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

by Taylor Branch

From the bus boycott through the Freedom Rides and on into Albany, King always had entered popular movements more or less haphazardly. Now, since his public stature made anything he did a referendum on his principles, pragmatism demanded that he design his own test. He needed advance planning, training, and mobilization on a specific rather than a general target area. In short, he needed control of a concentrated effort, maximizing both his risk and his chances for spectacular success. To his staff, King announced his resolve to swear off spontaneous rescue missions. “I don’t want to be a fireman anymore.”

Inside, the few Negroes who arrived for classes chose their places carefully, whispering of sniper angles. Moses left for a registration drive in nearby Bolivar County, but the following midnight Sam Block called him there in hushed panic, to report that several carloads of armed men were staking out the office. What coiled the fear most tightly was the stark awareness that it was absurd to hope for police protection—Block had seen police cars pull out just ahead of the posse.

He had no way of finding out that Block and the two new volunteers had escaped through a window leading across the roofs of adjacent buildings, then had shinnied down a television antenna to a back alley. They crept back the next morning to discover Moses asleep. To Moses it had been a natural choice—he was tired, with nowhere to go and no way to find his missing coworkers—but to others his presence at the site of the terror added to the legend of his nonviolent composure. “I just didn’t understand what kind of guy this Bob Moses is, that could walk into a place where a lynch mob had just left and make up a bed and prepare to go to sleep, as if the situation was normal,” wrote one of the new SNCC workers. “So I guess I was learning.” Block and the two volunteers stayed on in Greenwood, but fear cost them their office. It took them five months to find another one.

Since the spring of that year, Moses had labored to implant tiny registration projects in the core counties of the Mississippi Delta, north of Jackson. It was plantation country, where most of the potential Negro voters lived on scattered farms amid unspeakable poverty and illiteracy, in a state of semifeudal dependence on the white planters.

No such number of strange Negroes could come into a Delta town without attracting notice, especially since the registration projects had raised tension to the threshold of violence. A sheriff’s deputy stopped Forman’s car outside of town, but let him off with an order to leave the county. One police patrol arrested David Dennis for a traffic violation. Another arrested Sam Block and five others for loitering. Wiley Branton, who had made it out of town unmolested, was obliged to return to Clarksdale the next day to convince the authorities that it was frivolous to charge anyone with loitering in a moving automobile, whereupon he was presented a grossly inflated bill for towing the car from the scene of the arrest. Resigned, Branton paid the bill out of VEP funds. That same day, on his way to the Jackson airport, Branton learned that Block had been rearrested in Sunflower County with Moses and three other SNCC workers. They went to jail on a criminal charge of distributing literature (a leaflet announcing a voter registration meeting) without a permit.

All eighteen endured the registration tests without crisis, though none was accepted as a new voter, but on the way back to Ruleville a highway patrolman stopped the bus. Moses was arrested once again. The unsuccessful registrants went on back to Ruleville behind the news of their attempt, which swept through the county. That night, the owner of the Marlowe plantation drove to the house of sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer, a stout woman of forty-four from a family of twenty children, and told her that the Klan and the White Citizens Council were sure to harass him because his field hands had been messing in politics. Sounding as beleaguered as he was angry, the owner told Hamer that she must renounce her registration application or leave his plantation, where she had lived for eighteen years. Hamer fled immediately to the home of a couple who had sheltered teachers for the SNCC registration classes.

This was the last day of August. That same night, vigilantes poured gunshots into four homes in Lee County, Georgia, outside Albany. All four belonged to supporters of the SNCC voter registration drive. State investigators counted twenty-four bullet holes in the frame house where the chairman of the Lee County Movement lived with his extended family of twenty. No one was hit. Claude Sitton of The New York Times made sure to point out that the chairman was the same man he and Pat Watters had heard sheriff’s deputies threaten at the Shady Grove church in July. Four nights later, vigilantes fired three shotgun blasts into the home of a Terrell County woman who boarded summer volunteers in the registration drive. The shots missed Charles Sherrod, who was asleep in a bunk, but wounded a white student in the arm and grazed two others.

He was giving a fund-raising speech in New York when the phones brought news of two fresh burnings of country churches: Mount Mary Baptist and Mount Olive Baptist in Terrell County, both of them sites for registration meetings and both completely destroyed.

and Mathews now said there was no evidence of arson at the two churches. FBI agents found plenty of evidence. Poking around in the ruins, wearing their standard FBI business suits, they enraged white bystanders who had gathered to view the destruction. Virgil Puckett went berserk, taking a wild drunken swing at one of the agents and knocking off his glasses. He was arrested for

assault.

The next night, in Ruleville, Mississippi, night riders fired shots into two of the three homes providing shelter for volunteers in the SNCC registration campaign. Herman and Hattie Sisson were talking with their granddaughter and a friend, who were spending the night there on their way back to college, when a series of popping noises startled them. “That sounded like a rifle to me,” Sisson observed calmly, but in the next instant both college girls tumbled from the couch to the floor, writhing. As Mrs. Sisson described it later, everyone in the house fell to the floor and began hollering, as other shots came spitting though the walls. By the time the two girls went to the hospital—one wounded critically in the neck and head, the other in the leg and arm—there were large pools of blood on the floor and Mayor Dorrough of Ruleville had arrived and was pacing about, clearly upset, talking incessantly. He ordered his men to take Mrs. Sisson to the hospital for treatment of glass cuts, then looked at the bullet holes. “I’m so glad Hattie didn’t get shot,” he said. Then, calling the sheriff of Sunflower County, the mayor said, “Bob Moses is the cause of all of it. I knowed something l...

anticipating correctly that white officials would move to consolidate the advantages gained by terror. The local newspaper in Ruleville published the names of all the Negroes who had tried to register. Mayor Dorrough ordered city water service cut off at Ruleville’s Williams Chapel, the only church in the area that dared to host registration meetings.

Ayfkm?

Later, in response to a question about King’s telegrams protesting violence against voter registration workers, the President turned just as forcefully on the terrorists in the South: “I don’t know any more outrageous action which I’ve seen occur in this country for a good many months or years than the burning of a church—two churches—because of the effort, made by Negroes, to be registered to vote.” He went on to mention the Ruleville shootings as well, and to brand the attacks “cowardly as well as outrageous.” “I commend those who are making the effort to register every citizen,” he added. “They deserve the protection of the United States Government, the protection of the states…And if it requires extra legislation, and extra force, we shall do that.” This was President Kennedy’s strongest statement on civil rights to date.

Four more Negro churches were burned in Georgia within ten days after the fire at I Hope Baptist.

For the first time, FBI agents planted informants inside the SCLC convention and sent daily reports to headquarters.

mere fact that King was scheduled to visit a segregated city already had led to an unprecedented—and tentatively productive—round of negotiations with white leaders. In this respect, King achieved more in Birmingham before his plane touched the ground than he had during all the months of battering in Albany.

Since the jailing of Fred Shuttlesworth in January, Negroes had supported what began as a student boycott of downtown stores; at its peak the boycott caused some merchants to complain of a 40 percent decline in sales.

When Smyer parried this question by saying that he couldn’t speak for the downtown merchants, Shuttlesworth headed for the door and said, “You all called me to the wrong meeting.”

when one of the white men in the audience walked to the stage and lashed out with his right fist. The blow made a loud popping sound as it

landed on King’s left cheek. He staggered backward and spun half around.

The assailant slowed rather than quickened the pace of his blows, expecting, as he said later, to be torn to pieces by the crowd. But he struck powerfully. After being knocked backward by one of the last blows, King turned to face him while dropping his hands. It was the look on his face that many would not forget. Septima Clark, who nursed many private complaints about the strutting ways of the SCLC preachers and would not have been shocked to see the unloosed rage of an exalted leader, marveled instead at King’s transcendent calm. King dropped his hands “like a newborn baby,” she said, and from then on she never doubted that his nonviolence was more than the heat of his oratory or the result of his slow calculation. It was the response of his quickest instincts. This impression struck a number of others, including perhaps the assailant himself, who stared at King long

enough for Wyatt Walker and some of the others to jump between them.

“Don’t touch him!” cried King. “Don’t touch him. We have...

others—to allow an integrated SCLC convention in Birmingham at all, Connor did not hesitate to point out that a white man could not have attacked King at a lawfully segregated meeting of Negroes.

The first flesh-to-flesh violence victimized newsmen, as in the Freedom Rides. Beaten by students, a television cameraman from Dallas struggled to what he thought was refuge inside his car, only to have the windows and fenders kicked in. As the contagion spread across the Lyceum lawn, students attacked two other reporters. An Ole Miss professor tried to rescue one of them but was himself beaten to the ground. Molotov cocktails—gasoline in Coke bottles—spread flames at the feet of several marshals. Senator Yarbrough, racing outside from his phone call with the Attorney General, was horrified to see that the marshals had put on their gas masks. The whole idea of dressing the marshals in civilian clothes had been to make them appear less military, less antagonizing to the Ole Miss students, but now they looked like ghoulish space warriors. Chief Marshal McShane ordered the men to remove their masks in exchange for Yarbrough’s desperate promise to make personal pleas for an end to the violence. Yarbrough plunged out into the swirling mob, but his shouts had no greater effect than any other loud noise. The students, darting closer and closer to the Lyceum, added bricks to their projectiles, and when the first big piece of lead pipe felled a marshal, McShane shouted for the tear gas. Cannisters were fired into the crowd from the marshals’ line all around the perimeter of the Lyceum. Battle chaos curled backward, as some choking marshals had forgotten or lost their gas masks. And...

All because Meredith wanted to go to Ole Miss

Firsthand experience with Ole Miss made the President doubt his old Harvard professors, who taught that Northern fanatics trampled upon an innocent South after the Civil War. “It makes me wonder,” Kennedy said privately to Sorensen, “whether everything I learned about the evils of Reconstruction was really true.”

In October 1962, CIA officials obtained photographic intelligence that Soviet nuclear missiles were being shipped to Cuba. “Can they hit Oxford, Mississippi?” asked the President, facetiously suggesting that Fidel Castro and the Russians could do worse than to obliterate the site of his recent vexations.

saying she had moved the entire family to Clarence Jordan’s Koinania Farm for fear that the military bases near Albany would make prime targets for Soviet missiles. Hundreds of millions of people in scores of countries shared similar apprehensions. Certainly not since World War II, and perhaps never, had so many people experienced world politics so vividly at once.

When Kunstler heard that O’Dell was supposed to have resigned from the SCLC, she demanded an explanation. Stanley Levison kept telling her that the story was a distortion of O’Dell’s past, and was unlikely to surface, but Kunstler insisted that “this thing might bounce back on us,” and that rich people “would tell me to go fly a kite” if they suspected Communist involvement in the SCLC. When Levison suggested that she simply stop referring to O’Dell as the man in charge, she objected that “up to this point there has been no reason for us to use subterfuge, if you want to call it that.” She said her own integrity was at stake, because “many people may come back to me and say that I pulled the wool over their eyes.” They were dealing in mysteries of character and imagination, she told Levison: “Some people would laugh at this, but others might

be terribly hurt…That spotlight is a powerful thing.”

FBI wiretappers intercepted these emotional exchanges over Levison’s office lines in New York and forwarded transcripts to headquarters, where Levison’s defense of O’Dell doubtless made perfect sense as one Communist vouching for another. The internal strife at the SCLC also was ample proof that the Bureau’s first active blow against King had landed with telling effect. FBI agents had planted the unsigned New Orleans ...

Hoover launched a full-scale investigation of King at the same time. While it may have seemed illogical for the Bureau to punish King even before gathering evidence of alleged misdeeds, Hoover shrewdly seized his chance to give both orders during the week when the whole country was huddling in fear of extinction by Soviet missiles. The missile crisis inspire...

To carry out the first secret strike against King, ironically, they called in the Washington representatives of five American newspapers.

Their suspicions of foul play centered on local police forces. King, like everyone else in the civil rights movement, thought of the FBI as an ally—a most reluctant one at times, and certainly the conservative wing of the federal presence, but nevertheless a force that made segregationists nervous. King sought a more active FBI intervention in the South.

That November, Robert Kennedy signed a request from J. Edgar Hoover authorizing the Bureau to add a fourth wiretap on Stanley Levison. This one covered Levison’s home, and fulfilled the agents’ hopes of intercepting conversations with King late at night. Such blanket eavesdropping was beyond the reach of King’s vision. Even at “tip-toe stance,” he would not have been prepared for it.

King might as well have hurled lightning bolts into J. Edgar Hoover’s office. Hoover’s top assistants immediately exchanged a flurry of indignant memos, as they did whenever the Bureau was criticized publicly. Assistant Director Alex Rosen interpreted the remarks attributed to King as further evidence that he was under Communist “domination.”

With that, on King’s thirty-fourth birthday, the FBI officially wrote him off as unfit for mediation or negotiation. Thereafter, upon receiving intelligence that someone was trying to kill him, the Bureau would refuse to warn King as it routinely warned other potential targets, such as Shuttlesworth. The FBI assigned full enemy status to King, who had staked his life and his religion on the chance that enemy-thinking might be overcome. That an intelligence agency took such a step in the belief that King was an enemy of freedom, ignorant of the reality that King had just set in motion the greatest firestorm of domestic liberty in a hundred years, was one of the saddest ironies of American history.

FBI: King is an enemy

Matthew 17 about the disciples who were shaken because they could not exorcise the evil spirit from a madman. “Why could we not cast him out?” they asked.

These were the “big Negro preachers” in Cadillacs and all the timid souls of false piety who allowed comfort or habit to subvert the demands of conscience.

They could not cast the demon out, he told the congregation, because evil was too deeply rooted in human character.

No human faculty, known or unknown, developed or undeveloped, could touch it—not the liberal reason of a dozen Enlightenments, nor all the wildest dreams of scientific progress fulfilled. “The humanist hope is an illusion,” King said.

Then, to illustrate his point, he did not turn outward to the usual depravities of slavery, the Holocaust, or the atomic bomb. Instead, he invited the congregation to look inward with him at addictions that seemed simple at first but then grew slowly more tenacious until finally, overcoming all goodwill, they emerged almost innocently as invincible evil—alien, ...

Year by year you became aware of the terrible sin that was taking possession of your life. It may have been slavery to drink, un-truthfulness, the impurity of selfishness or sexual promiscuity. And as the years unfolded the vice grew bolder and bolder. You knew all along that it was an unnatural intrusion. Never could you adjust to the fact. You knew all along that it was wrong and that it had invaded your life as an unnatural intruder. You said to yourself, “One day I’m going to rise up and drive this evil out. I know it is wrong. It is destroying my character and embarrassing my family.” At last the day came and you made a New Year’s resolution that would get rid of the whole base evil. And then the next year came around and you were doing the same old evil thing. Can you remember the surprise and disappointment that gripped you when you discovered that after all of your sincere effort—you discovered that after all that you had done through your resolutions to get rid of it—th...

Ever sensitive to political danger, the Mississippi legislature added a requirement that names of new voter applicants be published in the newspapers for two weeks prior to acceptance. Another new law allowed current voters to object to the “moral character” of applicants. Facing these laws, plus the shootings and padlocked churches, no Mississippi Negro could hope to slip quietly in or out of the courthouse.

New creative obstacles to voter registration

But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and when you wife and mother are never given the r...

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumblingblock is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice, who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action,” who paternalistically believes that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom…

the white preachers for their shortcomings, as though speaking from a pulpit. “I have heard numerous religious leaders of the South call upon their worshippers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law,” he wrote, “but I have longed to hear white ministers say, ‘follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother.’”

As he continued with his usual themes on the failures of the church, his wrath turned slowly into a lament:” I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love.” In supreme irony, the prisoner in the hole mourned over the most respectable clergymen in Alabama as lost sheep who were unable to find the most obvious tenets of their faith.

“because the goal of America is freedom…If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.”

lament. “I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation,” he wrote. “One day the South will recognize its real heroes…One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers.”