests. The Albany Movement leaders found that the spirit of the mass meeting was difficult to preserve. Their people were in jail, losing jobs. Reaching for a settlement, they sent through their negotiators the mildest four-part proposal they could tolerate: (1) free, unfettered use of the bus and train facilities by Negroes beginning thirty days hence; (2) acceptance by the city of property bonds instead of cash, which would enable those already out of jail to get refunds, and would make it possible to secure the release of the others; (3) appointment by the city of a biracial commission to discuss, without precondition, other aspects of segregation in Albany; (4) a permanent moratorium on demonstrations. As time dragged on without a response to this package, fears grew that it was so weak as to encourage the whites to filibuster in the hope that the Albany Movement would collapse.

Pious souls would maintain long afterward that they thought the Lord Himself had arrived, so awed were they. More skeptical observers were hardly less stupefied. Pat Watters, a newly arrived Atlanta Journal reporter, was so undone by his first exposure to a Negro mass meeting that he scribbled notes furiously to keep hold of himself. For posterity, he later wrote on the cover of his notebook: “Includes the night Dr. King entered the church.”

James Gray wrote a special front-page editorial in his Albany Herald, in which he denounced Albany Negroes’ complaints as “the Hitlerian tactic of the ‘Big Lie’…The Negroes are lying. The Department of Justice knows they are lying…. This sordid effort will fail, as all of the craft and cunning the Negro agitators have employed in their plottings for months have failed…. It will fail because its motivation is essentially evil.”

Judge Durden proved him correct by sentencing King and Abernathy to pay a $178 fine or serve forty-five days in jail.

seconded. King’s jailing, they agreed, was an embarrassment to everybody—to Albany, to the Kennedys, to Georgia, and to the entire United States in the court of world opinion.

Pritchett!” When he offered the chief Shiloh’s pulpit, the crowd fell into a dead silence. Then, as Pritchett made his way forward to speak, someone shouted, “Let’s give him a hand!” and an ovation rolled on for fully half a minute. Those outside who had expected to hear angry words, perhaps even gunshots, could only stare at each other in wonder.

often been told I would be welcome. I didn’t know whether I would or not.” Reporter Pat Watters, while marveling at the chief’s bravery, perceived a rich mixture of tone in his voice. There was some gratitude and respect, even some fellowship, he thought, combined with an edge of half-humorous sarcasm that Watters saw as the protective coating for Pritchett’s racial authority. “I never have interrupted your peaceful assemblies,” Pritchett told the crowd. “…Many people misunderstand your philosophy of nonviolence, but we respect your policy. I ask your cooperation in keeping Albany peaceful. This business of throwing rocks is not good.” The crowd applauded again. Pritchett contained his relief until he reached the police huddle outside. Captain Friend confessed to wobbly legs. “Don’t take me back in there, Chief,” he said, trying to grin. “Nobody but the laundry man will know how scared I was.”

they should pay Martin Luther King’s fine surreptitiously and then expel him from the jail. There was no other way, he explained, and they must be prepared to lie about it. If it became known that the city fathers of Albany had imprisoned King and then paid to free him, they would become a laughingstock. For men who prided themselves on their Southern code of honor, the lying part was a sour requirement indeed—all the more so because it was a Negro who forced the awful choice upon them. Still, they could not very well pressure the Kennedys to spring King, as it would look like a defeat for Albany at federal hands. Besides, the Kennedys were doing all they could. They had refrained from intervening or speaking out on King’s behalf; they had tacitly endorsed the scheme, and promised not to expose it.

Nonviolence manning hard choices

By prearrangement, the desk sergeant made out the receipt not to Gardner but to King and Abernathy.

Pritchett gave them what was to be his stock response through the ensuing publicity storm. All he knew, he said, was that the jailer had told him that “an unidentified, well-dressed Negro male” had paid the fines, asking not to be identified, and Pritchett did not want to question the jailer further about it, for fear of subjecting him to reprisal.

Kelley held tenaciously to the pact of silence for decades thereafter.

phrasing subtly endorsed the perspective of leading Albany whites, who saw segregation as a local matter.

James Gray declared, had done nothing more than to bankrupt the city bus system, cancel the Christmas parade, “cost Negroes jobs and money,” and cause “the jailing of nearly 800 persons, many of them children of long-established and honorable citizens of the Negro community…. They now have criminal records. Is this the way to teach the young about their America?”

was a near riot. There was no fighting, looting, or gunfire, but flying rocks and bricks soon joined the bottles in a sustained pelting.

At the same hour, King was returning from nearby Lee County, where the first jolt of late-summer violence hastened the decline of the Albany Movement. Arsonists had just firebombed the Shady Grove Baptist Church, in which SNCC volunteers had conducted a registration meeting four days earlier. The Lee County sheriff completed his investigation within two hours, speculating that an electrical storm might have started the fire, but FBI agents pursued leads pointing clearly to political sabotage. All that remained of the tiny church was a lonely chimney, and the charred remains of the clapboard walls and pine benches still were smoldering when King, wearing his customary suit and dress shoes, stepped gingerly across a dirt field off the remote stretch of Highway 195 to join a mournful group of church members at an impromptu memorial service.