At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Also on Tuesday at Wayne State, Alice Herz realized she had left the original of her protest leaflet in a commercial copying machine. Afraid the authorities would intercept it and stop her, Herz abandoned plans to carry out her demonstration on the campus where she had taught German after fleeing first from Berlin in 1933, then as a refugee west through wartime internment camps in France and Cuba. With her materials, she hastily boarded an outbound bus along Detroit’s Grand River Street. Herz was a bookworm, a trilingual freelance writer, retired kindergarten proprietor, and ardent admirer of Martin Luther King. She had pushed her way into the 1963 rally at Cobo Hall to hear an early rendition of his “I Have a Dream” speech, which Michigan devotees considered superior to the famous version in Washington. She had joined the first giant march around Detroit’s federal building on March 9, and could not believe that an American President who so eloquently endorsed the cause of Selma since then could withstand a jolting appeal to stop an incipient war. Herz exited the bus near a parking lot, stuffed her mouth with cotton, poured two cans of Energine dry cleaning fluid over her head, and struck a match. Left behind in her handbag near the flames, the copied leaflets denounced “hatred and fear, deliberately whipped up during the last twenty years,” and accused President Johnson of having “declared his decision and already started to enact it,” to make war in Vietnam. “GOD IS NOT MOCKED,” wrote Herz. “To make myself heard I have chosen the flaming death of the Buddhists…. May America’s Youth take the lead toward LIFE!”

  Against her will, the eighty-two-year-old body of Alice Herz struggled ten days before she succumbed to burns. She had confided nothing of the plan to her sole surviving child, even though they had been lifelong pacifists together at the urging of her late husband, Paul (a conscript in Kaiser Wilhelm’s army), and apartment-mates since his death in 1928. Tuesday evening at the hospital, supported by a co-worker from the Detroit public library, Helga Herz managed to say that her mother had been very upset by the bombing of Vietnam since February. She received a note in the next day’s mail begging forgiveness: “When you understand why I’ve done this, you will accept it. Don’t cry and don’t complain. I’m not doing this out of despair but out of hope for mankind.” A book of Alice Herz’s worldwide correspondence would be published a decade later in Holland—“A holy courage must animate more and more American souls,” she had written a Japanese philosopher in 1952—but America’s first Vietnam peace casualty sank invisibly among freakish news squibs.

  PUBLIC SENSATION did rise from the late mass meeting in Montgomery, despite great efforts to forge a working compromise. King secured a large church from the network of pastors who had refused SNCC, and Forman agreed to emphasize the goal of national action as symbolized by the twice-deferred march from Selma. “There’s only one man in this country that can stop George Wallace and those posses,” he told the overflow crowd at Beulah Baptist. “We can present thousands and thousands of bodies in the streets if we want to…but a lot of these problems will not be solved until that shaggedy old place called the White House begins to shake, and gets on the phone and says, ‘Now listen, George, we’re coming down there and throw you in jail if you don’t stop that mess!’” Over rippling cheers, Forman let slip his corrosive doubts. “This problem goes to the very bottom of the United States,” he shouted, “and you know, I said it today and I’ll say it again. If we can’t sit at the table, let’s knock the fuckin’ legs off! Excuse me.”

  Forman caught himself instantly and nodded with sheepish, ingrained respect for the nuns present, but a single obscene word dominated his message. Observers shivered with delight or disapproval over the lapse from the movement’s wholesome public discipline, ending a day that Forman later marked as a watershed—“the last time I wanted to participate in a nonviolent demonstration.” King came behind him with a fiery speech that concealed the breach. “The cup of endurance has run over,” he declared, then steered outrage over the horseback brutality into enthusiasm for massive nonviolent witness behind him and Forman the next day.

  EARLY WEDNESDAY, Attorney General Katzenbach called to prod Judge Frank Johnson on the case that had bottled up the long march from Selma for eight days running. Now that the President had announced the government’s position, and a voting rights bill was being delivered just then to Congress, Katzenbach pushed to relieve rather than contain the pressure. He asked when the Justice Department could expect a ruling.

  “It won’t be forthcoming,” the judge replied—not until he felt certain the order would be backed.

  “Backed?” said Katzenbach. “Well, I think we can back it.”

  “I don’t care what you think,” the judge said sternly. He wanted a guarantee of enforcement to bind the contending parties, lest his imposed settlement fail in a vacuum of finger pointing between the various levels of government. “It won’t be fair to the court and to the people to have an order that does not have support,” he added.

  “All right, you have my assurance,” said Katzenbach. Washington would fill any default of duty by state or local officials.

  “I don’t want your assurance, Mr. Katzenbach,” insisted the judge. “I want it from the president. I want to know before I issue this order.”

  Katzenbach signed off to call the White House.

  Not far from Judge Johnson’s chambers in Montgomery, King, Forman, and Silas Norman led nearly two thousand people on a mile-long walk to Sheriff Butler’s office at the county courthouse. Students clustered around King as a human shield from the threat of snipers, but rows of police officers guarded the long procession in a stark reversal. For the third time in March, following Bloody Sunday and the attack on James Reeb, a spasm of national publicity put Alabama on the defensive and masked strains within the civil rights movement. Two large photographs on the front page of the New York Times showed “mounted possemen” and “club-wielding deputies” pounding integrated ranks of young demonstrators. Other photographs on an inside page were captioned, “Taking Refuge” and “Cry for Help.” Wednesday’s Washington Post carried eleven separate dispatches on the Alabama crisis. One of the few unrelated stories on its front page told of South Korean diplomats who apologized to guests turned away from a formal luncheon for their visiting foreign minister, saying they had sent invitations without realizing that Washington’s National Press Club banned females from the dining room.

  In Montgomery, a chagrined local prosecutor already had excused the previous day’s rampage as unworthy of the capital city, saying, “We are sorry there was a mix-up and a misunderstanding of orders.” He invited King and Forman into the courthouse to negotiate new protest procedures with local officials, including Sheriff Butler, who had discarded his cowboy hat. John Doar observed for the Justice Department. The crowd waited outside through the whole afternoon, upbeat and singing in spite of a steady rain. “Police protection was thoroughly organized” against aggressive hecklers on the sidewalks, wrote one astonished demonstrator. Fifty miles away in Selma, meanwhile, FBI agents counted 586 people who braved the elements for an outdoor prayer rally. Half-inch hailstones fell as Hosea Williams exhorted the mix of travelers and local stalwarts to hold on. “I’m not interested in criticizing Sheriff Clark,” he shouted. “I’m interested in converting Sheriff Clark!”

  In Montgomery, emerging at 5:15 P.M. on Wednesday, King and Forman shared a megaphone to deliver a progress report from the steps of the courthouse. Local officials had agreed to sign a statement of regret for Tuesday’s violence, they said, and to forswear the use of the unaccountable possemen for law enforcement. They thanked the rain-soaked crowd for putting a “historic occasion” within reach, and urged them all to find shelter as talks continued into the night. “There are points that we agree on, and there are still points that we must negotiate,” King announced, then paused as Andrew Young pushed through to speak in his ear. His face changed. News cameramen expectantly buzzed reporters near him to clear the view—“get the mike down, get the mike down.”

 
“Let me give you this statement which I think will come as a source of deep joy to all of us,” King called out. “Judge Johnson has just ruled that we have a legal and Constitutional right to march from Selma to Montgomery!” Rolling cheers erupted over the last words.

  CHAPTER 12

  Neutralize Their Anxieties

  March 17–20, 1965

  JUDGE Johnson advised stunned lawyers for Alabama that they could catch a plane to New Orleans within the hour to seek an emergency stay in the Fifth Circuit. He assumed rightly that they would hurry, because his order prescribed a window of little more than a week to complete the fifty-mile march. Rushing just as hard to get started, King fixed Sunday for the third attempt to cross Pettus Bridge. This allowed movement workers only three days to improvise bivouac logistics along Highway 80.

  On Thursday, as Governor Wallace’s lawyers argued their appeal to block them, the U.S. Senate debated and passed an extraordinary resolution to send the day-old voting rights bill to the Judiciary Committee with instructions to report it back for floor action no later than April 9, the hundredth anniversary of Appomattox. “I am opposed to every word and every line in the bill,” declared Judiciary chairman James Eastland of Mississippi, protesting the usurpation of his traditional prerogative to set the timetable for legislation. Against him rose the leadership of both parties, with Vice President Humphrey formally presiding and many senators praising the Selma demonstrators for steadfast commitment to democratic principles. “As American citizens, they have faith in America,” said Republican John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, “and we must sustain that faith.” Only thirteen senators voted against the resolution, including one—Republican Margaret Chase Smith of Maine—who opposed sending the bill to committee even for three weeks.

  A Soviet cosmonaut burst into news bulletins as the first human to walk in space. “I didn’t experience fear,” Colonel Alexei Leonov said on reentry to his orbiting spacecraft, Voshkod 2, “only a sense of infinite expanse and depth of the universe.” At the White House, once a graceful response was framed for the latest setback in the space race, Johnson delegated to his confidential go-between Buford Ellington the task of securing from Governor Wallace a commitment to protect the Selma march as ordered by the court, but Attorney General Katzenbach soon interrupted with bad news from Ellington that the elusive Wallace was asking for help. With Deputy Defense Secretary Cyrus Vance, who was preparing U.S. troop deployments in case Alabama balked altogether, Katzenbach and Ellington coached Johnson for a showdown phone call calculated to draw upon his mesmerizing personal dominance of Wallace on Saturday.

  The governor came on the line at full gallop against marchers “pourin’ in from all over the country…nuns and priests, and got hundreds of bearded beatniks in front of my capitol now.” Just two days ago, he said, “it was James Forman suggesting in front of all the nuns and priests that if they, anybody went in the café and they wouldn’t serve ’em, to kick the fuckin’ legs of the tables off…that kind of intemperate remarks, and inflames people, you know…and I’m gonna do everything that I can, but now, all I want to say quite frankly is that they’ve been stirred up by a lot of things, and I know you don’t want anything to happen that looks like a revolution, but if these people keep pouring in here…why, it’s gonna take you, it’s gonna take everybody in the country to stop something.”

  President Johnson worked in a calming volley of words about cooperating peacefully with the march as ordered by the court. “Let’s get it over as soon as we can,” he said. “And let’s don’t, uh, when you talk about a revolution, that uh, that really, that really upsets us all.”

  Wallace made sure Johnson knew he meant polar threats from two kinds of revolutionaries: outsiders who pressed for the Negro vote by “wantin’ the federal government to take the state over,” and Alabamians on his side who wanted to annul federal authority on issues touching race. “Of course, if I was a revolutionary, I probably could invite a quarter of a million people to come help us,” he said. “But of course I don’t want anything like that at all. I don’t want people to get hurt.”

  “I know,” Johnson said.

  The President seemed chastened by the blunt talk of revolution, and Wallace resumed the offensive with tales of white Alabama as victim rather than oppressor, suffering nearly unbearable cases of interracial flirting. “A Negro priest yesterday asked all the patrolmen what their wives were doing,” he told Johnson. “Uh, reckon some of their friends could have dates with their wives, you know, tryin’ to provoke ’em, those kind of things, you know, and we’re tellin’ ’em just take all that stuff.” The marching and agitating in Selma had been getting worse for eight weeks, Wallace complained, rushing hotly to warn again that “if this matter continues on and on and on…if they’re gonna just stay in this state eight weeks and congregate fifty thousand strong a day, then uh, we’re going to have a revolution.” He checked himself. “Well, I don’t mean that, as you say, [to] use the word ‘revolution,’” he said. “We just gonna have trouble.”

  Johnson pleaded several times for Wallace to call out the Alabama Guard so the federal government would not have to intrude, but Wallace parried with a steady refrain. “Here’s what I’ll do,” he said. “I will, we’re gonna keep close touch with the situation.”

  The President brought Katzenbach, then Ellington, on the phone to push in tandem for a more definitive commitment. “George, are you by yourself?” asked Ellington, suspecting that Wallace might not want political colleagues to hear him pledge to protect race mixers under federal pressure.

  When Wallace parried again, Johnson tried an edge of disgust. “You don’t need to talk to me any more,” he announced, saying he had a Treasury nomination to finish before he flew home to Texas that afternoon. “I thought Governor Ellington and y’all had kind of, had a, uh a meeting of the minds on it,” he added in a plaintive tone.

  “Well, we’ll have a meeting of the minds, Mr. President,” said Wallace, giving ground. “I’ll do whatever it takes. If it takes ten thousand Guardsmen, we’ll have them. I’ll use—do whatever is necessary. And I won’t uh, wait too late. Of course, you know—”

  “That’s okay,” said Johnson, pouncing. “That’s good. And you keep in touch with Buford.” Wallace signed off with two hours left to prepare an address to the Alabama legislature.

  IN MONTGOMERY, legislative leaders escorted Governor Wallace into the House chamber precisely on cue for live statewide television at 6:30 P.M. His speech needed only sixteen minutes to draw from many wells of emotional resistance, beginning with ridicule. He read a long list of mobile support equipment already requested by the Selma organizers, including nine three-hundred-gallon water trailers and two rubbish trucks, then denounced the marchers as a mob. “And it is upon these people, and upon their anarchy,” said Wallace, “that a federal judge, presiding over a mock court, places a stamp of approval.” Nurtured by the “collectivist press,” they served a “foreign philosophy” that aimed to “take all police powers unto the central government,” he declared. “And sadly, the Negroes used as tools in this traditional type of Communist street warfare have no conception of the misery and slavery they are bringing to their children.”

  Wallace turned from “words of alarm, not that I have anything against proper alarm,” to the poignant retreat of the Lost Cause. “I do not ask you for cowardice,” he said, “but I ask you for restraint in the same tradition that our outnumbered forefathers followed.” He urged Alabamians to “exercise that superior discipline that is yours,” obey the order “though it be galling,” and leave the march alone. “Please stay home,” he pleaded. “Let’s have peace.” He presented scornful forbearance as the utmost patriotic sacrifice, but he could not bring himself to allow protection by any Alabama authority. “The federal courts have created this matter,” he declared, and therefore he would call on Washington to “provide for the safety and welfare of the so-called demonstrators.” Thunderous cheers answered his concluding appeal—�
��I have kept faith with you…”—for voters to stand behind the people’s governor. The Montgomery Advertiser recorded that “several women in the audience were in tears.” Friday’s Birmingham News proclaimed, “Wallace Has Finest Hour.”

  Flashes from Montgomery kept the Marine helicopter stalled on the White House lawn. “I’ve been leavin’ since 3:30, messing with that son of a bitch,” President Johnson fumed to Buford Ellington after nine o’clock Thursday night, “and he is absolutely treacherous.”

  Ellington vowed never to speak to Wallace again. “Well, you know I told you—”

  The President interrupted to quote from the speech. “I’m, I’m not going to be double-crossed this way,” he told Ellington. “I’m gonna issue a statement here that kinda burns his tail.”

  Wallace struck first. Johnson called Attorney General Katzenbach at ten, sputtering with frustration that he had been about to summon reporters when “in comes this goddam wire” asking the President to police the march with five thousand civilian federal workers, such as marshals and prison guards.

  The request was “ridiculous,” said Katzenbach, “as Governor Wallace knows perfectly well,” but the maneuver neatly sidestepped all National Guard options as political poison in Alabama. If Wallace called out the Guard himself, he would assume defense of Negroes he demonized to popular acclaim; if he refused, he would invite federal command and with it blame for surrender. If Johnson now suggested that Wallace was “reneging” on his commitment to use the Guard as necessary, the governor would simply reply that he preferred civilians. “That’s what he’ll say,” Katzenbach predicted. He advised Johnson to scrap his statement of rebuke and compose a straightforward reply: that federal civilian employees were unprepared and unsuited for the emergency, being scattered in assorted agencies nationwide, whereas the ten thousand members of the Alabama National Guard were on hand, “trained and equipped for this purpose.”