At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Daniels and Upham managed to find the domed white courthouse in front of the Hayneville water tower, surrounded by police cruisers and U.S. government sedans in a jam of parked vehicles. They instinctively avoided the local crowds milling about the square for the Monday start of the Viola Liuzzo murder trial, and gravitated to a line of Negroes outside the Old Jail two blocks away. There they met John Hulett, one of the only two Negroes to have passed the registration test, along with a garrulous, electrified version of Carmichael that was scarcely recognizable to the seminarians as the existentialist they knew for offbeat theories of John Brown and Jesus. He pranced about with encouragement in a Caribbean lilt, making light of fancy test words and special intimidations for Negroes, handing SNCC buttons blithely to deputies, but he told Daniels and Upham in a quiet aside that the area was unsafe for white movement workers. They left within an hour. Armed registrars processed sixty of 150 applicants who waited all day, and later accepted nine as a splash in the thimble of new black voters.

  Not a single Negro braved attendance at the week-long trial in Hayneville. Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, sat next to defendant Collie LeRoy Wilkins at the defense table, and Inspector Joe Sullivan entered with a heavy protective guard for chief witness Gary Thomas Rowe, now revealed as an FBI informant. Sparrows flew through open windows for aerial chases around the high-ceilinged courtroom, sometimes perching on the triangular relic of a prisoners’ cage welded into one rear corner, but drama centered upon Klan Klonsel Matt Murphy, first cousin of Mississippi novelist Walker Percy. He bellowed, waved a pistol, and stomped on his hat. Skimming through a cursory defense case that lasted only twenty-one minutes, he pitched himself instead into lurid attacks on the prosecution. Murphy denounced victim Liuzzo as “a white nigger who turned her car over to a black nigger for the purpose of hauling niggers and communists back and forth.” He accused Leroy Moton on the stand of shooting Liuzzo himself after interracial sex “under the hypnotic spell of narcotics,” and, most heatedly, he impeached star witness Rowe as a liar—“treacherous as a rattlesnake…a traitor and a pimp and an agent of Castro and I don’t know what all”—for violating his membership oath to guard Klan secrets.

  “No one, prosecutor or defense lawyer, had a kind word for the dead woman,” reported the New York Times. The lead prosecutor acknowledged widespread sentiment to excuse Liuzzo’s murder “on the grounds that this woman was riding in a car with a Negro man,” but warned against setting a legal precedent that might backfire against segregationist travelers including the jurors themselves. His closing argument—that a not-guilty vote would favor any potential bushwhacker who “sees you driving your Negro maid home, or sees your wife driving her cook home”—was regarded as a creative but futile stretch. With Attorney General Katzenbach privately braced to count even one prosecution vote as a moral victory, the jury made front-page news simply by extending deliberations overnight without reaching swift acquittal, and then on May 7 deadlocked 10–2 for conviction on a charge of manslaughter. Shocked prosecutors vowed to prepare for another trial.

  Farmer Edmund Sallee said fellow jurors felt “insulted” by Murphy’s courtroom antics, including his vicious diatribes against the deceased victim. By failing so far to convict a Klan defendant, the twelve white males did fulfill expectations of avowed segregationists from Lowndes County, but the jury box already had pushed them past visceral images that prevailed elsewhere. The editors of Ladies’ Home Journal, surprised by poll results showing that 55.2 percent of American women believed Viola Liuzzo “should have stayed home,” convened a random sample of Northern women for a discussion forum that skittered tensely through misgivings—with participants objecting most commonly that Liuzzo forsook her children, or could not know enough about issues “outside her back yard,” or lacked “her husband’s permission,” or should have “canceled her newspaper subscription” as a less extreme protest, but also saying, after one woman confessed leaving her children once with a sitter for a three-day club trip, that no family could resent an absent husband shot for something important, like resisting the Nazis, or that Liuzzo “might have thought her cause was stronger than her husband going to war.” The independent embrace of risk by a middle-class mother was yet an unstable new concept, which foreclosed broad interest in Liuzzo as a martyr of human scale.

  As for Gary Thomas Rowe, the Hayneville jury took a more informed view than observers on either side of the civil rights struggle. Several jurors said they could have won over the two holdouts against conviction—hard cases from Fort Deposit—if only Rowe had pleaded guilty to something for his part in the crime. Sophisticated Southerners missed such nuance out of fear and contempt. No lawyer in Alabama wanted to defend Rowe when Klonsel Murphy, vowing to flush him from hiding to face revenge, sued in mid-May for legal fees he claimed Rowe had incurred before defecting from the Klan. Through the American Bar Association, Attorney General Katzenbach prevailed upon Paul Johnston (Harvard ’30, Yale Law ’33) to represent Rowe, whereupon fellow partners, including his own father and brother, summarily expelled Johnston from his lifelong practice at the Birmingham firm of Cabaniss, Johnston, Gardner & Clark. (“You presently refuse to abide by the unanimous decision of the other members of the firm,” stated the letter of severance.) Nationally prominent lawyers and judges commiserated with Johnston from afar. Alabama peers ostracized him to advertise their professional distance from Rowe, who radiated compound controversy as a turncoat Klansman working a race murder for the feds.

  Prosecutors seeking justice for Liuzzo stressed the positive side of their linchpin witness, and FBI officials gladly cooperated by concealing Rowe’s violent five-year career as a protected federal informant. Not until 1979 would a U.S. Justice Department task force discover that he lied repeatedly under oath about his role in sordid, faction-ridden Klan conspiracies,* and that FBI supervisors covered up all but the bare fact of his former employment. More than two decades later, Birmingham historian Diane McWhorter would examine the detailed mass of Rowe’s FBI record, including his reported claim to have killed a black man in 1963, and find it difficult in retrospect to sort out what was understated, condoned, exaggerated, or sanitized. Only one contemporary reporter addressed the Liuzzo trial’s glimpse of undercover work by Rowe. “What sorely troubles me, if we accept the prosecution’s account of the slaying,” wrote Inez Robb, “is the moral aspect of Rowe’s presence in the car…. Under what kind of secret orders did Rowe work?” Was he expected to join in crime, strictly observe, or try to prevent murder? “It is one woman’s opinion” she concluded, “that the FBI owes the nation an explanation of its action in the Liuzzo case.”

  Robb’s May 17 column appeared in 132 newspapers and landed on J. Edgar Hoover’s desk with a report finding “no information of a derogatory nature” about Robb. Hoover remembered differently. “Back in the ’30s or ’40s,” he wrote, “she vilified the FBI and me personally when I was in Miami.” His note sent FBI officials scurrying a quarter-century back through their files to unearth yellowed confirmation of Hoover’s legendary antennae for criticism—a March 5, 1940, Robb column that scolded the top G-man of “the most wonderful brown eyes” for vacationing in mob-controlled spots along Florida’s casino Gold Coast while vowing to fight crime. Hoover’s deputies, chastened as always, came back with a steely recommendation that DeLoach contact Inez Robb to “set her straight” about Rowe.

  “No,” Hoover scrawled, countermanding an order that might provoke further inquiry. “She is a ‘bitch’ & nothing would be gained.”

  “BUNDY IS Unable to Appear Because of ‘Other Duties,’” headlined a skeptical New York Times story on the principal debater’s late scratch from the May 15 Vietnam National Teach-In. The Times reported that White House officials were “uncomfortable with the need for silence,” but “could not in any way discuss Mr. Bundy’s whereabouts.” (Bundy slipped away for secret truce negotiations in the Dominican Republic, where President Johnson on April 28 had disp
atched U.S. troops to quell incipient civil war.) Substitutes took his place before a live audience of five thousand at Washington’s Sheraton Park Hotel, connected by patched radio feed to 100,000 listeners at 122 campus teach-ins over thirty-five states. Professor Eric Wolf of Michigan, speaking for the committee that had sprung up from the original teach-in seven weeks earlier, introduced the debate as a “life blood of democracy,” vitally needed to resolve contradictory claims that Vietnam policy was at once too complex for the average citizen and as simple as good versus evil. “We are here to serve notice that American citizens are not children,” he declared.

  Historian Arthur Schlesinger, speaking for the administration’s policy, warned that it would be foolish to ignore “the very sure and very terrible consequences of either enlargement or withdrawal” in Vietnam. Enlargement invited World War III, and withdrawal betrayed the students, professors, and intellectuals of Vietnam—“people like ourselves”—who opposed the Vietnamese Communists. Famously, he observed that “if we took the Marines now in the Dominican Republic and sent them to South Vietnam, we would be a good deal better off in both countries.” Reporters emphasized the intramural critique of Johnson by a partisan Kennedy Democrat, but the predominantly antiwar crowd booed Schlesinger’s overall support for the military commitment to Vietnam. He recommended supplementary moves toward a negotiated settlement that “doesn’t promise a perfect solution,” and paused to add, “But life is not very satisfactory.” Boos turned to silence, then scattered applause. “I welcome this existential endorsement,” Schlesinger said wryly.

  Like most of the parallel campus debates, the showcase National Teach-In continued for some nine hours after the radio feed. The format limiting speakers to professors and government officials set a muted, academic tone for what columnist Peter Lisagor called a “battle of the eggheads.” Daniel Ellsberg, destined to become a historic dissenter in 1971, argued for the State Department that the war could and should be won, while professor Robert Scalapino of Berkeley, standing in for Bundy, proposed a complex program “from the standpoint of maximizing the fundamental interests which you and the non-Communist world hold together.”

  Across the continent at Berkeley, a more raucous panoply of speakers held forth through intermittent rain the next weekend for nearly thirty-four continuous hours. Professor Scalapino boycotted the largest and longest teach-in as a “travesty” on his home campus that “should be repudiated by all true scholars irrespective of their views on Vietnam.” Staughton Lynd of Yale denounced Scalapino for cowardly elitism. Baby doctor Benjamin Spock and British philosopher Bertrand Russell expounded on the threat of nuclear annihilation. Maverick journalist I. F. Stone fielded questions about colonial interventions from the Napoleonic Wars to the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and confronted the fear of “irreversible” Communism—noting from the pattern of police states that “it takes a hell of a long time to get a thaw,” but trusting in democratic engagement and free thought (“Jefferson for me is an ultimate and a far greater figure than Lenin”) to thaw tyrannies “instead of trying to strangle them with blockades and with hatred.” Novelist Norman Mailer conjured up florid images of Lyndon Johnson as a cornpone emperor drawn to Vietnam “out of the pusillanimities of the madnesses of his secret sleep,” then swerved through contrarian rhetoric of an isolationist utopia to an “equally visionary” cry for virile combat without high-altitude bombers—“Fight like men! Go in man-to-man against the Vietcong!”—that discomfited some imaginations he had tickled into flight.

  Dozens of the Berkeley speakers came grounded in the civil rights movement. Charlie Cobb, fresh from Julian Bond’s unheralded victory in the special Georgia primary, read a long poem he had written for a girlfriend about Selma and Vietnam:

  So cry not just for Jackson and Reeb

  Schwerner Goodman Chaney or Lee

  Cry for all mothers

  with shovels

  digging at hovels

  looking for their dead

  Cry for all the blood spilled

  Of all the people killed

  In the standard procedure of the country

  which is not ours…

  Norman Thomas, the venerable six-time Socialist candidate for President, and a former Presbyterian minister, grieved over his bitter premonition that America’s white churches were falling from late conversion on civil rights back to excuse violence in “their familiar role of opposing all wars except the one they are in.” Movement comedian Dick Gregory paired the ill omen of Vietnam with California’s landslide approval for Proposition 14, which repealed the state’s new fair housing law starkly against the grain of the 1964 national election. “Which means,” Gregory shouted, “California ain’t nothing but Mississippi with palm trees!”

  Near adjournment on Saturday night, May 22, Gregory introduced surprise speaker Bob Parris with mysterious, nonspecific praise as one “among the greatest human beings who have ever walked the earth.” Murmurs circulated that Parris had dropped the name Moses to shed the burdens of his four pioneer years for SNCC in Mississippi, and his few soft-spoken words were distinctive to others that knew nothing of him: “I saw a picture in an AP release. It said, ‘Marine Captures Communist Rebel.’ Now I looked at that picture, and what I saw was a little colored boy standing against a wire fence with a big huge white Marine with a gun in his back.” Moses implored the Berkeley crowd to approach the issue of political labels personally, first by writing letters—“a lot of you”—to Hazel Palmer, a former maid and future mayor in Mississippi. He gave an address on Farish Street in Jackson and a list of suggested questions: “What did you do? What do you do now? What makes you think that instead of being a cook in somebody’s kitchen you could help run a political party?” Through Palmer, he suggested, they could see the South “as a looking glass, not a lightning rod” for deflected troubles, and the peace movement could learn from faceless leaders at home how to gain a picture of Third World faces in Vietnam. “The people in this country believe that they’re in Vietnam fighting Communism as the manifestation of evil in the world,” said Moses. “That’s what they deeply believe. And that’s what they read all the time in their newspapers. You’ve got to be prepared to offer a different reality.”

  Coverage of the incipient Vietnam protest stoutly resisted association with civil rights. Sunday’s San Francisco Examiner ignored the marathon Berkeley event altogether. The New York Times offered the most substantive account in the mainstream press—“33-Hour Teach-In Attracts 10,000”—leading with the image of “a bleary-eyed, bearded young man whose gray sweatshirt bore the inscription ‘Let’s Make Love, Not War,’ stretched out on the grass,” followed by a paragraph on a nearby “girl with straight black hair and bare feet,” who “plaintively asked her escort, ‘Don’t they ever run out of things to say?’”

  Strains within the racial movement itself concealed signal lessons about projecting new witness into the prevailing political order, and it scarcely helped that the Berkeley Free Speech Movement had veered notoriously from the quickening battles to support nonviolent volunteers in Mississippi. In March, four days before the Selma Bloody Sunday, a lone fan of the beat comic Lenny Bruce had tested the hard-won political debate plaza with a sign bearing simply the word “FUCK.” His arrest energized naughty protest across the spectrum of campus affairs, with jailing soon for a due-process “Fuck Defense Fund,” a “Fuck Communism” parade by Cal Conservatives, and a public reading of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by English majors, also jailed. One leader of the Free Speech Movement convened defense rallies on principle. Some held back, and others tacked against the university for hypocritical indifference to the winning, wildly vulgar “Miss Pussy Galore” entry in a recent fraternity contest. Through April and May, as a statewide chorus of wags mocked the modified “Filthy Speech” Movement, student leaders debated whether the obscenity uproar polluted their cause. One faculty group called them “moral spastics,” too enamored of their own flamboyant display to gauge consequence in
the world. A few days after the Vietnam teach-in, California Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh initiated a full investigation of both the “free speech” and “filthy speech” uprisings at Berkeley.

  A BOMB threat evacuated the Americana Hotel in New York before Martin Luther King’s speech on May 20. He met privately with Vice President Hubert Humphrey, seeking assurance that the administration had the votes to break the Senate filibuster of the voting rights bill. Among King’s worries was the timing of the SCOPE project he had approved so uneasily, as delays in the anticipated law would ruin hopes for the first mass registration of Negroes that summer, forcing Hosea Williams either to withhold hundreds of new volunteers or fling them unprotected into the maw of Southern sheriffs. King prodded Wachtel to complete a committee “review” of Stanley Levison’s pending return to the circle of Northern advisers, and Wachtel stalled in collaboration with Bayard Rustin, believing Levison would regain unfair access to King’s ear from his unique personal bond that had encompassed long phone calls from King after midnight.

  King was so vexed on a related front that he had prevailed upon Archibald Carey to fly from Chicago to FBI headquarters only the day before, seeking to forestall a press attack rumored for the last week in May. “I interrupted Dr. Carey at this point,” DeLoach wrote afterward, “and told him…the FBI had plenty to do without being responsible for a discrediting campaign against Reverend King.” DeLoach said he countered with a list of King’s “derelictions” in criticizing Hoover, then dismissed Carey with a reminder that “King and the other civil rights workers owed the FBI a debt of gratitude they would never be able to repay.” Resigned, Carey reported back to King that he should make more effort to praise Hoover. A prominent judge and minister of Daddy King’s close acquaintance, Carey had cured the subversive accusations in his own FBI file with single-minded applications of flattery, complete with letters gushing over handshakes and autographed photos with Hoover. He recommended that King confine himself to small talk in the Director’s presence. Hoover, for his part, bestowed a rare compliment on DeLoach—“well handled”—and promptly authorized the leak of confidential bug and wiretap information on King to UPI’s chief Southern correspondent.