Over the Christmas holidays, though, he found a few hours in which to prepare an article for The Nation called “Equality Now” and directed at John F. Kennedy, whose presidency would begin in the centennial year of Lincoln’s first inauguration. The symbolism was not lost on King. He thought he had helped Kennedy get elected, and he intended to influence the new President in the matter of civil rights as Frederick Douglass had influenced Lincoln.
Toiling in his study, contending with an eternally ringing phone, King wrote that Kennedy’s was the first administration in one hundred years with a chance to adopt “a radically new approach” in race relations and employ powerful and direct federal intervention to improve them. First, the President could “take the offensive” and fight for a far-reaching civil-rights bill that among other things would safeguard Negro voting rights. Second, he could use “moral persuasion,” letting it be known “that he would not participate in any activity in which segregation exists” and thus setting “a clear example for Americans everywhere.” Third, Kennedy could virtually abolish segregation through the executive order, one of the strongest weapons at his disposal. The Emancipation Proclamation was such an order, and so was Truman’s directive which desegregated the armed forces. Through executive orders, Kennedy could eradicate discrimination in federal employment, in federally contracted business activity, and in federally financed housing and medical programs. In addition, he could deploy federal marshals in Dixie, remembering that in early American history “it was the federal marshal who restored law in frontier communities when local authority broke down.” Finally, the President could appoint a Secretary of Integration to coordinate civil-rights activity, and he could urge the United States to provide the American Negro with the kind of special treatment that India accorded the untouchables.
The essay appeared in the February 4, 1961, issue of The Nation, and King and his aides distributed copies by the thousands. At the same time, he requested a hearing with Kennedy as soon as possible, so that he could press his suggestions.
Meanwhile King undertook a grueling public tour to raise funds for SCLC and SNCC, which was running the Atlanta boycotts and sit-ins. In Oakland, he set a crowd of 7,500 to “rattling the rafters” of the local auditorium—and collected some $10,000 in that single appear-’ ance. He tried to keep apprised of the situation in Atlanta, where the boycott against Rich’s had proven almost 100 percent effective. At least his debate with Kilpatrick hadn’t hurt the protest there.
When he returned home in mid-March, though, he found the black community ablaze with controversy. As it happened, the established Negro leaders—Daddy King among them—had negotiated an agreement with representatives of the all-white Chamber of Commerce and the fifty or so downtown stores. According to the terms, recorded and signed in the form of a contract, the stores would desegregate their lunch counters within thirty days after Atlanta schools began to accept Negroes in September. The boycott, however, would cease immediately, and students in jail would be released and charges against them dropped. Though at least two students had been present during the negotiations, Lonnie King and many others charged that they had been sold out—they wanted desegregation now, not in September—and black Atlanta rocked with recriminations. Once again King found himself in a bitter crossfire between the students and their elders.
The controversy reached a climax at a noisy mass meeting in one of the Negro churches. Young students and a prominent Negro dentist all inveighed against the agreement: the dentist claimed they had been railroaded; the students wanted to resume demonstrations. Daddy King rose and said he’d been working in this town for thirty years…“That’s what’s wrong,” somebody shouted. And the malcontents booed and hooted him down. The established leaders could not control the meeting. It looked as though the agreement were doomed.
King was there that night and felt his father’s humiliation. He had to do something to hold the community together. “He took to the pulpit,” an observer recalled, “and stood before the crowd for a full minute, searching every face in the audience.” Then he spoke extemporaneously in defense of his father and the older leadership, stressing their contribution to the cause. He lamented “the cancerous disease of disunity” that afflicted his people and exhorted them to march out of here stronger and more united than ever before. As for the agreement, he thought the students right in criticizing the date when desegregation was to start. Yet the agreement had much to recommend it, since it was the first written contract Atlanta Negroes had ever extracted from the white man. They had waited one hundred years for justice, so maybe they could wait another four or five months. “If this contract is broken,” he concluded, “it will be a disaster and a disgrace. If anyone breaks this contract, let it be the white man.”
He walked out of the church, leaving the crowd silent and subdued. Both students and adults agreed that it was a remarkable performance, one that dispelled “the lynch mood which was pervasive that night” and brought them all together. “I had heard him called ‘Little Jesus’ in the black community,” said the president of the Chamber of Commerce, who was in the audience. “Now I understood why.” In the end, black Atlanta rallied behind the accord and the boycotts and sit-ins all stopped. That fall, after the schools had accepted their first Negroes, the downtown stores and hotels quietly desegregated their lunch counters. “I am optimistic,” King told a reporter, “and I base it on Atlanta itself. Here, we have all the forces on both sides, but the forces of defiance are not as strong as those who realize it’s futile to stand on the beaches of history and try to hold back the tide.”
SOMETIME THAT SPRING, King met privately with Kennedy in Washington. Harris Wofford, the President’s civil-rights adviser, observed that there was always a strain between the two men, because King “came on with a moral tone that was not Kennedy’s style and made him uncomfortable.” To King’s dismay, the President said he was not going to push for a new civil-rights bill as King wanted, mainly because it would alienate powerful southerners on Capitol Hill and imperil other necessary social legislation. “Nobody needs to convince me any longer that we have to solve the problem, not let it drift on gradualism,” Kennedy said of racial injustice. “But how do you go about it? If we go into a long fight in Congress, it will bottleneck everything else and still get no [civil rights] bill.” But if he would forgo legislation, the President would employ executive action against segregation, as King had urged him to do. Kennedy hoped that this and a strong presidential commitment to civil rights would be enough to mollify King and the other Negro leaders. “I never wanted—and I told him this—to be in the position that I couldn’t criticize him if I thought he was wrong,” King recalled. “And he said, ‘It often helps me to be pushed.’” That was precisely what King intended to do.
King also met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, thirty-five, slim and bushy-haired, known as “Ruthless Bobby” for his relentless prosecution of labor boss Jimmy Hoffa. Like his brother, Robert Kennedy was fiercely competitive and fiercely loyal to his family. But behind his combative, acerbic public image was a compassionate and sensitive individual who strongly identified with underdogs. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., remarked, Robert Kennedy possessed what T. S. Eliot termed “an experiencing nature.” But at this juncture he had little experience with racial discrimination. John Seigenthaler, a Kennedy assistant, thought that King and the Attorney General liked one another well enough, but were never close in the sense of being friends, of calling one another Martin and Bobby.
King left Washington with the impression that the Kennedys did not fully understand the evils of segregation, did not regard it as the country’s most glaring and most urgent social problem. But perhaps they would learn, if he pushed and goaded them enough. As he spoke around the Republic that spring, he closely monitored the administration’s progress in civil rights, and in several areas he was not displeased. When it came to black officeholders, Kennedy altered the patterns of neglect and indifference that had character
ized previous administrations and appointed more than forty Negroes to significant posts, naming Robert C. Weaver to run the Housing and Home Finance Agency and placing Thurgood Marshall, hailed as “Mr. Civil Rights” for his brilliant court work with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, on the Second Court of Appeals in New York. The Kennedy Justice Department also opened negotiations with southern officials regarding school desegregation and initiated a strategy of legal action to gain southern Negroes the right to vote. “We are heartened,” King wired Robert Kennedy,” that your department is moving ahead with forthrightness and courage in a sincere attempt to solve many of the crises that face our Southland and nation.” And he had nothing but praise for the Attorney General when he came south himself and gave a blunt and uncompromising speech on racial justice at the University of Georgia. No Eisenhower attorney general had ever done anything like that.
But King was incensed with the Kennedys over the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba. With administration approval, a CIA-backed force of anti-Castro Cubans launched an invasion there in April, 1961, but Castro’s forces threw them back amid a storm of anti-American indignation. “I think our country has done not only a disservice to its own citizens,” King complained, “but to the whole of humanity in dealing with the Cuban situation. For some reason, we just don’t understand the meaning of the revolution taking place in the world. There is a revolt all over the world against colonialism, reactionary dictatorship, and systems of exploitation. Unless we as a nation join the revolution and go back to the revolutionary spirit that characterized the birth of our nation, I am afraid that we will be relegated to a second-class power in the world with no real moral voice to speak to the conscience of humanity.” He felt so strongly about the Bay of Pigs invasion that he signed a major newspaper advertisement denouncing it. “I did this,” he said, “because I am as concerned about the international affairs as I am about the civil rights struggle.”
He found some consolation in the fact that Kennedy rejected proposals that he hurl the marines into Cuba, and assumed full responsibility for the Bay of Pigs debacle. At least, King said, the President was “big enough to admit when he was wrong.”
IN EARLY MAY, 1961, James Farmer phoned King that CORE was launching Freedom Rides across the South to challenge segregated interstate bus facilities. In 1946, the U.S. Supreme Court had outlawed segregation on interstate buses and trains and in 1960 had extended the ban to terminals as well, but southern bus stations remained adamantly segregated, something CORE intended to dramatize. Under its auspices, interracial groups boarded two buses in Washington, D.C., and set out on a circuitous journey toward New Orleans, testing terminal facilities as they went. King had dinner with the Freedom Riders when they came through Atlanta, but elected not to accompany them. “CORE started the Freedom Ride,” he told his staff, “and should get the credit. We will play a supportive role.” Accordingly, SCLC bought the tickets that shuttled the riders off for Alabama, and SCLC affiliates stood ready to help in Birmingham and Montgomery.
In Alabama, the Freedom Rides turned into a nightmare. On Mother’s Day, May 14, an armed mob surrounded the first bus just outside of Anniston and set the vehicle afire. The passengers narrowly escaped before the bus exploded in a shower of flames, a scene that newsmen captured in photographs that were widely publicized. The second bus managed to escape the Anniston mob and raced on to Birmingham. But as the Freedom Riders stepped off the bus there, a gang of Klansmen, promised fifteen minutes of immunity by the local police, beat them mercilessly with lead pipes, baseball bats, and bicycle chains.
Because of all the violence, the Freedom Rides got far more media publicity than the sit-ins and traumatized white officialdom from Montgomery to Washington, D.C. In Washington, Robert Kennedy worked behind the scenes to protect the riders and dispatched John Seigenthaler to meet with Alabama Governor John Patterson and see what could be done. Badly mauled, the CORE Freedom Riders canceled their bus trip and flew to New Orleans. But a group of intrepid student activists—many of them veterans of the sit-ins—gathered in Birmingham and vowed to continue the Freedom Rides on their own. By now, Governor Patterson was in a rage against “the namby-pamby” in Washington and the “mobsters” and “trained agitators” invading his sovereign state. “There’s nobody in the whole country that’s got the spine to stand up to the Goddamned nigger except me,” he bellowed at Seigenthaler. “And I’ll tell you I’ve got more mail in the drawers of that desk over there congratulating me on the stand that I’ve taken against what’s going on in this country, the stand I’ve taken against Martin Luther King and those rabble-rousers.” And Seigenthaler could tell this to the Attorney General: if the schools were integrated, by God, “blood’s going to flow in the streets.”
On Saturday, May 20, the Freedom Riders set off for Montgomery in a bus secured through the Attorney General’s efforts. The Montgomery station was weirdly silent when the bus pulled in and the riders filed off. Not a single policeman was in sight. Suddenly a thousand armed whites materialized in the streets and screamed, “Git them niggers,” “Kill the nigger-loving son-of-a-bitch,” as they pummeled the riders with pipes and clubs.
In Atlanta, King saw the ugly scenes replayed on television and determined then and there to go to Montgomery and stand with the students. He phoned Abernathy and others that he was coming, and the word got out to Kennedy men on the scene in Montgomery. Robert Kennedy then called King and urged him not to go because whites there could not guarantee his safety. But King would not be dissuaded. He flew into Montgomery late Saturday night, and the next day five hundred federal marshals assembled at nearby Maxwell Air Force Base. Kennedy had sent them in because Governor Patterson would not call out the National Guard.
That evening, King spoke at a mass meeting in support of the Freedom Riders at Abernathy’s church. A white mob had formed outside, though, and King could hear shouts and heckling. Presently, Fred Shuttlesworth of SCLC’s Birmingham affiliate entered the sanctuary with CORE chief James Farmer, who had just arrived in Montgomery. Shuttlesworth had led him through the whites outside, crying, “Out of the way. Go on. Out of the way.” And they were so astonished that they let him pass unmolested. Then the crowd went berserk, setting a car ablaze and then attacking the church itself, hurling rocks through its stained-glass windows. In the sanctuary, people huddled frantically together as glass rained down on them and tear-gas bombs bounced along the floor. A clear baritone voice began to sing “Leaning on His Everlasting Arms.” In all the confusion, King made his way down to the basement and phoned Robert Kennedy in Washington that a mob was about to burn the church. Kennedy assured him that federal marshals were on their way at that very moment. Returning upstairs, King peered out the front door. As though by a miracle, the marshals had materialized in the gloom. King couldn’t make out how many, but they were out there with armbands on, trying to shove the mob back.
As hand-to-hand fighting raged outside, King and the other ministers held a hurried war council. Maybe they ought to surrender, someone said. Wouldn’t it be better to surrender than to be flushed out with tear gas and stoned to death as they attempted to escape? At that, King resolved to try and talk to the mob. He opened the door, and a gas bomb hurtled by just over his head. A preacher tossed it out the door; somebody else pulled King back, and he stayed with his people in the sanctuary, praying and singing as the racket of battle continued to punctuate the night.
Then suddenly it was quiet. The marshals, reinforced by a band of state police and a contingent of Alabama National Guardsmen, had finally broken the mob up. The blacks could go home now. National Guard trucks rumbled up to the church and hauled them away through the early-morning streets. The battle of Montgomery was over.
Afterward, Robert Kennedy tried to stop the Freedom Rides. His brother was away in Vienna, meeting with Khrushchev, and the rides were embarrassing him. “Doesn’t the Attorney General know that we’ve been embarrassed all our lives?” said Ralph Abernathy. “I thought that people were
going to be killed,” Kennedy said later, “and they had made their point. What was the purpose of continuing with it?” When he called for a “cooling-off period,” Farmer replied, “We have been cooling off for 100 years. If we got any cooler we’d be in a deep freeze.” In a meeting at a minister’s home in Montgomery, the Freedom Riders elected to continue their journey come what may and implored King to go with them. But King told them no. His advisers explained that he was on probation in Georgia and would be imprisoned again if he was arrested. “Look, I’m on probation too,” a young rider said. And others chimed in, “So am I.” “Me, too.” “Me, too, and I’m going.” But King would not risk going to jail at this critical hour, not when so many groups and incarcerated blacks depended on him to raise them money. And the riders would need him, too, if they ended up in some dreary Mississippi dungeon.
When King announced his decision at a press conference, several riders were bitterly disappointed. “I would rather have heard King say, ‘I’m scared—that’s why I’m not going,’ ” a young man complained. “I would have had greater respect for him if he had said that.” Said a young woman: “He’s a good man but as a symbol of this movement, he leaves a lot to be desired. He has been affected by a lot of middle-class standards. If he wanted to, he could really do something about the South. He could go to Jackson [with us] and tell those people why they should participate in and support the Freedom Rides.”
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