At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  “Uh, and if he won’t call them out, we will,” the President suggested.

  “And uh, if he’s unable to maintain law, we will,” Katzenbach added.

  Johnson shouted for his secretary Marie Fehmer to get on the line for dictation that bounced back and forth for ten minutes before he took off for Andrews Air Force Base. He called the FBI from the plane “in a highly agitated condition about the situation in Alabama,” Director Hoover advised his executives, and the President reached the LBJ Ranch before two o’clock Friday morning.

  FOR KING, Wallace’s speech was background radio news in a long night of related collisions. With the victory of Judge Johnson’s order, pressure spiked on many fronts, including where to camp Sunday on the first night out of Selma. No sooner did a volunteer at last offer a farm near the highway than Dallas County officials rushed James Minter to court with an ironclad argument that Anderson Watts was merely his sharecropper of twenty years and could not grant such permission. The Selma courthouse swarmed with word of imminent suits by the city and the local bus company to collect massive damages from Negro leaders over the economic effect of demonstrations. Familiar signs of spite hollowed optimism among movement veterans who had learned to be wary on the brink of hard-won public success. Retaliatory violence had charred celebrations consistently in the past, with bombs detonated soon after the bus boycott, sit-ins, Birmingham campaign, and March on Washington.

  The usual infighting rubbed so raw as to provoke a rare eruption of temper from King, against SNCC’s Willie Ricks in Montgomery. With James Forman, Ricks had organized student pickets that held ground outside the capitol for several hours Thursday, menaced by a larger “Niggers Go Home” counterdemonstration of whites. When police arrested eighty-four of the students for sitting down on the sidewalk, three hundred new demonstrators—mostly travelers on their way to Selma—marched to the courthouse to denounce the jailing as a violation of the new protest agreement. At midnight, the most persistent thirty-six were jailed themselves, joining the others, and arguments seethed into the morning over the priority of this crisis.

  What upset King was a passing encounter with three female students from Alabama State who wore helmets from the huge batch that Forman had imported for SNCC’s “second front” campaign. When he complimented the distinctive look, one of them replied, “You need one.” Another added, “You better get you one.”

  King stopped. “Willie Ricks told you to say that,” he said. When he pressed the students to confirm his guess, they ran off instead to Ricks, whom they knew, saying King was a paranoid celebrity who thought Ricks controlled his fate.

  Hours later, King spotted Ricks on a fringe of the marathon strategy session. “Come here, son,” he said, pulling him close. “I’ve been out here fighting a long time, and I know what I’m doing. You can’t hurt me.” His tone hushed the room. King preached that Cain had killed Abel but Ricks couldn’t hurt him. “Remember that,” he said. “I was Martin Luther King before you were Willie Ricks, and I’ll be Martin Luther King long after you’re gone.”

  Ricks stood silent as King “went off on me,” but his SNCC colleagues lit into King’s surrogates. Forman accused Andrew Young of undermining SNCC’s militancy in order to please Washington. He said King’s SCLC staff sacrificed integrity even to get creature comforts for the march, such as port-o-potties and walkie-talkies. “I’ve known people who sold out for a car or money,” he shouted, “but never for toilets!”

  “Jim, why don’t you just tell everybody that you hate Dr. King?” Young retorted. He said Forman was consistent only in branding King wrong.

  Most observers recoiled from the disputes, but King’s host in Montgomery tried to reassume his role from the bus boycott as volunteer “bodyguard.” Richmond Smiley, whose family included trustees who had shut off the water and electricity to drive Forman’s demonstrators from Dexter church, was appalled to watch young rowdies berate his old pastor. He offered more than once to bounce them from his house, but King checked him, having recovered his amiable thick skin under fire. “No, that’s not the way,” he said as he held mostly aloof, intervening to let the clashes play out. At dawn, with Forman departed after a halfhearted truce rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” King addressed his own staff and friends. “Well brothers, if there’s going to be a divorce, SNCC will have to initiate it,” he announced. “And if they do, I’ll be just like Rockefeller’s wife when she discovered that Happy* was pregnant.” He paused for effect, then added, “I’ll not say a word.” His primly comic allusion relieved stress with a splash of laughter.

  On Friday in New York, while monitoring wiretaps on civil rights advisers, FBI agents overheard Bayard Rustin urge King to renounce SNCC publicly as a political liability. King deflected. Rustin believed from personal experience that King avoided personal conflict, especially severances and goodbyes, out of weakness. King saw it differently, arguing that he was bound to SNCC by necessity and principle. With his own small staff crushed by an avalanche of assignments, he saw the SNCC veterans as a unique human resource—intrepid, task-oriented loners, accustomed to the threat of violence and qualified to create instant miracles everywhere from crowd control to tent construction. Through Hosea Williams, he assigned much of the logistics and communication over the fifty-four miles to SNCC’s Ivanhoe Donaldson. Having survived many jailings and one threat of death from an irate Mississippi officer with a pistol to his head, Donaldson could disregard the scorn of some SNCC colleagues for “the Reverend’s show.” He had skipped the March on Washington and now claimed indulgence to be in the middle of a gigantic movement event. “Everybody’s entitled to one in a lifetime,” he joked.

  Donaldson pitched into the chaos of Selma, where crowds jostled journalists, camping supplies littered church basements, and farm pickups needed to be commandeered into a truck transport system. For a celebrity concert that Harry Belafonte planned near Montgomery on the last night of the march, he began figuring how to rig an outdoor soundstage out of stacked coffin crates from Selma’s Negro funeral homes. Donaldson and SNCC’s Frank Soracco undertook the delicate assignment of winnowing the aspiring marchers to comply with Judge Johnson’s order, which specified that unlimited hosts at the beginning and end of the five-day trek must be constricted to three hundred designated marchers for the middle passage through Lowndes County, where Highway 80 narrowed to two lanes. This requirement posed logistical nightmares for the thousands who must confine themselves to one segment of the march, or suspend participation for several days in hostile country, and the choice of each coveted spot among the “elite” three hundred put Donaldson and Soracco into Solomon’s hot seat. They organized a census to gather information on physical fitness and movement service, then weighed competing claims among local Negroes and eminent visitors alike. They selected Rev. F. Goldthwaite Sherrill of Ipswich, Massachusetts, to represent Episcopalians, for instance, and reserved 250 places for Alabamians who had marched on or before Bloody Sunday.

  King’s trust in two SNCC workers to compile the sensitive roster muted widespread rumors of estrangement. “Arguments take place in any family,” Donaldson told reporters. “They don’t mean disunity.” He complained that the press was “confusing people who want to support both organizations.” A syndicated column by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak on Thursday lumped John Lewis with James Forman as “two hotheaded extremists” who had imposed their will upon King. By agreeing to resume the Selma march, the column charged, King had “capitulated,” “abdicated,” and “knuckled under” to a SNCC group “substantially infiltrated by beatnik left-wing revolutionaries, and—worst of all—by Communists.” For King, the only grain of truth in the attack was that he did consider some recent SNCC demonstrations to be expressions of rivalry and rage, without constructive purpose. He had vented privately to colleagues that the students lacked a sense of “political timing” and maneuvered selfishly to “get a martyr” for SNCC in Alabama, but he resisted advice to rebuke them publicly. In essence, Ki
ng worried that some SNCC leaders were falling away from nonviolence—from its disciplined commitment to rise above human proclivities to denigrate and separate, strike back, demonize, and incite—but he could not say so without betraying nonviolence himself. Instead, he told Rustin and others that he would work hard to communicate with SNCC leaders “sufficiently to neutralize their anxieties.” King acknowledged that stinging impatience with him had contributed to historic, creative sacrifice by students, notably the sit-ins and Freedom Rides, and he knew their attitudes toward Selma were varied and volatile. Forman, for all his bluster, agreed to suspend demonstrations in Montgomery until the march was over.

  STOKELY CARMICHAEL returned to Alabama from his “two-day nervous breakdown” with a novel remedy in mind. His experimental motto was “use King,” in contrast with what he called James Forman’s “fight King,” and various other stances within SNCC such as “ignore King” (Silas Norman), “be King” (John Lewis), and “cooperate selectively with King” (Ivanhoe Donaldson). To challenge King’s appeal for mass mobilization was futile and destructive, Carmichael decided, but he thought SNCC workers might harness the popular response for their own grassroots work. On Friday, he drove into the wilds with a stack of leaflets for the upcoming march. He took along Bob Mants, who was just back from a wrenching journey home to tell his parents that he was intact after Bloody Sunday but must drop out of Morehouse College to rejoin SNCC. Outside the all-Negro Lowndes County Training School, Carmichael and Mants waved leaflets and SNCC buttons at departing students who avoided them. One student bus driver furtively signaled interest before principal R. R. Pierce expelled the visitors with notice that he had called police. Deputy Sheriff “Lux” Johnson overtook Carmichael and Mants less than two miles away and ordered them back for investigation at the school, where a state trooper already waited with the overwrought Pierce. Students and teachers gawked from a distance as Carmichael pulled the receiver cord of a CB radio from his Mississippi SNCC car and transmitted his location and ETA in brisk radio jargon.

  Two teachers soon carefully followed the departing caravan to find out whether the deputy and the trooper really would let the intruders go free. Seventeen-year-old John Jackson, expecting correctly that he would lose his job as bus driver, sped home with leaflet evidence that Martin Luther King was coming to Lowndes County whether people believed it or not, as promised by these “Freedom Riders” who had appeared in a stick-shift Plymouth with a long whip antenna. His parents, Matthew and Emma Jackson, slipped away that night to discuss providential signs on a word-of-mouth summons from William Cosby. Since Cosby was considered exposed already by the visit to his store of “Joshua’s scouts” (Andrew Young and James Bevel) nearly a month ago, they gathered first at the home of Frank Haralson to settle upon the safest spot, free of vulnerable mortgage and secluded from known stooges. Rocena Haralson stayed behind to feed those who decided not to walk or drive across the way to the Haralson country store for the county’s first political meeting of Negroes.

  Nearly thirty people, most of whom had tried to register Monday at the old jail, organized themselves as the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights (LCCMHR). The name, adapted from Fred Shuttlesworth’s group in Birmingham, was suggested by John Hulett, who accepted the lead role with open trepidation—partly to honor the goodbye plea of his pastor, Lorenzo Harrison, in flight from the local Klan. As secretary the founders chose Lillian McGill, who had met King during the bus boycott while working as a maid in Montgomery. Her father, Elzie, a railroad worker, was elected treasurer. Farmer Charles Smith of Calhoun served as vice chairman and chief orator, reciting scripture from his locally celebrated memory. A teacher in 1930 had begged him to take his gift for literature beyond the heights of eight grade, but Smith had turned away from impractical academics to marry Ella Mae, who had since borne them nine children.

  Carmichael and Mants crept out of Lowndes County with eyes fixed on cruisers in the rearview mirror, fighting cocky mirth as well as fear. Mants brimmed with admiration for Carmichael’s quick-witted fake transmission, from well out of range, which may have puffed them up as aliens best left alone. They found Selma so overrun with early arrivals from the North that King’s own staff allowed demonstrations of restless enthusiasm. Some three hundred new visitors, arrested for picketing Mayor Smitherman’s home, refused release and insisted on being confined at the Negro Community Center, albeit with some exits unlocked. Jammed together, strangers acquainted themselves by ecumenical exchange that wore on until one New Yorker “almost began to feel up to my ears with the religion, with the intense religion bit.” Some overnight prisoners tried folk dancing. “This is stupid,” said their reluctant jailer, Wilson Baker, who groused to reporters that “at least we had good music when the Negroes were demonstrating.”

  OTHER MARCH volunteers more than filled the Friday mass meeting at Brown Chapel. “No white churchman is going to be free until you’re free,” declared Rev. C. Kilmer Myers, suffragan Bishop of Michigan, who was called briefly to the pulpit along with a second Episcopal bishop, George Millard of San Francisco. Rev. F. D. Reese of Selma proclaimed applications still open for three hundred stalwarts “with good hearts, good feet, good minds, people who are willing to go all the way” to Montgomery. He announced that provisions, protections, and campsites all remained in doubt: “we might sleep on the highway, I don’t know.” Reese called the movement a jumbled leap beyond full grasp—“you will never know what it means”—but envisioned a universal grandchild looking back some day on Selma, “trying to find a channel through which he can direct his own life,” and “something within him would say, ‘You’ve got to go.’”

  James Bevel followed with a featured address that mingled Selma history with provocative skeins of entertainment. He described a staff journey for King into Rochester, New York, after racial disturbances the previous summer, and being asked “what’s wrong with Negroes—they’ve gone crazy all over the country? And I said, ‘Do you know Negroes?’ They said, ‘Oh, yeah, we know our Negroes.’ ‘What Negroes do you know?’” To much laughter, Bevel recounted efforts to educate white city fathers about race by taking Kodak executives “down on the corner with me” to listen to a local jukebox: “I can’t get no sleep, and it’s crowded on the street / I got to move, I got to find myself a quieter place.” Bevel quoted the soul tune by Garnet Mimms & the Enchanters, then recalled in Brown Chapel, “I said, ‘Do you hear what he’s saying? If you listen to him sing in the spring time, he’ll tell you what he’s gonna do in the summer.’” He preached seriously for a time on the danger of another “letdown” period in history, as after the Civil War. “You cannot legislate deals and go home without dealing with sicknesses in society,” Bevel shouted. Something was wrong when Sheriff Clark “will take two or three hundred Negro children and run ’em down the highway for six miles and leave ’em in the country,” or when sight of a pastor like James Reeb enraged a community to homicide. “Unless we profoundly address ourselves to the hate in the white community,” he added, a voting rights bill “won’t have any meaning. So we have a job to do. I’m gonna do my job.” He turned to Bishop Myers on the podium. “I’m gonna give you a suggestion, bishop,” said Bevel. “Call your missionaries from Africa.” Above startled laughter, he called out impishly, “Lots of people in Africa are killing folks, but at least when they kill somebody, they’re trying to get a meal! Sheriff Clark, he doesn’t need a meal.”

  King stayed away from the mass meeting to battle arrangements for the ordeal just ahead. Through Andrew Young, he sent an urgent request for Rabbi Abraham Heschel to join the first day’s exodus. “By all means,” Heschel replied from New York, “but I have a problem with Shabbat.” Orthodox Jewish practice banned regular activities including travel until the close of sabbath at dusk on Saturday, which made it impossible to reach Selma in time. Conflict gnawed at Heschel, the scion of a long line of Hasidic rebbes from Poland, who had fled Europe ahead of Nazi persecution. Across the chasm betwee
n their respective backgrounds, he and King had found seeds of a surprising bond at a historic Chicago conference on religion and race in 1963, when they brought almost interchangeable sermons on the claims of prophetic justice. Each had railed against a national religious climate of resigned, trivial piety, prodding some two thousand eminent clergy to inflict healing discomfort on the world’s racial divisions. “To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart,” Heschel had proclaimed, “to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child.” Now that a flood of response at last descended upon Selma, Heschel consulted fellow authorities about Talmudic exceptions for saving and risking lives, and whether dire circumstances might permit a person of frail health to modify strict Shabbat prohibitions by substitute ritual, such as pushing elevator buttons with the point of an elbow.

  HELICOPTERS AND motorcades shuttled a sleep-deprived President Johnson to visit friends at five different ranches on his first day home in Texas. From Washington, aides bombarded him in transit with pressure to initiate troop movements in Alabama Friday night. Against Johnson’s political desire to conceal or delay all moves until his own press announcement on Saturday, Pentagon commanders warned that the advance concentration of Army transport planes was “likely to leak some time during the night anyway,” and government lawyers advised that his formal signature must precede even preliminary notice to call out the Alabama National Guard. “Cy Vance strongly—repeat: strongly—insists he needs full day tomorrow in order to mesh Guard with regular Army,” Bill Moyers cabled. The President, giving in, flew from Judge A. W. Moursund’s late supper to work on documents amassed at the LBJ Ranch.