King was accustomed to funerals, and normally kept his trained composure in the pulpit, but a correspondent noted that “a tear glistened from the corner of his eye as he rose to speak.” Recycling the text of his brief eulogy for the young girls killed by dynamite in their Birmingham church, he parceled out blame for the funeral among the hatred in some segregationists, the passivity in moderates, the “timidity” of the federal government, and “the cowardice of every Negro” who “stands on the sidelines in the struggle for justice.” He acknowledged the unfathomable depth of the moment—“At times life is hard, hard as crucible steel”—and reached high and wide for consolation. “God still has a way of wringing good out of evil,” he said. “History has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive.” Finally, King added a personal tribute with a conclusion that also addressed his own dilemma. “Jimmie Lee Jackson is speaking to us from the casket,” he said, “and he is saying to us that we must substitute courage for caution…. We must not be bitter, and we must not harbor ideas of retaliating with violence. We must not lose faith in our white brothers.”
King recessed behind the pallbearers out through the courthouse square, past the café where Jackson had been shot, out of town on muddy roads to Heard Cemetery. “More than 1,000 walked three miles in rain to bury him on a pine hill,” the New York Times recorded simply of Jackson’s interment. Some of those in the long line had marched in the Selma campaign since January, including nine-year-old Sheyann Webb, whose example had melted the fearful nonparticipation of her parents. “What time they be marchin’?” her father asked her at last, and John Webb walked memorably this day in a new suit so thin that rain rinsed its blue dye all through his white shirt. The humblest citizens of two counties mingled in a burial procession that stretched nearly half a mile, confronting reminders of lethal, semiofficial violence in such numbers as to invite greater leaps of faith. King passed word to schedule the fifty-four-mile march from Selma to Montgomery. He set the starting date for Sunday, March 7, only four days away, and Bevel announced the first detailed plans that night in Selma. Again, however, King decided not to speak at the mass meeting. To give himself some wiggle room about Lowndes County, he told reporters that he might break away from the four-day pilgrimage and rejoin its conclusion in Montgomery.
KING RUSHED to catch a plane for New York, leaving behind the frantic logistical preparations and ferocious debates that were triggered by his commitment to the Sunday march. Staff members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) branded his announcement another high-handed betrayal by King of their working agreement to make joint decisions. At a crisis staff meeting in Selma, Fay Bellamy voiced the prevailing opinion that the proposed march would be a publicity stunt. Bellamy was twenty-six. Gripped by news images of the Birmingham church bombing, she had made her way east from San Francisco in search of the movement, and in January had secured her first field assignment among roughly a dozen SNCC workers added to Selma since King opened his campaign there, grabbing space willy-nilly on cots and bedrolls in SNCC’s Freedom House at 2021 Eugene Street, with no telephone and virtually no heat, drawing a weekly SNCC paycheck of $9.64 when lucky. She and other newcomers absorbed SNCC’s five-year institutional memory of subdued grievance against King—that he reaped public glory from their sacrifice as shock troops since the sit-ins and Freedom Rides, that his hit-and-run celebrity priesthood undercut their long-term efforts to build local leadership. By natural temperament, or out of emotional exhaustion from prolonged exposure to suffering, they also chafed against the nonviolent doctrines SNCC shared publicly with King and his preacher-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In February, Bellamy had introduced herself to Malcolm X at Tuskegee and boldly importuned him to discuss alternatives to nonviolence in Selma, scaring people for and against the movement. She and most SNCC colleagues, having fought rearguard battles against the innovation of night marches before Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed in one, saw King’s plan as an invitation to punishment on a grand scale. Lacking the means to stop it, however, they were sharply divided about whether to split the movement by public dissent, and tactical arguments raged until project director Silas Norman arranged for the national officers of SNCC to address the emergency issue Friday night in Atlanta.
IN MONTGOMERY, where an opposing war council convened behind closed doors, Governor George Wallace and his deputies, especially Colonel Al Lingo of the state troopers, debated a surprise suggestion to let the march go forward unmolested. Staff advisers explained the scheme as a mousetrap for King. They proposed to lure his group onto the highway and then stop all vehicular traffic between Selma and Montgomery behind trooper roadblocks. Not even reporters would be allowed to follow, except on foot, and King’s ragtag pilgrims would find themselves cut off from motorized support or relief, facing fifty miles of hostile country. Press secretary Bill Jones confidently predicted that the Negroes would abandon voting rights and limp back to Selma as the “laughingstock of the nation.” The Alabama officials warmed to the propaganda value of defeating King with a shrewdly tailored version of what he wanted, and chortled over refinements such as temporary signs to mark Highway 80 as a “Jefferson Davis footpath” for these pedestrians. By midnight Thursday, Wallace approved deceptive news leaks that Alabama would not allow Sunday’s march to leave Selma. This feint might induce Negroes to show up low on water and travel supplies, expecting no march, and it gave Wallace a strong position for maneuver if he changed his mind about the laughingstock option.
IN NEW York, at 12:31 P.M. on Thursday, March 4, FBI surveillance agents carefully noted that Stanley Levison rode an elevator to the forty-third floor of the Americana Hotel and walked into Room 4323, where Andrew Young and King’s travel aide Bernard Lee were waiting. The agents recorded that King himself arrived at 12:56 from a speaking engagement before a federation of Jewish women, followed by King’s lawyer Clarence Jones at 1:25 and actor Ossie Davis at 3:20. Since Saturday, when Davis had delivered the principal eulogy for Malcolm X, agents had intercepted conversations over the wiretapped phone lines of Jones in which Davis worried about threats against King’s life in Alabama, saying, “We cannot afford to lose him at this juncture.” These spare gleanings were flashed to headquarters and distilled from the FBI point of view into an overnight warning to President Johnson that forthcoming requests for federal protection of King would be subversive in origin. Director Hoover’s note included boilerplate allegations: Clarence Jones had reportedly belonged to a suspect college youth group, and a source in 1963 had called Ossie Davis a Communist.
A separate letter from Hoover, hand-delivered to the White House and classified secret, reported that King was resuming contact with Stanley Levison a year and a half after breaking off all communication under heavy pressure from President Kennedy. Hoover had source information that Levison had been a Communist fund-raiser in the early 1950s, which he preserved secretly as the official predicate not only for the pressure through Kennedy and for the authorized wiretaps on Jones, King, and others who knew Levison, but also for Hoover’s extralegal harassment of King. Alerted by wiretaps, for instance, FBI headquarters only the day before had instructed the head of the Boston office to try to scuttle a “Martin Luther King Day” scheduled for April by arranging a derogatory briefing about King for Governor John Volpe of Massachusetts, “on a highly confidential basis and with the proviso that under no circumstances may there ever be any attribution to the FBI.”
FBI surveillance agents lacked an opportunity to plant microphone bugs in the Americana walls that could record these two-day deliberations behind closed doors. Wiretaps on telephones missed celebrations over the return of Levison to the inner circle, but they did pick up undercurrents of friction as the volunteer advisers readjusted to King’s closest white friend in the movement. Since February, when he insisted that the advisers “clear” Levison back into their informal councils—saying he still regretted giving in to the government’s arbitrary an
d unprincipled banishment, whether or not it helped secure passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—King had ached to resume his late-night telephone chats. Levison, a lifelong activist and semiretired investor, was bluntly straightforward and yet avuncular by nature. “Escalation [in Southeast Asia] in the manner recently conducted is more suited to small boys than great powers,” he advised President Johnson two weeks earlier in a typically brief, handwritten letter. “Walter Lippman[n] is one hundred percent right in asserting that our national interests are not critically involved in the jungles of Viet Nam, particularly since our naval power is unhampered off its shores. Your election was characterized by the clearest mandate for peace since World War II. Please execute it fearlessly.”
Clarence Jones arrived at the Americana with his own draft letter for President Johnson “to express my vigorous dissent and alarm over the conduct of present United States foreign policy in South Vietnam.” Jones differed markedly from Levison in style—more formal and polished, from upbringing in a chauffeur’s household and hard-won training in entertainment law—yet gravitated to him in the current alignment of the Northern council. Assuming that Wallace would stop Sunday’s march, which could not thereafter reach Montgomery without federal intervention, the advisers heatedly debated ways to apportion risk and hardship among people from different worlds. Should they postpone for safety while seeking a federal protective order? Or try to march, perhaps to rally support by enduring another mass incarceration, and then go to court?
Levison opposed the quest of his “twin” Jewish adviser, Harry Wachtel, to become the designated liaison with Attorney General Katzenbach, in a side dispute that awkwardly followed Wachtel’s assignment to cajole Levison back from exile. Granted, King’s Washington representative Walter Fauntroy was out of his depth on legislative matters before Congress, but Wachtel was too eager to replace the young Negro minister rather than develop Fauntroy’s voice alongside Wachtel’s influence as a Wall Street law partner. Together with Jones, Levison similarly criticized Bayard Rustin’s tendency of late to dismiss student complaints about the Selma movement as naive or obstructionist. With Rustin, architect of the 1963 March on Washington, Wachtel pushed King toward a larger role in national politics while Levison and Jones tilted for patchwork unity in the protest movement. Where one side saw colleagues limiting King, the other thought he was being used.
King chose a path through the counsel of strong-willed advisers. He took Walter Fauntroy with him late Friday afternoon to the White House, past a line of uniformed American Nazis on Pennsylvania Avenue with picket signs—“Down With Martin Luther Koon,” “Who Needs Niggers”—to a contrasting welcome in the Fish Room of the West Wing. Then, alone with President Johnson, he followed Wachtel’s advice to argue that any effective voting rights bill must include an ironclad provision to replace local officials with registrars accountable to the President. Johnson agreed that legislation was a better route to securing Negro voting rights than a proposed constitutional amendment, which would be slow, difficult to ratify, and redundant to the existing Fifteenth Amendment, but he declined to go beyond his public promise to submit a voting rights “message” to Congress. King, for his part, did not ask the President explicitly to submit a new bill, nor did he ask for federal marshals to protect the march on Sunday, so as not to force Johnson to ask for postponements and conditions, or to oppose such a protest altogether. Instead, King emerged from the White House Friday evening to emphasize carefully that he and Johnson had shared their respective troubles and come tantalizingly close to a common agenda. “The President told me that Senator [Everett] Dirksen had made a commitment to support a voting rights bill,” King told reporters of the pivotal Republican leader, but he could not say what bill or when. He missed his scheduled flight home that night and scrambled for a later one. Airline sources told FBI agents that King had a reservation from Atlanta to Montgomery at 8:35 A.M. Sunday, in time to reach Selma for the march.
IN THE basement of Frazier’s soul food café, near its Atlanta headquarters, the national executive committee of SNCC convened before ten o’clock Friday night with a convoluted debate about the rules of procedure—bylaws, credentials, determination of a quorum, standing to vote—that ran well past midnight, punctuated by a shout of “Who the hell is Robert, anyway?” from Courtland Cox, who noted wryly that the author of the book on parliamentary order was not a SNCC member. For five years, as they confronted race questions that long befuddled elder statesmen, the young SNCC activists had made decisions by informal consensus born of a common willingness to go to jail and risk their lives, which also winnowed out frivolous leadership claims. Cox, a veteran strategist out of Howard University, lamented a loss of family camaraderie that had accelerated since SNCC’s 1964 Freedom Summer project in Mississippi. Disagreements festered over whether the project was a model for revolutionary change or a mistaken venture into national politics, and internal governance was paralyzed by collisions of numbers and ideology—how to apportion the influence of burgeoning staff members against the hoped-for participation of the poorest Negroes. Nearly a hundred of the summer volunteers had been inspired to stay on, which more than doubled the permanent staff and threatened to swamp SNCC with mostly white students from Northern colleges.
Beneath SNCC’s vanguard devotion to racial harmony, anxieties about group control were concealed as issues of class or geography, and Bob Moses, one of the few SNCC leaders who addressed internal racial hostilities, had vanished in a cloud of paradox since his stunning withdrawal announcement at the previous meeting. Moses was the anti-King within SNCC. By immersing himself for years in the persecution of rural Mississippi, and subordinating his Harvard education to folk wisdom, he acquired stature that defined grassroots SNCC culture. By speaking softly, he gained a voice within SNCC far stronger than King’s classical oratory. By eschewing the priestly hierarchy of King’s leadership, he became a quiet icon who could pull off Freedom Summer—a desperate gamble to pierce national conscience through the sacrifice of elite students. By lifting up the innate capacities of all citizens, he helped discover pathbreaking democratic leaders such as an unlettered orator from Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer, but at least five colleagues followed his example to their martyrdom in Mississippi despite his insistence that they all make their own decisions. While classmates finished their degrees back on campus, Moses carried the moral weight of these losses plus the heavy expectations that he alone could bridge the growing fissures between sharecroppers, saints, and sharp-tongued dialecticians—until, breaking down in the midst of a February SNCC debate, he tried to escape his charisma by conducting a mysterious final ceremony of wine and cheese, during which he renounced his own name. Contenders threw up questions more urgently in his absence. What did it mean now to be a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and who should decide?
A ruling from the chair suspended procedural wrangles to hear from the new Selma project director. Silas Norman had left Wisconsin the previous summer to be a clandestine literacy tutor for potential voters in Selma, where he lost his cover when subjected to Sheriff Clark’s cattle prod during a spontaneous demonstration, then joined SNCC in the fall and came to preside over the local office as it swelled during King’s campaign. With a rich deep voice and precise diction, ingrained from family training in Augusta, Georgia,* Norman recommended that SNCC provide a minimum level of cooperation with the march on Sunday—lend walkie-talkies for logistics on the road, contribute cooking utensils, and handle medical support—which could be done merely by contacting volunteer nurses and doctors already on the way from New York. While making clear that the Selma project had opposed Bevel’s plan altogether, Norman tempered criticism in his first presentation to national officers. “We have to go,” he said, partly out of deference to SNCC’s public alliance with King.
In response, several officers rushed past his caution to ask why SNCC should participate at all. Norman’s predecessor in Selma called the march a “joyride” for King’s fund-rais
ing apparatus at the expense of local Negroes. Executive Director James Forman, SNCC’s organizational mainstay since 1961, raised the most basic issue by asking whether there could be validity in any movement for the right to vote in Alabama. To succeed required principled commitment and action from the federal government, for which hope had drained very low within SNCC by the end of Freedom Summer, and without such hope, deliberate sacrifice and risk looked pointless. Forman and others suggested that SNCC needed to find a more independent course. The executive committee voted to spell out its broader dissent against the strategy in Selma, and Norman spent what little remained of Friday night with Ivanhoe Donaldson, a quick-witted movement veteran of Jamaican descent, drafting a letter to Martin Luther King. It was Donaldson whose lecture at the University of Wisconsin had mesmerized Norman with transforming tales of suffering and mirth from SNCC’s era of classical nonviolence, so much so that he resolved to leave his graduate studies in microbiology to come south. Only a year later, they collaborated in an attempt to explain the swift passing of a generation inside the movement.
At Canaan's Edge Page 4
