At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  KATZENBACH’S MEMORANDUM landed on Monday at the White House, where officials bemoaned a simultaneous choice about whether American power should and could shape political order halfway around the world. In a cocoon of official secrecy, President Johnson was ending his own tormented war of decision before most people recognized anything of significance about distant Vietnam. “The game now is in the fourth quarter and it’s about 78 to nothing,” he had lamented on Friday to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Beneath public assurances of stability, Johnson faced a bleak reality that guerrilla armies were defeating the partitioned South, and would unify Vietnam under Communist rule unless the United States swiftly intervened. Worse, his military experts advised that a commitment of blood and treasure could stave off immediate disaster in South Vietnam—but little more. Classified military projections stubbornly refuted the ingrained presumption that a flick of American power would prevail in backward Vietnam, and strategic plans failed to predict lasting success by warfare of any design, scale, or duration. Johnson, trapped between looming humiliation and futile war, erupted in moments of primal fury against resignation to Communist victory. This to him was spineless surrender and political suicide for the leader of a great power, because American voters would “forgive you for anything except being weak.” Yet he also recoiled from a vision of bloody stalemate, saying, “this is a terrible thing we’re getting ready to do,” and that the prospect of sending American soldiers into Asia “makes the chills run up my back.”

  Bad weather still delayed the start of sustained bombing against North Vietnam, destined to last eight years, which Johnson had approved secretly on February 13 amid warnings of impending collapse in the South. (It was this crisis that had shortened his patience for King’s visit from Selma.) In the interim, another military coup by South Vietnamese allies installed the latest of six chronically unstable governments over the past eighteen months. Nerves tightened, the President made the best of a decision no longer deferred. “Now we’re off to bombing those people and we’re over that hurdle,” he told McNamara privately. “And I don’t think anything is gonna be as bad as losing, and I don’t see any way of winning, but I would sure want to feel that every person that had an idea, that his suggestion was fully explored.”

  On Monday, March 1, when McNamara explained the latest weather postponement and obtained clearance to “go ahead tonight” with the first of the new air attacks, he found the President transfixed by a report in the New York Times of plans for these continuous air strikes as well as ground troops to follow. “Am I wrong in saying that this appears to be almost traitorous?” Johnson asked shortly before noon. News about Vietnam decisions risked disclosure of the mountainous doubt and brutally frank pessimism inside his government—with Johnson and most of his advisers skeptical of airpower in this guerrilla war, with General Maxwell Taylor, ambassador in South Vietnam and America’s most illustrious active soldier, warning sharply against the introduction of American troops. Almost any candor about actual deliberations would erase the appearance of sovereign control, violating Johnson’s first rule of successful politics. He ached to introduce the conflict matter-of-factly, confidently, and even as quietly as possible, and pleaded with McNamara that Monday morning to track down those leaking war news to the press. “Somebody ought to be removed, Bob,” he said in a voice choked with emotion. “I just, you just can’t, you can’t exist this kind of thing…you just can’t exist with it.”

  By then, a draining twelve hours since Los Angeles, King began registration day in Alabama with an explicit prophecy of relief in the national arena. “We are going to bring a voting bill into being in the streets of Selma, Alabama,” he told a late-morning crowd at Brown Chapel AME Church, the twin-steepled gathering point for demonstrations in Selma. “President Johnson has a mandate from the American people.” Then he led an orderly double file of some three hundred volunteers on the familiar short walk through downtown Selma—a left turn from the church, two short blocks south on Sylvan Street, right on Alabama Avenue for five blocks to the Dallas County courthouse. Sheriff’s deputies blocked the head of the line at the steps, and across the street, buffered behind a line of city police officers, clumps of reporters and bystanders waited to see what reception lay in store. Sheriff Clark had employed tactics of selective or mass arrest, elaborate stalls, and various forms of harassment including one surprise dispersal of some two hundred adolescent Negro demonstrators by forced march behind cattle prods for three miles, out beyond the city limits to the Cosby-Carmichael gravel pit. A cold rain fell steadily this Monday on observers and demonstrators alike. King, wearing a raincoat and felt hat, passed words of encouragement down the line of aspiring voters along the sidewalk.

  DURING THIS wait in Selma, a slow accumulation of Negroes caused a hush to fall around the Lowndes County courthouse. As many as thirty-seven conspicuously nervous citizens arrived to mingle outside in the rain, unsure how or where to find the registrars and hesitant to enter without knowing. People stared from windows around the courthouse square. The Negroes formed a volunteer delegation of five that wandered the imposing halls, hats off, pausing at doorways. One of the white secretaries spoke to an office companion, asking, “Who is that little fella who keeps walking through the courthouse?” This gave John Hulett an opening to inquire about the registrars. He received no reply, but white men soon appeared to shoo the group back outside with a notepad and instructions to have all who wanted to register write down their names and come back in two weeks.

  The Negro group huddled under the eaves for furtive debate. Were these really the registrars? If so, why did familiar white men including car dealer Carl Golson decline to identify themselves by name or title? They “refused to know their own selves,” later recalled Elzie McGill, a fifty-nine-year-old railroad worker who came with his daughter Lillian from the White Hall area around Mt. Gillard Church, where preacher Lorenzo Harrison had taken refuge the previous day. McGill did not know Hulett or his carload from Mt. Carmel Baptist very well—indeed, many in White Hall thought Negroes from Hulett’s Gordonville area down Highway 17 spoke with an odd accent. They had been able to agree across community lines to show up this registration day in spite of the Klan scare, like regular citizens, with no outside civil rights workers to provoke the courthouse powers more than necessary. Such caution seemed especially prudent after the officials made goading remarks about whether the Negroes expected Martin Luther King to be the current local voter who would stand for their “good blood,” meaning vouch for their character, as local law required for each new registrant. This barrier helped confine Negro voting to the mists of faith for things unseen, which allowed for disagreement about the notepad. Some worried that those who signed would be marked for retribution. Others said they were identified already by standing there in daylight, and that nonsigners would be targeted as defiant, or as weak. Emma and Matthew Jackson of White Hall led a majority who signed, and Hulett’s small delegation returned inside to deliver the notepad so they could leave.

  IN SELMA, where the line of potential registrants stretched more than a block around on Lauderdale Street by early afternoon, King knocked on the closed courthouse door and beseeched Sheriff Clark for shelter from the rain. Reporters pressed forward to hear some of their exchange. “In the name of humanity,” King called out, “we are asking you to let them come inside.” He said there was room for them to wait in the corridors and stairwells. “In the name of common sense,” Clark replied, “they will have to stay out there until their numbers are called.” The numbers, mandated by federal court, were the recent fruit of legal pounding by lawyers from the civil rights movement and the Justice Department, designed to prevent manipulation in the order of service and to discourage all-day filibusters by the registrars. Sheriff Clark improvised this day by calling out numbers for the registrar’s office in a slurred whisper, then announcing that those who missed the call forfeited their number and must go to the back of a separate line for a new one. He d
ueled the movement staff in logistical maneuver until King led most of the sodden crowd in retreat back to Brown Chapel. No one knew whether any new applicants would be accepted as registered voters, if so, how many, or how long it would take to find out. These were separate, uphill battles. On balance, however, reporters judged the day’s effort a success for the demonstrators. There were no arrests or casualties, and 266 people managed to finish the complicated application process—twice the previous record.

  A small caravan of reporters and federal observers followed King out of Selma for an afternoon pilgrimage to outlying areas, first south to the Wilcox County seat of Camden, which had been named in 1842 for the city in South Carolina. Many of the early Wilcox settlers brought from South Carolina the zeal of its famous “fire-eaters,” who championed slavery and secession toward the Civil War in an era when one isolated Unionist balefully observed that his state was “too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum.” Although no Negro had voted in Wilcox County since an accommodating barber* in 1901, the white minority still raised apoplectic cries from time to time. One prominent local senator issued a proclamation that the racial voting margin—“2,250 whites registered, AND NOT ONE NEGRO”—would be unsafe against “the onrushing black horde” without new character requirements, which he advocated as “our only hope for white supremacy, our only hope for peace, our only protection against a race war.” Ghosts of yesteryear remained close in a county that had no electric lights until 1925, where temperament flickered between homespun gentility and raw tribal aggression. Ben Miller, elected on an anti-Klan platform as “the sturdy oak of Wilcox,” took a cow with him to supply milk at the governor’s mansion in 1930. Four years later into the Depression, a posse of mounted whites liquidated chattel liens in Wilcox County by seizing every crop, chicken, wagon, and plow from sixty-eight families of Negro sharecroppers, then setting them adrift on the Alabama River. Some of those who survived still never had seen a water faucet when King arrived at the Camden courthouse in 1965. He walked along a line of two hundred Negroes waiting in the rain—“Doin’ all right. How you feeling?”—and sought out P. C. “Lummie” Jenkins, county sheriff since 1937. Voluble and commanding, boasting that he had never carried a gun, Jenkins fretted about wasted time for everybody. To be registered, he said, each applicant needed not only to pass the literacy and citizenship tests but also to present a current local voter who would vouch for good character.

  “Well, how about you acting as voucher?” asked King.

  “I’m not allowed,” Jenkins replied. Elected officials were barred in order to avoid conflicts over vote trading.

  “Mind if I look around town for vouchers?” asked King.

  “Inquire around,” Jenkins invited. He called King “preacher,” and candidly advised that it might not “look right” for anyone to sponsor these new voters.

  Practiced, jovial banter masked the edge of tension. One awed woman would summarize in her words King’s quiet plea for them to put away anything that could cause harm or excuse violence: “Don’t even carry a hair clamp in your head.” Those in line eyed the fifty wet Alabama state troopers who stood vigil over them with guns and nightsticks, many knowing that a similar detachment had run violently amok in nearby Perry County when Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot. King himself was keenly aware of intensified threats against him, partly from Attorney General Katzenbach’s confidential notice that two riflemen intended to shoot him on his previous visit to the counties around Selma. He climbed a stoop at the jail to pay tribute to those who “turned out in the rain” where no Negro had voted for decades. “This is a magnificent thing,” he told those in line. Only ten were allowed to apply for registration, but this was a seismic number in Wilcox County. “Keep walking, children,” King called out in his familiar closing from the spirituals. “Don’cha get weary.”

  THERE WAS no public spectacle at the last stop. The sleepy courthouse lawn was drained of everything but fear when King arrived at Hayneville, where John Hulett’s group had been sent away hours ago. Lowndes County shared a South Carolina heritage with adjacent Wilcox but ranked higher on the intimidation scale. The county seat was named for Robert Y. Hayne, once South Carolina’s junior U.S. senator to John C. Calhoun, the county itself for South Carolina congressman William Lowndes, namesake relative of Alabama’s own fire-eating Senator William Lowndes Yancey, who in 1848 had advanced a Southern demand to extend slaveholding rights throughout newly settled territories. Racial solidarity remained a prime civic duty among local whites, resting on memories and practices that sometimes were peculiar or invisible to outsiders. No merchant in Lowndes County would sell Marlboro cigarettes or Falstaff beer, for instance, because of a report from the 1950s—unnoticed or long forgotten everywhere else—that the companies once made donations to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Mysteriously, the lone official who halted King’s party in the courthouse corridor refused to give his name or title. He did allow that other Negroes might have come to the courthouse on their own that day. If they did, he added, they wanted nothing to do with outsiders.

  King replied that local people had asked for help, but were frightened. “We had heard that if we work here, there would be violence,” he said.

  “I heard there would be violence, too,” said the man. “And you can agitate that. Everywhere you have been, there has been violence.”

  King sparred about seeking justice instead of trouble. As minutes passed, his persistently mild words echoed down the hallway and the man’s temper seemed to rise. Asked about religion, he said he was a Methodist but demanded to know what Christianity had to do with the vote. Asked about the county’s voting procedures, he said testily that the information was reserved for county citizens.

  “We don’t understand,” said King.

  “You are damned dumb, then, if you don’t understand,” the man said angrily. Photographers snapped a picture of him pointing an index finger closely at King’s nose as he denounced him for interfering where he had no business. “None of you can help the Negroes of Lowndes County,” he said to Abernathy, Andrew Young, and observers close by. After he declared the courthouse closed and walked away, reporters identified the pointer as car dealer Carl Golson, a former state senator and one of three county registrars.

  King returned safely from the outlying counties late Monday afternoon, March 1, completing a circuit of better than a hundred miles. He crossed the Alabama River over the Edmund Pettus Bridge into Selma on U.S. Highway 80, by the same route that Lorenzo Harrison had fled from Lowndes County into the previous night’s mass meeting. The deposed minister was fired from his regular job as a bush-hog operator for a construction company.

  FBI agents cabled headquarters that their personal observations “revealed no incidents throughout day.” They reported that King left Sullivan Jackson’s house after supper for Brown Chapel, arriving at 8:28 P.M. Monday evening, but he did not follow his usual practice of slipping into the pastor’s study before making an entrance to the mass meeting. James Bevel was exhorting a crowd of five hundred to be ready for a foot pilgrimage all the way to Montgomery, and King debated how and when to respond from the pulpit. Still undecided whether to embrace or deflect the call for such prolonged, vulnerable exposure on Alabama highways, he hesitated for six minutes on the steps outside the church, then climbed back in his car to catch a night flight from the Montgomery airport.

  CHAPTER 3

  Dissent

  March 2–5, 1965

  KING landed in Washington for Tuesday’s hundred-year anniversary observance at Howard University, which had been chartered under the Freedmen’s Bureau and named for its first appointed head under Abraham Lincoln, Union General Oliver Howard. In full academic regalia, he delivered a reprise on his Nobel Peace Prize lecture from December—urgently recommending nonviolence to combat what he called mankind’s three related scourges of racial injustice, poverty, and war. He spoke broadly on survival and moral progr
ess in a shrinking world, and reacted to sketchy reports of that day’s first massive U.S. air strike under a new policy of sustained military attack upon North Vietnam. “I know that President Johnson has a serious problem here, and naturally I am sympathetic to that,” King told the Howard convocation, but said he saw no solution in violence. “The war in Vietnam is accomplishing nothing.”

  King’s first public comment about Vietnam, like his speech at Howard, escaped notice in a press climate that looked to him for confrontational stories about race in the South. Attention to the war itself remained muted by later standards: a one-inch story noted that two deaths that week brought the number of Americans killed through five years of military support to 402, including 124 who perished in accidents. In some respects, neither King nor President Johnson wanted to advertise inner conflict about strategy. Johnson made sure that the United States and South Vietnam made no formal announcement of the new bombing policy, nor of the actual strike earlier that day by 104 Air Force jets, six of which were lost, and reporters were obliged to piece together the story indirectly. King, for his part, did not mention his apprehensions about the proposed march out of Selma any more than he dwelled on the forty policemen who stood guard around him on the Howard campus because of numerous death threats received in Washington. If he was not safe at a Negro college in Lincoln’s capital, what could be gained by an exposed hike through rural Alabama?

  Privately, King spent Tuesday in the capital seeking counsel about his dilemma. He arranged to meet with his Northern advisers later that week and sought another audience with President Johnson. Events pushed him to decide, but disputes and confusion made him hesitate. Bad weather delayed his return flight through Atlanta to Montgomery on Wednesday morning, March 3, and he circled in the air while two thousand mourners filed past Jimmie Lee Jackson’s casket at Brown Chapel in Selma. King missed the morning service there, as well as the thirty-mile procession by hearse and caravan northwest from Selma to Perry County, but reached Jackson’s hometown of Marion in time to join the afternoon funeral procession that moved into Zion’s Chapel Methodist through an overflow crowd of nearly a thousand Negroes standing outside. Some four hundred people were packed into the tiny structure of rough-cut planks, built for half that number. Jackson’s mother, Viola, and his eighty-two-year-old grandfather, Cager Lee, wept openly in the front pews, still bearing signs of violence from the attack on the march out of this church two weeks earlier.