At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  “I’m not worried about James any more!” Bevel cried from the pulpit, two days after Jackson died as the first martyr of the current campaign for the vote. “I’m concerned about Peter.” Only twenty-eight himself, Bevel sang out in the spitfire tenor of a gifted Baptist orator—more original than King, believed many admirers of both—wearing the denim overalls common to those who came into the nonviolent movement as students, and on his head a yarmulke that marked him for an eccentric identification with the Hebrew prophets. By Peter, Bevel meant all those left behind “to be cowed and coerced and beaten and even murdered,” yet to prevail by spirit. He said he had gone out into the countryside only hours after the death on Friday and found Jackson’s mother still bandaged from the attack and his battered grandfather, Cager Lee, still pronouncing himself fit for the next march. Bevel said that while he should be accustomed by now to such plainspoken courage, somehow the exposure to Jimmie Lee Jackson’s family “is falling kind of hard on me.” He shifted his biblical text to the story of Esther, a Queen of ancient Persia who had concealed her Hebrew identity until a courtier’s plot moved her to “go unto the king, to make supplication unto him, and to make request before him for her people.” Just so, said Bevel, voteless Negroes should honor Jimmie Lee Jackson by hazarding a mass pilgrimage of several days to petition the ruler of Alabama. “We must go to Montgomery and see the king!” he shouted. “Be prepared to walk to Montgomery! Be prepared to sleep on the highway!” He preached the congregation into full-throated shouts of call and response.

  Bevel returned to Selma that evening and was repeating his challenge when Rev. Lorenzo Harrison burst through the doors at Brown Chapel AME. A commotion ran through the packed congregation of seven hundred until Rev. L. L. Anderson brought the fugitive into the pulpit to tell of being chased from his church in Lowndes County that day. Harrison clung to bravado on the edge of hysteria. He declared that he would have stayed on to face the threats—and would go back—except that his deacons had paid him three months’ severance pay of a hundred dollars. “I said you ought not to be crying, you should be like men!” he shouted. “I told them I was not leaving because I was afraid, but because I can’t fight white folks and black folks at the same time!” Then Harrison himself broke down.

  Rev. Anderson reacted in a fury: “I want the world to know that in Alabama you are through running Negro preachers out of their pulpits!” He reminded the crowd that terror almost this extreme had paralyzed Selma itself until less than two years ago, during the national upheaval over King’s 1963 demonstrations in Birmingham, when the young civil rights worker Bernard Lafayette had persuaded Anderson, over the strenuous objections of his deacons, to open Tabernacle Baptist for the first church meeting about the right to vote, and Sheriff Jim Clark had brought intimidating deputies right into the Tabernacle sanctuary. Despite this early trauma, the Selma movement had grown slowly into a thundering witness, with nearly four thousand demonstrators jailed since King arrived in January of 1965. Anderson vowed to carry this newfound courage into the harshest surrounding countryside.

  In a cable to headquarters, FBI observers downplayed the excitement from Lowndes County as a dubious tale “inasmuch as Harris [sic] could furnish no description of any vehicle that the white people were traveling in and could not furnish any description of the whites that allegedly contacted the deacons in his church.” More accurately, agents reported from private sources that James Bevel was distraught over Harrison’s flight. Recently, he and colleague Andrew Young had turned up glimmers of interest as they scouted into Lowndes County along Highway 80, ducking into makeshift sharecroppers’ stores with low tin roofs and walls of rough-cut timber, where chamber pots and drinking dippers hung for sale, telling nonplussed customers that “Dr. King asked us to come down here like Caleb and Joshua, to survey the land and look for the giants.” Most contacts hastily vanished, and no church yet dared to open its doors for a meeting about the vote, but one deacon had promised “to do what I can.” A farmer had said he heard talk of Dr. King on his television, and others warily had gauged whether local whites might tolerate registration if Negroes confined themselves to small groups. Now the preemptive raid showed that such timid interest was betrayed already to the Klan, and shock threatened to reseal the most isolated part of Alabama behind its firewall of legend at the county line. One dire consequence for Bevel was that the pragmatic Martin Luther King might not approve his desperate new resolve to walk fifty-four miles from Selma to Montgomery, through Big Swamp and the expanse of Lowndes County.

  KING WAS returning to Alabama by way of Atlanta that Sunday, from a fund-raising excursion to California. “My few days here are a refreshing contrast to Selma,” he told a crowd in Los Angeles, trying to look past the bubble of crisis that traveled with him. Because of death threats from callers who identified themselves with a newly formed Christian Nationalist State Army, a hundred Los Angeles police officers guarded his appearances at Temple Israel, Victory Baptist Church, and the Hollywood Palladium. News stories tracked a manhunt for the cultish group’s leader, who was said to have stolen more than a half-ton of dynamite. Reporters pressed King to confirm rumors that Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach had just warned him personally of other murder plots in Alabama, and they bombarded him with questions about the assassination of Malcolm X the previous Sunday in New York. Did King suspect a conspiracy? Had he made arrangement for succession if “something should happen” to him? Was he afraid that support for the doctrine of nonviolence was evaporating nationwide? In his sermon at Victory Baptist, King decried popular culture that made heroes of fast guns and raised even children to think of dissent by murder. “This disturbs me,” he said, “because I know violence is not the answer.”

  A charged atmosphere both galvanized and polarized press attention. When King defined nonviolence in a Los Angeles interview as a leadership discipline for public conduct, and said he could in good conscience defend his family from attack in their home, a local Negro newspaper excoriated him as “the biggest hypocrite alive” for excluding his own loved ones from the suffering witness he prescribed, and declared that his nonviolence itself failed the Malcolm X standard of manhood. In New York, by contrast, the normally reserved Times reacted to Malcolm’s death with open scorn for a “pitifully wasted” life marked by “ruthless and fanatical belief in violence.”

  King made his way through Atlanta back to Alabama for a few hours of domestic refuge at the home of Dr. Sullivan Jackson, Selma’s only Negro dentist, where he knew he would find the small guest bedroom stocked for him with Jackson’s spare clothes in his size, including suits and underwear, plus matching pajamas and a twin bed for his movement companion, Rev. Ralph Abernathy. King regularly teased himself for failing to persuade Jackson to join the nonviolent demonstrations—“I flunked on you, Sully”—but he valued the respite of well-worn hospitality. Dr. Jackson’s wife, Jean, was a childhood friend of Abernathy’s wife, Juanita; her great-aunt had been one of Coretta King’s music teachers. College ties and pulpit connections extended social bonds among the families that cushioned King’s reentry to the Selma campaign. He knew of Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death, which doctors had predicted before King left for California, but now he learned of the newly proposed march to Montgomery. He knew to expect danger on his scheduled tour of the outlying rural areas on Monday morning, March 1—one of only two days per month when Alabama law required courthouses to be open for voter registration—but now he learned of the Klan raid in Lowndes County. Aides argued that it was suicidal futility for King to venture there with personal appeals for white officials to accept Negro applicants, and some traced anticipated disaster on several fronts to the lunatic streak in James Bevel.

  Doubts about Bevel were legion in King’s inner circle. Bevel himself claimed to hear voices. His rival, Hosea Williams of Savannah, regularly denounced Bevel to King as unstable, even though Williams himself had pioneered night marches through Klan towns in a semitrance that inspired playful remarks
about side effects from the metal plate still in his head, courtesy of war wounds in Germany. Wyatt Walker, chief of staff from 1960 until 1964, had resigned from movement service in part because King refused his insistent demands to fire Bevel for insubordinate mischief. King had indulged Bevel, saying the movement required a touch of madness—“maladjustment,” he called it in sermons—in order to crusade against the entrenched structure of racial caste in America from a base of powerless, nonviolent Negroes. Indeed, King was in Selma largely on a quixotic leap urged upon him since the Birmingham church bombing eighteen months earlier, when Bevel and his wife, Diane Nash Bevel, had concocted a grand design to answer the heinous crime by securing the right to vote for Negroes. Vowing never to rest until they succeeded, the couple had made a life’s pact out of anguish intensified by their pivotal roles in urging King’s Birmingham movement to use students, adolescents, and finally small children in great numbers—girls mostly, many even younger than the four victims in the church bombing—in the May 1963 demonstrations that at last overwhelmed the national and international conscience about segregation. While King knew that Bevel walked a thin edge between prophetic genius and self-destruction, the record of astonishing nonviolent breakthroughs made him slow to reject any of Bevel’s schemes as crazy or immature.

  King encountered new rumbles of amateur diagnosis about Bevel, who had been discovered wandering Selma’s streets in the predawn hours on Friday, evicted by his wife from their lodgings at the Torch Motel. In one sense, friends considered the evident crackup a minor surprise compared with the mismatched wedding three years earlier between the unabashedly skirt-chasing Mississippi Baptist preacher and the reserved Catholic puritan from Chicago—Hotspur and Joan of Arc. Introduced in nonviolent college workshops, where Nash emerged from the sit-ins of 1960 as the iron-willed leader of Nashville’s vanguard student organization, they had achieved by harrowing common experience a spiritual respect that overcame their sniping incompatibility. Through the birth of two children, Nash had remained oblivious to her husband’s rascally effusions—blind to quips and rumors, dismissing one direct complaint from a movement colleague that Bevel had seduced his wife. In Selma, earlier in February, when Sheriff Clark had boiled over against the voting rights demonstrations and punched Bevel with his nightstick, then had him jailed, his cell stripped bare and hosed with cold water at night until Bevel ran a high fever from viral pneumonia, Nash mounted a telephone blitz to the Justice Department that prompted Clark to transfer the prisoner to a hospital, where Nash found him shackled and chained to the bed. Another round of calls and door banging by Nash secured Bevel’s release, leaving friends puzzled anew over her ferocious loyalty and the mysterious personal chemistry of opposites.

  Now King found the couple fractured, reticent in shock. Each insisted that personal casualties were incidental to the larger campaign for the vote, and other members of King’s staff knew little as yet about the precipitating incident late Thursday night when Nash had found a baby-sitter for the children and slipped into the back of a nightspot to observe Bevel keeping one of his assignations rather than his promise to come home. Later, when she contradicted his alibi about car trouble, Bevel had struck her, in the face. “How dare you, lie to me and then hit me!” Nash shouted, so angry that she remained dry-eyed all night, which surprised her as a departure from her habit of crying privately through anxiety before demonstrations. She went instead to a lawyer, but the harsh realities of divorce made her hesitate. Nash remained partly under the spell of Bevel, who, always on the offensive, folded the conflict into a teaching tool for their ongoing commitment to answer the Birmingham church bombing. Citing Nash herself, ironically, he presented nonviolence as a kind of nuclear science by which truth properly applied could release stupendous healing energy in the larger society.

  King knew there was calculated political strategy in Bevel’s method, beyond his mystical exuberance and personal demons, and that the real target of the proposed journey to Montgomery was not Governor Wallace but the national government in Washington. For nine years now, since the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56, King’s cohorts had experimented with the spiritual and political arts required to nurture a small inspiration, such as the arrest of Rosa Parks, into a movement of sufficient scope to make America “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed,” as he put it in his signature “dream” speech. For King, this meant steering a course that took account not only of Bevel’s state of mind and the residual strength of the jailgoers in Selma, plus the likely effect of Lorenzo Harrison’s flight into the mass meeting, but also the response from national leaders a world apart.

  BY FAR the most critical figure for him to read was President Lyndon Johnson, whose relations with King contrasted sharply with President John F. Kennedy’s sympathetic, sophisticated aloofness. Whereas Kennedy had charmed King while keeping him at a safe distance, harping in private on the political dangers of alleged subversives in the civil rights movement, Johnson in the White House was intensely personal but unpredictable—treating King variously to a Texas bear hug of shared dreams or a towering, wounded snit. After the assassination in Dallas, Johnson had burst with urgent intimacy in a telephone call, promising to show King “how worthy I’m going to try to be of all of your hopes,” and the new President indeed played skillfully upon national mourning to enact the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Then Johnson had turned suddenly coy and insecure. Having consciously alienated the century-old segregationist base of his Democratic Party, he refused to see King, pretended he had nothing to do with his own nominating convention, and lashed out privately at both King’s Negroes and white Southerners. Just as suddenly, after his landslide election in November, Johnson had rushed past King’s congratulations to confide a crowning ambition to win the right for Negroes to vote. “That will answer seventy percent of your problems,” he had said in January, rehearsing at breakneck speed speeches he urged on King to dramatize the idea that every American should “have a right to vote just like he has a right to fight, and that we just extend it whether it’s a Negro or whether it’s a Mexican or who it is.” King, on his heels, had mumbled approval. He did not mention that he was headed to Selma for that very purpose—knowing that Johnson would not welcome his tactics of street protest—and the President kept pressing him to aim higher than conventional civil rights goals such as a Negro Cabinet officer. “There’s not gonna be anything, though, doctor, as effective as all of ’em votin’,” Johnson had told King. “That’ll get you a message that all the eloquence in the world won’t bring…. I think this will be bigger, because it will do things that even that ’64 act couldn’t do.”

  More recently, Johnson’s mood had turned prickly again. When a haggard King placed an ad in the February 5, 1965, New York Times—THIS IS SELMA, ALABAMA. THERE ARE MORE NEGROES IN JAIL WITH ME THAN THERE ARE ON THE VOTING ROLLS—and posted bond to confer in Washington, White House aides had scolded him for presuming upon Johnson’s schedule, adding to the grave burdens of state. Johnson had set for King an appointment with underlings, then concocted an “accidental” meeting at which he insisted upon his prerogative to choose the content and moment for any voting rights bill. This last encounter had put King back on edge with Johnson. Before he left California on Sunday, February 28, King called intermediaries to urge that prominent citizens send telegrams on his behalf, beseeching Johnson for federal protection of his life against death threats the next day in Alabama. He had no way of knowing that FBI agents overheard his call through a wiretap on the phone of his lawyer in New York, Clarence Jones, or that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reacted to the intercept by maneuvering to escape such duty. Nor could King realize how sharply Johnson felt the tenterhooks of two fateful decisions that same weekend.

  The President ordered his staff to evaluate a proposal to suspend local literacy tests, and to provide for direct registration by federal officials, in those areas of the country where Negroes voted drastically under their percentage of the popula
tion. Senior speechwriter Horace Busby promptly warned that white Southern voters would deplore such drastic measures as “a return to Reconstruction.” More broadly, a stand for the rights of poorly educated and illiterate Negroes “will be unpopular far outside the South” as a “most radical intervention” in state affairs, Busby argued, and would jeopardize generations of accumulated public trust by touching the hot-button fear of government domination. Busby’s objections circulated on Sunday, and Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach wrote a pained reply. Katzenbach himself strongly opposed any new civil rights initiative as premature. He believed the country had just begun to digest the law of 1964—moving toward gradual compliance in public accommodations but still segregated, now illegally, in nearly all schools and employment sectors, including the news media and government itself. He feared that another controversial race law would undermine the daunting task of enforcement, and meanwhile would snarl the Congress for months of a second consecutive year. Reluctantly, however, Katzenbach turned aside from Busby’s tempting position that it was wiser to outlaw the “abuse” by state officials of their rightful duty to set standards for voters. Such abuse was forbidden already by statutes across two centuries, he said, but local officials consistently delayed, thwarted, and evaded prosecution by the Justice Department in dozens of recent marathon cases. He saw only a remote chance to win effective remedy under arrangements that “leave control of voting machinery in state hands,” given the pervasive obstacles in Southern statehouses and courtrooms. “Therefore,” Katzenbach concluded, “while I agree with Mr. Busby that the political consequences of the proposed message are serious, I see no alternative.” If Johnson really meant to secure the right of Negroes to vote, he must try to extend the reach of national government and trust posterity to judge whether the result enhanced freedom or tyranny.