At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  A transcript rocketed to Washington within hours, fueled by predatory outrage within the FBI over Abernathy’s careless claim to a cooperative relationship. Hoover scribbled a precautionary note that “if I find anyone furnishing information to SCLC he will be dismissed,” and DeLoach orchestrated an aggressive campaign to brand Abernathy’s statement “absolutely untrue” behind the official stance that all FBI files were strictly confidential. His office distributed sharp, contemptuous statements to press contacts, DeLoach reported to colleagues, “so as to give the lie to Martin Luther King and his ilk.” On Hoover’s orders, top FBI officials received notice of the media offensive by the close of business on July 2.

  These attacks trailed King into Chicago on the night of July 6. A few outlets printed them (“Fast Refutation by FBI”), but most had trouble fashioning news out of a disputed aside by the little-known Abernathy. One Illinois paper conflated the FBI rebuke with a fresh outburst from Mayor Daley, who, exasperated by nineteen days of local civil rights demonstrations, issued his own public charge of subversion on July 2: “We know Communists infiltrate all these organizations.” For King, such controversy registered as familiar background nuisance. Flight delays pushed his arrival too late for a scheduled meeting with Al Raby at the Palmer House Hotel, and he was whisked into the ballroom to address the General Synod of the United Church of Christ. He saluted the mass witness of religious Americans over the past two years as an inspirational start. “The actual work to redeem the soul of America is before us,” declared King, hinting at constructive tasks across broken barriers of race nationwide. “Not only are millions deprived of formal education and proper health facilities, but our most fundamental social unit—the family—is tortured, corrupted, and weakened by economic injustice,” he said. “The church cannot look with indifference upon these glaring evils.”

  From the crush of a reception among church delegates, King appeared briefly at a press conference. Reporters wanted to know whether he planned to “take over” the upstart civil rights campaign in Chicago, and, strangely, they pressed for his reaction to reports of internecine strife since the previous day’s national CORE convention in Durham, North Carolina. King parried both questions, then withdrew for consultations late into the night with his Chicago lawyer Chauncey Eskridge, Al Raby, and local CORE leader Willie Blue. Raby had just filed a complaint with U.S. Education Commissioner Francis Keppel, based on studies since the 1958 Crisis report, arguing that Chicago’s effectively segregated schools should be “deprived of any and all Federal assistance” pursuant to Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This novel petition—the first aimed at a Northern school district—was certain to magnify the stakes of local protest.

  As King’s staff debated the chances for a Chicago movement, Blue interjected theories about why the national CORE delegates had passed a Vietnam resolution calling for “an immediate withdrawal of all American troops,” only to reconsider and table the same measure within hours on a personal appeal from James Farmer. There were grumblings implicating King’s speech days earlier at all-Negro Virginia State College. A local reporter had picked up comments on Vietnam—“There is no reason why there cannot be peace rallies like we have freedom rallies…. We are not going to defeat Communism with bombs and guns and gases…. We must work this out in the framework of our democracy”—which moved over newswires to back pages in several newspapers. Gossip attributed the CORE reversal to hidden maneuvers and rivalries, which drew the press to whiffs of fresh controversy, but an incoming emergency call from Ralph Abernathy—intercepted by the Chicago police “Red Squad”—intervened after midnight with sickening word that Wilson Baker had arrested Rev. F. D. Reese for alleged embezzlement of the donations that had poured into Selma since the marches over Pettus Bridge. Press images of thieving Negro leaders loomed over a voting rights bill that was still stuck between the two houses of Congress.

  J. Edgar Hoover was alerted to sensitivities over Vietnam that same evening of July 6. A solicitous call from Attorney General Katzenbach informed him that President Johnson and Secretary Rusk wanted an FBI investigation of the emerging King position on Vietnam, including possible Communist influences. Katzenbach confided that King’s most prominent civil rights colleagues, Roy Wilkins and James Farmer, already had disparaged King for Vietnam comments they called wrongheaded and disloyal. For Hoover, the Katzenbach request landed as a welcome reversal by a nominal boss who had resisted his penchant for political intelligence to the point of barely civil relations. Far more important, it signaled a shift by the President, who had ignored scurrilous FBI reports on King since the day he entered the White House. Prior efforts to brand King subversive, which had bounced off Johnson’s kindred domestic agenda, acquired sudden new promise across the trenches of the impending foreign war, and Hoover ordered overnight research on the obscure Asian country that might rescue FBI propaganda from flailing jabs at Ralph Abernathy. He delivered the next day a sanctioned, classified paper on “King’s injection into the Vietnam situation.”

  KING ANNOUNCED that morning at the Palmer House that he had agreed “to spend some time in Chicago, beginning July 24.” To skeptical questions about the point of demonstrations in a city without segregation laws, he replied that many “persons of good will” did not yet understand the breadth of the nonviolent movement, and that there was “a great job of interpretation to be done” before his first major campaign in the North. “During entire press conference,” FBI observers cabled headquarters, “King was not questioned nor did he mention Viet Nam, or make any reference whatsoever to United States foreign policy.” Leaving Andrew Young with Bevel to prepare his Chicago canvass, King flew to New York for an afternoon engagement and promptly canceled his evening flight to Los Angeles. There were too many ominous signs radiating over telephone lines, seeping into news—and too many historic changes teetering—for him to be content with guesses about the single most crucial vector in democracy. When an incoming call rang through on July 7 at 8:05 P.M., the White House log recorded Lyndon Johnson’s first phone conversation initiated by King.

  The President came on the line distant and cold. He grunted without recognition until King confirmed his name: “This is Martin King.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you do, sir?”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine,” said King. “Glad to hear your voice.”

  “Thank you.”

  Johnson’s clipped monosyllables hung until King abandoned pleasantry to ask about the voting rights bill. “I want to get your advice on this,” he concluded.

  Deference thawed the President. “I’ll be glad to,” he said, cranking into political calculations of such sustained acceleration that King would speak only one word (“very”) over the next ten minutes. Johnson saw the opposing coalition of Republicans and crafty Southerners becoming more potent since Goldwater began to influence Republican leaders in Congress. “They’re gonna quit the nigras,” he said. “They will not let a nigra vote for them.” Their current ploy was “to get a big fight started over which way to repeal the poll tax,” he summarized, telling King that the Senate very nearly passed an amendment to abolish poll taxes as a form of racial discrimination, but the administration detected a mousetrap. Vermont had a dormant poll tax law, and Katzenbach warned that segregationists would welcome the amendment as an opening to challenge the overall bill from a state with virtually no Negroes. “They’ll bring the case on Vermont,” the President told King. “And that’ll be the case that they’ll take to the Court, and they will not hold that it is discriminatory in Vermont because it is not.” Having originally instructed Katzenbach “to get rid of the poll tax any way in the world he could without nullifying the whole law,” Johnson said Katzenbach’s legal strategy was good politics. He vowed to keep the bill clean, and move separately to speed one of the pending Southern cases by which the Supreme Court was expected to void all poll taxes.

  Johnson complained that House liberals could not resist tem
ptation to add a poll tax amendment anyway. “[Speaker John] McCormack was afraid that somebody would be stronger for the Negro than he was,” he fumed, “so he came out red hot for complete repeal.” The imminent vote could be fatal, he told King, because any slight change in the Senate-passed bill would require a conference committee of both houses of Congress to reconcile differences. “So they get in an argument, and that delays it,” he said. “And maybe nothing comes out.” Any modified bill must repeat the legislative process in at least one chamber of Congress, and either hurdle a filibuster again in the Senate or “you got to go back to Judge [Howard] Smith” in the House. “You got to get a rule from him, and he won’t give you a rule. He, he, he,” Johnson sputtered, on the pitfalls of recircumventing the implacable Rules Committee chairman from Virginia. “So you got to file a [discharge] petition and take another twenty-one days…and they want to get out of here Labor Day. And they’re playin’ for that time. Now they been doin’ that for thirty-five years that I been here, and I been watchin’ ’em do it.”

  More than once Johnson reminded King of “my practical political problem” with the two Kennedy senators, both of whom supported poll tax repeal. He portrayed himself as a lonely President embattled on a dozen fronts while his civil rights allies were “all off celebratin’”—Wilkins at his convention, labor leaders George Meany and Walter Reuther on vacation, “and you’re somewhere else.” The opposition was “playin’ us,” said Johnson, “and we are not parliamentary smart enough, if you want to be honest—now you asked advice, I’m just tellin’ you.” He worked up a lather of shrewdness, rage, and self-pity that tickled King in spite of himself. “They want your wife to go one direction and you to go the other,” said the President.

  “Yes,” said King, chuckling.

  “Then the kids don’t know which one to follow,” added Johnson.

  King laughed as the President rounded through his tactical blueprint. “Well, I certainly appreciate this, Mr. President,” he said, adding softly that he was confident in Katzenbach on “this whole voting bill,” and that always he had tried to make the movement helpful “as I was telling you when we started in Alabama.”

  “You sure have and—” said Johnson. He checked himself, then responded more earnestly to King’s personal reminder. “Well, you helped, I think, to dramatize and bring it to a point where I could go before the Congress in that night session, and I think that was one of the most effective things that ever happened,” he declared. “But uh, you had worked for months to help create the sentiment that supported it.”

  “Yes,” said King.

  “Now the trouble is that fire has gone out,” added Johnson, not lingering on sentiment. “We got a few coals on it,” he said, then reviewed his plan to stoke the embers with cedar and “a little coal oil” by full-scale civil rights lobby for a unified bill in the House.

  “Yes, well, this has been very sound,” King replied, quickly interjecting “one other point that I wanted to mention to you, because it has begun to concern me a great deal, in the last uh, few days, in making my speeches, in making a speech in Virginia, where I made a statement concerning, uh, the Vietnam situation, and there have been some press statements about it.” The President kept silent through King’s nervous monologue denying that he was “engaged in destructive criticism…that we should unilaterally withdraw troops from Vietnam, which I know is unreasonable.” He had been “speaking really as a minister of the gospel,” King said, and wanted to be clear. “It was merely a statement that all citizens of good will ought to be concerned about the problem that faces our world, the problem of war,” he added carefully, “and that, although uncomfortable, they ought to debate on this issue.” King coughed. “I just wanted to say that to you,” he said, “because I felt eventually that it would come to your attention—”

  “Well—”

  “—and I know the terrible burden and awesome responsibility and decisions that you make, and I know it’s complicated,” King rushed on, “and I didn’t want to add to the burdens because I know they’re very difficult.”

  Johnson paused. “Well, you, you, you’re very, uh, uh, helpful, and I appreciate it,” he said, stumbling. Then he recovered: “I did see it. I was distressed. I do want to talk to you.” He exposed to King his confessional tone about Vietnam, saying he had stalled and hoped to the point that “unless I bomb, they run me out right quick,” and stressed the constant toll of war pressure—“well, the Republican leader had a press conference this afternoon, [Gerald] Ford, demanded I bomb Hanoi”—over his twenty months in office. “I’ve lost about two hundred and sixty—our lives up to now,” he told King, “and I could lose two hundred and sixty-five thousand mighty easy, and I’m trying to keep those zeroes down.”

  The President admitted that he was “not all wise” in matters of foreign policy. “I don’t want to be a warmonger,” he assured King, but neither could he abide defeat in a Cold War conflict. “Now I don’t want to pull down the flag and come home runnin’ with my tail between my legs,” he said, “particularly if it’s going to create more problems than I got out there—and it would, according to our best judges.” Johnson urged King to explore the alternatives at length with Rusk, McNamara, and himself—“I’ll give you all I know”—and thanked him for constructive purpose always “in our dealings together.” King in turn thanked Johnson for true leadership, and especially—“I don’t think I’ve had a chance”—for his speech after Selma. They parted with pledges of joint zeal to finish the quest for universal suffrage.

  At their fleeting, crucial moment of contact on Vietnam, Johnson had minimized his war motive to the point of apology, just as King circumscribed his criticism. Each one said he yearned to find another way, but shied from nonviolent strategies in the glare of the military challenge.

  THE SEMINARIAN Jonathan Daniels reached Selma for a third stay on July 8, this time alone, having completed the semester at Cambridge by submitting overdue papers steeped in religious epiphany. Stark memories had become tools for reflection. He recalled first erasing the hostile stares of Southern strangers simply by switching from Massachusetts to Alabama license tags, with the “Heart of Dixie” state slogan, only to become flushed under the wary looks of Negroes, then mortified by the impression Upham’s car advertised along roadways back north through his native New Hampshire. “I wanted to shout to them, ‘No, no! I’m not an Alabama white,” Daniels wrote. Yet he identified with white Southerners in turmoil against him, to the point of defending them from showers of condescension at the seminary. Regretting the “self-righteous insanities” of his early weeks in the Alabama Black Belt, he expressed gratitude to his pastoral mentor in Selma, Father Maurice Ouellet of St. Elizabeth’s Edmundite mission among Negroes, for making clear exactly how “he had finally stopped hating” fellow white clergy after twelve years of ostracism and injustice. Daniels carried a secret intention to pursue conversion under Ouellet toward the Catholic rather than Episcopal priesthood. He found comfort in the formal liturgy and structured hierarchy of the Roman Church, which had anchored centuries of cerebral meditation from St. Augustine to Thomas Merton. From his own inner voyage in Alabama, treated variously as a “white nigger,” “redneck,” and oddball savior, Daniels stretched for an empathy that could reach all human wounds. “It meant absorbing their guilt as well,” he wrote of the segregationists, “and suffering the cost which they might not yet even know was there to be paid.” He professed new baptism to a living theology beyond fear—“that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God.”

  Lonzy and Alice West drove Daniels from the Montgomery airport to apartment 313E at the Carver Homes in Selma, adjacent to Brown Chapel. Many of the ten West children at home squealed with delight over the return of their favorite family guest, even though they had to bunch more tightly on beds and sofas to vacate his old room. Daniels retained an open bond with them, particularly the younger ones. He had the wit to join in t
heir fun about the novelty of himself as a white man in Carver Homes. He recognized them as participants in a fearful movement, but employed playful nonsense—bouncing them on his knee, twirling them in the air, asking, “Now are you afraid?”—to dispel hardships from the grown-up world.

  Local powers were reasserting authority in the wake of Selma’s great marches. Archbishop Thomas Toolen of Alabama had just banished Father Ouellet to Vermont by edict that made national news, depriving Daniels of personal counsel and the Wests of their family priest. (Lonzy West had converted from the Negro Baptist church a decade earlier, after a stint as Ouellet’s parish janitor.) The Dallas County school superintendent aborted a tense first meeting with Negroes on freedom-of-choice integration by announcing that he would receive only written questions for later study, then refusing to address the Negro parents by courtesy titles rather than first names. In declining also to shake their hands, the superintendent stood curtly on the abstract principle of his free choice, but apologists said he could not survive the political stigma of breaking racial custom. Meanwhile, Mayor Joseph Smitherman stalled the downtown boycott of segregated merchants until it dwindled for lack of result.