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

by Taylor Branch

By eerie coincidence, a more obscure kook was on a parallel trek. As King was leaving jail on Saturday, a white postman from Baltimore was presenting himself at the White House gate with a letter notifying President Kennedy that he intended to take ten days’ vacation to walk all the way from Chattanooga to Mississippi wearing two signboards, END SEGREGATION IN AMERICA and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL MEN.

Moore said that he had grown up in Mississippi. “I don’t believe the people in the South are that way. I think a lot of this stuff is just made up.” The reporter left Moore on a remote stretch of U.S. Highway 11, near Attala. A passing motorist discovered the body a mile down the road, shot twice through the head at close range.

From the beginning, it was no secret that their model was the 1960 march at the climax of James Lawson’s sit-ins in Nashville. This three-year-old event had become a new inspiration in Birmingham, since Bevel had been showing his film copy of an NBC special report on Nashville, narrated by Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. “Four thousand Negroes marched on the City Hall in Nashville, Tennessee,” Andrew Young announced at the mass meeting. “We would like to have that many here in Birmingham.” In their private strategy sessions, however, the leaders recognized that they faced crippling disadvantages. Nashville had jailed none of its marchers, whereas Birmingham had a consistent record of jailing them all. There had been no injunction against demonstrations in Nashville, nor any Bull Connor. Most critically, the Nashville march line had been formed mostly of students, whereas the Birmingham movement had been a grim war waged by Negro adults.

self-respecting adult could use their children for battle fodder, they said, as even the early Christians had not encouraged their children to face the lions at the Colosseum.

“Well, Bevel, you already got about eighty counts of contributing to the delinquency of minors pending in Jackson,” he said. “Well, that’s the problem,” Bevel replied. “I didn’t get enough. If I had had eight thousand, they wouldn’t have bothered me.”

Foster Hailey of the Times left Birmingham to cover the smaller group of Diane Nash Bevel, Paul Brooks, and six others, who began walking toward Birmingham from the spot where Moore’s body had fallen. Alabama state troopers soon arrested all eighteen in both groups, plus Forman.

How could he and King tell six-year-old church members that they were old enough to decide their eternal destiny but too young to march against segregation? How could they keep church members out of a nonviolent movement that embodied Christian teachings?

He also knew that it was absurd to form a jail march based on church teachings as addressed to the afterlife.

For King, too, the moment brimmed with tension. Eight years after the bus boycott, he was on the brink of holding nothing back. Eight long months after the SCLC convention in Birmingham, he was contemplating an action of more drastic, lasting impact than jumping off the roof of city hall or assassinating Bull Connor. Having submitted his prestige and his body to jail, and having hurled his innermost passions against the aloof respectability of white American clergymen, all without noticeable effect, King committed his cause to the witness of schoolchildren.

fifty teenagers emerged two abreast. Their high-spirited singing and clapping transformed “We Shall Overcome” from a wistful dirge into a ragtime march.

Except for the absence of adults in the line, it seemed to be another day in the month-long siege until a second double line of marchers spilled out through the church’s front doors. Shortly after them came another group, followed by another and another.

George Wall, a tough-looking police captain, confronted a group of thirty-eight elementary-school children and did his best to cajole or intimidate them into leaving the lines, but they all said they knew what they were doing.

With the streets cleared, the energy that had created the extraordinary sights disappeared into the jails, where as many as seventy-five students were crammed into cells built for eight.

“There ain’t gonna be no meeting Monday night,” he shouted, “because every Negro is gonna be in jail by Sunday night.” In wild, boundless bravado, Bevel vowed

This time there was no talk of arrest. With both the city and county jails bulging already, the goal was to keep the demonstrators out of the downtown business section without making arrests. On the orders of Bull Connor, Captain Evans pointed to the fire hoses behind him and told the sixty students to disperse “or you’re going to get wet.”

The holdouts sat down on the sidewalk to stabilize themselves. It was a moment of baptism for the civil rights movement, and Birmingham’s last effort to wash away the stain of dissent against segregation.

bystanders threw bricks and rocks at the hoses. When the water drove them back out of range, some of them sneaked into buildings so they could lob their projectiles from above. Eventually, they hit two firemen and Life photographer Charles Moore.

Andrew Young, and other supervisors directed the lines away from the conflict, avoiding both the hoses and the contaminating association with violence. Their maneuver confronted police commanders

Where the crowd was too tightly massed to flee cleanly, the growling German shepherds lunged toward stumbling, cowering stragglers.

An AP photographer standing nearby caught the sight that came to symbolize Birmingham: a white policeman in dark sunglasses grasping a Negro boy by the front of the shirt as his other hand gave just enough slack in the leash for the dog to spring upward and bury its teeth in the boy’s abdomen.

The victim, young Walter Gadsden, was not steeped in nonviolent discipline, nor had he intended to become part of the demonstration. His handsome cardigan sweater was an emblem of his standing in the prosperous family of C. A. Scott, who so scorned King’s demonstrations that his World papers in both Atlanta and Birmingham still ignored Project C more resolutely even than Birmingham’s white newspapers. Although the image of the savage attack struck like lightning in the American mind, the reaction of Walter Gadsden lay buried in the deeper convolutions of race. True to his family, he later said the German shepherd had shocked him into the realization that he had been “mixing with a bad crowd” of Negroes when he went to observe the demonstration. He resolved to get off the streets and prepare for college.

In caustic remarks, he and his fellow preachers noted that this tender solicitude for Negro children had never produced much concern over their consignment to miserable schools or other injuries of segregation.

said, “but it’s not nonviolent enough.” He warned that no amount of provocation justified rock-throwing. “We must not boo the police when they bring up the dogs,” he added. “…We must praise them. The police don’t know how to handle the situation governed by love, and the power of God. During these demonstrations we must tell the crowd to behave.”

“And dogs?” he asked. “Well, I’ll tell you. When I was growing up, I was dog bitten”—he paused, as a horrified cry rose up—“for NOTHING! So I don’t mind being bitten by a dog for standing up for freedom!”

After bombings and riots had shaken the goodwill of the movement Negroes, the local police, and the moderate whites alike, he said, the Wallace-Connor forces had moved into the confusion with a decisive show of anti-Negro violence. Their objective was to sabotage the Birmingham settlement in one of three ways: (1) by direct intimidation of the white businessmen who had authorized it; (2) by provoking the Negroes to riot against the state troopers, or to demonstrate, or to renounce the agreement themselves; or (3) by forcing the federal government to intervene, which would put the Birmingham businessmen in a politically untenable alliance with Yankee soldiers as well as Negroes.

“I believe that one of the weaknesses of communism is found right here,” King declared, citing Lenin’s defense of deceit and violence toward the goal of a classless society. “And this is where nonviolence breaks with communism or any other system that would argue that the end justifies the means, for in the long run the end is pre-existent in the means, and the means represents the ideal in the making and the end in process.” As his content grew more technical and remote, King compensated with nearly desperate passion. “I have come to see even more,” he cried in a choking voice, “that as we move on toward the goal of justice, hatred must never be our motive.”

“I refuse to become bitter,” he said, then moved to a final peroration on a theme that had inspired the multitude at his Detroit speech in June. “And so tonight I say to you, as I have said before, I have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” he began. “I have a dream that one day, right down in Birmingham, Alabama, where the home of my good friend Arthur Shores was bombed just last night, white men and Negro men, white women and Negro women, will be able to walk together as brothers and sisters. I have a dream…” During the ovation that followed, the dapper Chicago emcee shouted that he wished he had King’s eloquence in order to express his appreciation for the speech. “I don’t have that eloquence, so you’ll have to have another dream,” he quipped.

Wilkins and King did their cooperative best to project the march in a positive light—there was not a shaving’s difference between them in tone or substance—but public expectations brimmed with apprehension. In Washington, authorities from all sectors guarded against the possibility that marauding Negroes might sack the capital like Moors or Visigoths reincarnate. The city banned liquor sales for the first time since Prohibition. President Kennedy and his military chiefs were poised with pre-drafted proclamations that would trigger suppression by 4,000 troops assembled in the suburbs, backed by 15,000 paratroopers on alert in North Carolina. Washington hospitals canceled elective surgery. Some storekeepers transferred merchandise to warehouses to safeguard against looting. Chief Judge John Lewis Smith, Jr., notified his fifteen colleagues to be prepared for all-night criminal hearings,* and practically no baseball fans protested when the Washington Senators postponed two days’ games until Thursday, when the march would be safely over.

Bayard Rustin spent countless hours arranging police security and imported a supplementary force of four thousand volunteer marshals from New York.

happen if attackers burned one of the two thousand buses headed toward Washington, as they had burned the Freedom Ride bus, or if any bombs were detonated, as in Birmingham. It was Rustin’s obsession to make sure that no flaw in the arrangements permitted claustrophobia or discomfort to flare up into violence. He drove his core staff of two hundred volunteers to pepper the Mall with several hundred portable toilets, twenty-one temporary drinking fountains, twenty-four first-aid stations, and even a check-cashing facility. Meanwhile, in the great hall of New York’s Riverside Church, volunteers worked in shifts to prepare 80,000 cheese-sandwich bag lunches for overnight transport to Washington—to feed growling stomachs, and thereby to prevent growling people. Over the vast march area, Rustin had signs posted high enough to be read by someone jammed in a crowd. “If you want to organize anything,” he kept saying, “assume that everybody is absolutely stupid. And assume yourself that you’re stupid.”

Strict discipline would allow timely evacuation, which would reduce the chances of violence by or upon Negroes wandering strange city streets at night. It would also refute the racial stereotype of imprecision and inbred, self-indulgent tardiness. The planners wrestled not only with logistics but with the weight of perceptions that had accumulated over centuries. Never before had white America accepted a prescheduled Negro political event for national attention. By guilt or aversion, many of the most sympathetic whites retained a subliminal belief pairing Negroes with violence, such that even innocent beating victims were implicated to some degree in their fate.

This triggered a heated debate on what exactly the purpose was. Word of the dispute filtered downstairs to the hotel lobby, where Malcolm X was fielding questions from reporters, and the Black Muslim leader adroitly cited the reports to buttress his thesis that powerful white forces had made puppets of the Negroes and turned the protest into a Kennedy pep rally, which Malcolm later ridiculed as the “Farce on Washington.” Word of his stinging comments filtered back upstairs to the SNCC contingent. Lewis and several others had met Malcolm that day. They admired him for slinging darts of uncomfortable truth, and yet they also wanted to prove that at least some Negroes were not puppets.

Malcolm x on march on Washington

Moses himself carried a picket sign that caused more than a few pedestrians to brush by him as a doomsday kook: “When There Is No Justice, What Is the State but a Robber Band Enlarged?”

He turned aside briefly in a paragraph addressed to incipient Negro separatism within the movement—not only from Malcolm X but also from King’s exasperating colleague Adam Clayton Powell, who of late had been sounding off about how Negroes needed to purge the civil rights organizations of white influence. King blended a plea for renewed nonviolence with a call for a “biracial army.” “The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people,”

According to march historian Thomas Gentile, twenty-one charter trains pulled in that morning, and buses poured south through the Baltimore tunnel at the rate of one hundred per hour.

An eighty-two-year-old bicycled from Ohio, and a younger man pedaled in from South Dakota.

A chorus of news cameras clicked as James Garner pushed through the crowd hand in hand with Negro actress Diahann Carroll; they were among dozens who had arrived on the Hollywood “celebrity plane” organized by Harry Belafonte and Clarence Jones.

Norman Thomas, the old patrician Socialist, looked tearfully over the huge crowd and said, “I’m glad I lived long enough to see this day.”

From this official number, friendly observers argued plausibly that late arrivals and high density justified talk of 300,000, and the usual effusions ran it upward to 500,000.

of the fact that in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path, it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice that was calling to you to gather here today in this cause.”

For those who revered Du Bois, news of his death that very morning came as a shockingly appropriate transition. Gone finally was the father of pan-Africanism, the NAACP, and the Negro intelligentsia. Taking his life’s jumbled status to the grave, Du Bois would receive a state funeral in Accra, a Marxist eulogy, and burial outside Christianborg Castle.

From him, talk of living “in constant fear of a police state” did not seem extreme, and his refrain, “What did the federal government do?” came as a bracing dose of realism. Prophetically, he did not use the word “Negro,” and alone of the speakers talked of “black people” and “the black masses.” Crowd response swept him through difficult rhetoric of scolding, cold-eyed idealism:

In a harbinger of a separate movement to come, there had been muffled contention over the role of women in the march. Without noticeable dissent, the planning committee barred Coretta King and the other wives of the male leaders from marching with their husbands.

He recited his text verbatim until a short run near the end: “We will not be satisfied until justice runs down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The crowd responded to the pulsating emotion transmitted from the prophet Amos, and King could not bring himself to deliver the next line of his prepared text, which by contrast opened its lamest and most pretentious section (“And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction”). Instead, extemporaneously, he urged them to return to their struggles (“Go back to Mississippi. Go back to Alabama…”), to believe that change would come “somehow” and that they could not “wallow in the valley of despair.”

There was no alternative but to preach. Knowing that he had wandered completely off his text, some of those behind him on the platform urged him on, and Mahalia Jackson piped up as though in church, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” Whether her words reached him is not known. Later, King said only that he forgot the rest of the speech and took up the first run of oratory that “came to me.” After the word “despair,” he temporized for an instant: “I say to you today, my friends, and so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream…”

As King tolled the freedom bells from New Hampshire to California and back across Mississippi, his solid, square frame shook and his stateliness barely contained the push to an end that was old to King but new to the world: “And when this happens…we will be able to speed up that day when all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”

Like most television viewers, President Kennedy was witnessing a complete King speech for the first time. “He’s damn good,” the President remarked to his aides at the White House. Kennedy was especially impressed with King’s ad lib off the prepared text, and he was quick to pick out the most original refrain.

When Kennedy agreed, Randolph told him, “Nobody can lead this crusade but you,” and he urged him to take the crusade directly to the voters, over the heads of Congress. President Kennedy squirmed in

safely for civil rights and still hang blame for Negro excess on the Democrats. Then and later, President Kennedy alluded to treacherous political games being played—segregationist Democrats maneuvering for pro-Negro amendments to make it easier for moderates to vote against the entire bill, liberal Republicans threatening to vote against the bill because it was too weak.

More than his words, the timbre of his voice projected him across the racial divide and planted him as a new founding father. It was a fitting joke on the races that he achieved such statesmanship by setting aside his lofty text to let loose and jam, as he did regularly from two hundred podiums a year.