At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  “Selma was bigger than Birmingham though it was smaller in scope,” Levison wrote King, “because for the first time whites and Negroes from all over the nation joined the struggle in a pilgrimage to the deep south.” Whereas Birmingham moved millions “from paper resolutions of support to sympathy,” he observed, Selma mobilized “a true cross-section of America.” Levison had seen for himself. “In the Montgomery airport I was struck by the unfamiliarity of the participants,” he continued. “They were not long-committed white liberals and Negroes. They were new forces from all faiths and all classes…from business men to pacifist radicals.”

  Levison praised “President Johnson’s magnificent address” as a vital and necessary expression of popular will, but he insisted that the motive force in history belonged to the movement. “The leadership was yours,” he advised, and momentum from Selma made King “one of the most powerful figures in the country—a leader now not merely of Negroes, but of millions of whites in motion.” He may have underscored the point to lift King from an appealing but relentless modesty that Levison considered a flaw. King was “too humble,” he often said, yet far from insecure, and Levison offered his usual unsparing criticism. “The casual manner of proposing [the] boycott, and the impression that this was your central program caused deep disquiet….” he wrote. “It was not the best selection of alternatives for action, and it was not logical to emerge from a struggle for voting rights.” By contrast, he sketched the sounder path of historic choices made by Frederick Douglass during and after the Civil War.

  “The movement you lead is the single movement in the nation at this time which arouses the finer democratic instincts of the nation,” Levison asserted. Laboring to explain why, he focused on method. “Nonviolent direct action was proven by Selma to have even greater power than anyone had fully realized,” he wrote. “We would be at fault if we believed our own propaganda that Selma was a terrible expression of brutality and terrorism. Considerable restraint was exercised by the authorities. The degree of violence was shocking and startling, but not extensive.” Levison argued that the violence of Birmingham—let alone the spectacle lynchings of recent decades—was much worse, and that the power of Selma arose from the cumulative inspiration of the method itself. Nonviolence evoked courage. When sustained and crafted, it built political engagement almost inexorably. “Someone asked a Negro if he thought they would win,” Levison informed King, “and he responded, ‘We won when we started.’ This is profound.”

  Levison wrestled with the limits of nonviolence. He could trace its “finer democratic instincts” to thousands of practitioners who risked and absorbed violence without striking back, as their disciplined witness affirmed the daring American theory that people can govern themselves without imposed rulers or guardians. By nearly superhuman forbearance, and a matching faith in common humanity, nonviolent demonstrators invited their own oppressors into the Founders’ novel compact of political equals. They challenged hierarchy and heredity, like the original patriots, to transform “the relationship between government and the people,” Levison wrote.

  For all his balanced wisdom, Levison was not a seer, and his letter to King understated the watershed of Selma. He predicted the overthrow of segregation’s “agrarian interests,” but not the resulting miracle of Sunbelt prosperity for the South. He believed optimistically that the movement could “go far in changing slum conditions,” but he did not foresee corollary ripples of freedom beyond race or economics. Once loosed, doctrines of equality and nonviolent strength resonated broadly against traditional niches of authority. If the depth of potential could be glimpsed in the extraordinary saga of pilgrims to Selma, such as Viola Liuzzo and Jonathan Daniels, the breadth of impact would be felt everywhere from altars and bedrooms to Olympic Games in distant nations. Binding energy from the movement would transform culture and hearth with implications that rattled civil rights leaders themselves, just as the original American Founders had been shaken by a clatter of dollars and frontier brawlers who were not above electing a broomstick, George Washington caustically observed, fearing an excess of democracy in his retirement. Changes beyond imagination soon became commonplace. Inspired by the civil rights movement, a Cincinnati student in 1972 would be ordained the first female rabbi in two thousand years of rabbinical Judaism. “We must face the realities of life,” Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath told his board at the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. “Women are here to stay.”

  Still less did Levison anticipate the spectacular trends of countervailing thought. Both inside and outside the movement, nonviolent politics would drop from scholarly or popular interest at the same time that its inexorable momentum began to spawn lasting achievements. As King warned in his Montgomery speech, revisions of recent history would minimize hope for nonviolent democracy while magnifying its fears. War, even in failure and contradiction, would become again a common measure of freedom, and people sought refuge from unsettled times in what the revolutionary Benjamin Franklin called “a natural inclination in mankind to Kingly Government.” A new consensus eventually made people’s government the perceived scourge of freedom rather than its unsteady instrument. Phoenix-like, opponents of civil rights landmarks would refine themselves to govern.

  King took Levison’s long letter on retreat to Jamaica. It was warm counsel for the political maelstrom of his short future. All the twists ahead would be a consequence of, or reaction to, the ten-year crest of the nonviolent movement in March of 1965. Beyond the three years allotted to him, they would shape history into the next century.

  II

  High Tide

  CHAPTER 17

  Ten Feet Tall

  April 7–May 26, 1965

  SCULPTRESS Jimilu Mason despaired of making her subject hold a pose. She tried to shape the bust while President Johnson, seated on a raised platform just outside the Oval Office, gesticulated for an hour to columnist Walter Lippmann about the secret draft of a speech on Vietnam. “I’m going to hold out that carrot you keep talking to me about,” he promised. When storms grounded White House helicopters on the evening of April 7, a substitute motorcade whisked Johnson to Baltimore for his nationally televised address from Johns Hopkins University. He welcomed “unconditional discussions” toward peace and offered a “billion dollar American investment” for postwar economic development of the region, including North Vietnam. “The vast Mekong River can provide food and water and power on a scale to dwarf even our own TVA,” he declared. “The wonders of modern medicine can be spread through villages where thousands die every year from lack of care. Schools can be established…”

  All this “and more” would unfold for good once North Vietnam ceased its campaign of “total conquest” in South Vietnam, Johnson pledged. Until then, he presented his nation as a dutiful warrior on “this painful road,” standing ready to honor the cause of four hundred Americans who had ended their young lives already “on Vietnam’s steaming soil.” He announced passive yet steadfast resolve: “We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired.” Against unflinching preparations for “a war of unparalleled brutality,” he posed lyrical yearnings for peace. Six times Johnson mentioned a dream to end war itself. “It is a very old dream,” said the President. “But we have the power and now we have the opportunity to make that dream come true.” He struggled almost wistfully with the temptations of martial glory—saying, “the guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure”—then closed in the voice of Moses proclaiming his farewell summary of Israel’s covenant law: “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore, choose life.”

  Critics hailed the threshold speech as a “master stroke.” Former President Dwight Eisenhower privately congratulated Johnson for “a very timely and fine move,” and welcomed the worldwide political initiative as recognition that an independent South Vietnam could not be maintained “just with bayonets” or “just with w
hite nations.” Mail to the White House shifted overnight from 4–1 against U.S. policy in Vietnam to 5–1 in favor, but Johnson mulled over the hostile responses. He sought reassurance the next morning from Arthur “Tex” Goldschmidt, an old friend who served the United Nations as an expert on Mekong River development. Goldschmidt had collaborated with speechwriter Richard Goodwin, and was pleased that the Hopkins audience of sixty million nearly matched the seminal “We Shall Overcome” speech three weeks earlier. His boss, Secretary-General U Thant, already had confided that the message was “wonderful,” Goldschmidt told the President, and he had heard “terrific reactions” from lesser U.N. colleagues, “you know, that I talk to in the elevator.”

  Johnson could not stop reading from his avalanche of telegrams: “Atlanta, Georgia, ‘People are sick and tired of your lies about Vietnam. Bring the troops home.’ Lubbock, Texas, ‘We will back down in Vietnam as we have everywhere else.’…Uh, ‘your speech tonight was pious nonsense.’…Uh, ‘Do you really believe that peace can be purchased for a billion?’ That’s Michigan…uh, California, ‘a weak-kneed buyout scheme…billion-dollar appeasement.’…Uh, ‘You listened to the wrong advisers. Please ready Encyclopedia America ’57….”

  Goldschmidt laughed. He said Johnson was getting hit from both sides.

  “I haven’t got a damn wire from anybody I know,” said the President. “Isn’t that odd? Not a one.” Political professionals hedged. While Johnson hoped that North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh would choose economic rewards over military punishment, he admitted to himself that he would never negotiate if the positions were reversed. Forlorn, he suggested that Goldschmidt’s wife must approve at least of his health legislation.

  “She loves it,” said Goldschmidt. “We’re both happy. I mean if you had tried to make the Goldschmidts happy, you couldn’t have done better.” His wife, Elizabeth Wickenden, had been a social policy advocate since the New Deal, when she and Goldschmidt had introduced a youthful Lyndon Johnson to lifelong friends such as Abe Fortas. Now the President asked that he have her dictate a statement about the passage of Medicare tonight.

  “Tonight?” exclaimed Goldschmidt.

  “Yeah, we’re gonna pass it tonight in the House,” said Johnson, chortling over his surprise. “Tell her to give it a little thought and she can call up and dictate it to my secretary. I really want to say it’s the finest thing that ever happened to the world.”

  Historic wonders and woes tumbled over each other. Medicare did pass the House by 110 votes before midnight on April 8. Both education and voting rights cleared Senate hurdles the next day, the centennial of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. In between, Johnson fielded reports through Thursday night about a single Air Force jet fighter that was missing and presumed shot down near the Chinese territory of Hainan Island. He postponed a scheduled trip to Houston, on tenterhooks about military confrontation with Communist China and political backbiting in the Senate, where he feared that the bellicose Thomas Dodd of Connecticut “gets up and says why in the hell did we run, and they knock down our plane and we don’t do anything?” Any normal activity would “look awful bad,” Johnson worried, “if we had another incident or they bombed or something.”

  “I believe you can go, Mr. President,” said McGeorge Bundy, and Johnson reached “the world’s largest air-conditioned room” Friday night to witness the first Major League baseball game ever played indoors. Mickey Mantle’s exhibition home run to right-center field triggered the inaugural forty-five-second convulsion of a giant scoreboard that flashed from pinball whirls and rocket flares to electronic cowboys slinging lassos on longhorn steers. The New York Times likened the new Houston Astrodome to Roman Emperor Vespasian’s cloth-covered amphitheater from the year 70. Innovations included fifty-three luxury boxes with private bars and swivel chairs upholstered in velvet, plus groundskeepers called Earthmen who wore orange space suits. There were flaws to be addressed—the sun-starved death of Tifway Bermuda grass soon introduced plastic AstroTurf—but the domed extravaganza proved a bellwether of the regional economy. That same Friday, the Milwaukee Braves and Detroit Tigers played at a stadium hastily thrown up in Atlanta, according to Mayor Ivan Allen, “on ground we didn’t own, with money we didn’t have, for a team we hadn’t signed.” As the Deep South began to escape the commercial shackles of segregation, Allen courted the Braves and a new professional football team to help lift Atlanta into the fifth year of a nationwide boom economy.

  Johnson stayed in Texas to dedicate a Job Corps center on Saturday with Sargent Shriver, director of the eight-month-old poverty program. The President confessed to the assembled young trainees that he himself had been a dropout for two years, and he made a teasing lesson of the platform dignitaries by recalling that several had been hungry apprentices in FDR’s National Youth Administration, “the job corps of that day”—Governor John Connally for $30 a month, Representative Jake Pickle for $25. “I am not a prophet, or the son of a prophet,” said Johnson, but he predicted an era of renewed potential for miracles. Meanwhile, couriers scrambled from Washington with the finished education bill, and on Palm Sunday, April 11, aides hung the presidential seal from a plank table in the yard of the one-room prairie schoolhouse where Johnson had completed eight grades from the age of four. “Come over here, Miss Katie,” he said, beckoning his first teacher, long since retired, to sit with him before the press corps.

  The new law provided $1.3 billion, which covered only 6 percent of current costs for elementary and secondary schools. It circumvented a long stalemate over church-state issues by targeting the five million poorest students in all schools, whether public or religious, on Johnson’s pounded theme: “Poverty has many roots, but the taproot is ignorance.” Required local control meant that districts could and would divert funds to less needy students. Still, Johnson waxed euphoric over the breakthrough in federal support for education, ending legislative failures that dated back to 1870 and ran thick since 1946. He mingled at the ceremony with Tomás Coronado and Amanda García among returning admirers from his formative job at Cotulla in 1928. Teacher Johnson had bought a book to drill Coronado in English even though he was the adult janitor. García said Johnson once spanked another student for mimicking his awkward gringo gait, which had made them realize that he, too, was sensitive about humiliation. The President said he would never sign a more important law than the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Quoting Thomas Jefferson’s admonition to “establish and improve the law for educating the common people,” he urged his audience not to “delay in putting it to work.”

  ON PALM Sunday in Selma, the chief usher at St. Paul’s Episcopal stopped a mixed group before 7:30 morning worship. “The bishop says we’ve got to let you into our church,” he advised, “but we don’t have to let you receive Communion.” Police arrived, and a standoff ensued until Rev. Frank Mathews emerged in robes to guide the ushers down the sidewalk for an intense private discussion. White seminarians Jonathan Daniels and Judith Upham waited with half a dozen charges in question—teenage girls from their host families in the Carver Homes apartments, who had been up since dawn to plait their hair, pull on dress gloves, and practice Communion etiquette. “I may lose my job because of this,” Mathews whispered upon his return, “but you can come to the service.” With a look that signaled an uneasy compromise with his ushers, he stipulated that they must sit in the back row and receive Communion last. Inside, some members held back from Communion with transparent disgust, as though the intruders had spoiled salvation. Others made a point of welcoming the visitors afterward, while one man made conversation on the steps until he could no longer contain himself. “You goddam scum,” he said, and spelled out the word with an intensity that left Upham shaking.

  Upham and Daniels carved out their own witness on the fringe of a movement stunned in the afterglow of the great march to Montgomery. They drove to Mobile to buy clerical collars that identified them as seminarians. They spent whole days seeking out the few members of
St. Paul’s who would exchange words with them. Judge Bernard Reynolds, the chief usher, received them in his chambers at the Dallas County courthouse and explained that they would be welcome in church whenever they did not bring their “nigger trash.” Daniels and Upham stifled their rage to discuss church doctrine. “There are still moments when I’d like to get a high-powered rifle and take to the woods,” Daniels wrote that week, “but more and more strongly I am beginning to feel that ultimately the revolution to which I am committed is the way of the Cross.”

  Religious interpretation ran ahead of tactical savvy. The seminarians repeated the knowing buzz of insiders who said Viola Liuzzo had naively endangered herself by interracial travel, but they drove around Selma with half a dozen Negro youngsters stuffed in the Volkswagen. With an Episcopal priest from California and his entire family, including three small children, they ventured into remote Wilcox County and were embarrassed to ask local white people for directions to a voting rights demonstration. Daniels wound up suffering canister burns in the midst of a large crowd being tear-gassed in Camden, where his spirits revived upon personal revelation that hateful Southerners “didn’t know what else to do.” He conceived “a kind of grim affection” for them—“at least a love that was real and ‘existential’ rather than abstract.”