At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Inside a fatigued Selma movement, there were complaints, about self-promotional leadership well before the July 6 embezzlement arrest of Rev. F. D. Reese. A close observer of the emergency perceived him as an amateur trapped between persecutors and opportunists. Ralph Abernathy flew in with an earthy appeal to unite behind Reese even if he was guilty. He ridiculed the idea that white officials, who arrested them for trying to vote, suddenly became trustworthy guardians of the movement’s private collections. “I didn’t see Mr. Baker put anything in the plate!” he cried. By exercising command of the pulpit—calling for treasured hymns, extolling preachers as inheritors of biblical leadership—Abernathy held off the criticism that bubbled in the pews. “The SNCC people here come on with their taunts about SCLC exploitation and abandonment,” one of King’s staff members wrote, “and I know it isn’t true, but I can’t answer them.”

  Beneath the leadership skirmishes, Daniels pitched himself into experimental projects such as the Selma Free College. Volunteers unpacked books from collection drives organized by spring marchers on their return to home cities—13,000 in the first shipment from students at San Francisco State University, 1,600 from Antioch College, small truckloads from Yale and Brown. To avoid repercussions in white Selma, officials of all-Negro Selma University fearfully declined to accept donations tainted by civil rights (sadly so, as the campus library held fewer than four thousand volumes), whereupon a dozen volunteers catalogued a full lending library for their own improvised summer curriculum. They scrounged a piano for music and folk dance, turned a derelict house into an art gallery, and held large swimming classes in a pond. They nailed wire mesh over windows to control vandalism by the “Green Street Gang” of young Negro boys, who stole supplies and killed mealworms meant to feed the lizards in a nature display assembled by science teacher Mary Alice McQuaid of Colorado State. More pleasantly, the Selma Free College managed overflow attendance in Gloria Larry’s class. Students idolized her poised, movie-star looks, but Larry—a graduate student in comparative literature at Berkeley, who had made her way south with trepidation more than a year after hearing a Bob Moses talk—was nonplussed by the clamor for French lessons instead of demonstrations. Nine-year-old Rachel West eagerly joined her freedom class every morning. West’s housemate Daniels, rejoicing to learn that the new teacher was a lifelong Negro Episcopalian, told Larry she had impeccable credentials to renew the campaign for integrated worship at St. Paul’s Church.

  Daniels resumed his awkward, daily overtures to St. Paul’s members at their offices and homes. With members of Silas Norman’s local SNCC staff, he also canvassed the poorest sections of East Selma. Households lacked basic nutrition and potable water, as was obvious from surveys taken in the Free College health class, but direct exposure to conditions in see-through shacks often shocked the volunteers. One woman, asked why no male supported her destitute family, placed her hand on the heads of eleven offspring as she recalled absentee fathers out loud. To a numb suggestion that she stop seeing such men in order to qualify for social services, the mother pleaded that children were more precious than a welfare check. Volunteers figured out how to pacify another mother who was too fearful of a doctor, or too distressed by the idea of venturing into white Selma, to accompany Daniels and her two small children to Good Samaritan for emergency treatment of malnutrition and intestinal worms by Dr. Isabel Dumont, a German refugee who had preceded and survived Father Ouellet at the Catholic mission.

  Ouellet had feared that Daniels was too naive for such work. From their spring conversations after mass, he thought the seminarian believed too strongly in the power of ideas to reform character—that he could change Rev. Frank Mathews of St. Paul’s by dialogue on Christian duty and theology, for instance, whereas Ouellet perceived Mathews to be governed by his coveted social post at Selma’s most prestigious church. Now Daniels himself was becoming a relative veteran. He could laugh over poignant absurdities of race while expounding on the difference between foolishness and a childlike tenacity of faith. After one fresh volunteer from California tried to assure strangers that some Negro girls in question were all right because they were under his supervision, only to be chased from the white side of the laundromat by a woman beating him with her shoe, it was Daniels who helped turn the volunteer’s fright to relieved hilarity, then to lessons on cultural provocation and risk. He became mentor also to a middle-aged couple who arrived from Long Island for a month’s stay. He found them lodging with a nurse in Carver Homes, arranged for them to help teach a geography class, and took them to mass meetings at Brown Chapel, where Rabbi Harold Saperstein twice was asked to speak as a visiting dignitary. From his parallel experience, Daniels tempered disappointment when the Sapersteins were implored by uncomfortable local Jews not to attend services at the temple on Broad Street. He took them into East Selma. He coached them on everyday subtleties such as visits to the post office—how not to stand out more as civil rights workers by trying to hide—and rewarded their progress with an odd announcement: “I think it’s all right for you to meet Stokely.”

  Asked to wait outside a remote, primitive cabin, the Sapersteins first saw Carmichael step from the doorway behind Daniels with a roasted leg of small game. Marcia Saperstein guessed it was possum, her husband thought rabbit, but they were too disoriented to ask. Still rattled from the long drive out of Selma at speeds above eighty—“Never let a car pass you,” said Daniels, citing one of Carmichael’s paradoxical safety rules—they were absorbing what Daniels told them of the rural SNCC outpost that had lasted four months in Lowndes County without electricity, money, running water, or protection from the Klan.

  Maddening hope had seized the Freedom House cabin since July 6, when a Justice Department lawyer stunned Carmichael with notice that local officials agreed to add registration dates and to terminate literacy tests for prospective voters. Was there a trick, or perhaps some deal to mitigate future enforcement of federal law? After spirited debate, the Lowndes County movement resolved to gamble in trust. They appealed to five hundred pioneer applicants since March 1—nearly all of whom had been rejected—to brave another try at the Old Jail in Hayneville. Lillian McGill quit her federal job at the Agriculture Department to canvass nearly around the clock, often with John Hulett, the church deacon who had founded the Lowndes County voting rights movement since rescuing his pastor from the Klan in February. SNCC workers mobilized outside reinforcements including Gloria Larry, who, after morning classes in Selma, ventured out through Big Swamp to help shepherd registration caravans. (When the prim Larry first asked to use the Freedom House bathroom, she endured guffaws as Carmichael merrily pointed her toward the small outhouse in the woods behind.) There had been serious division also about Daniels. Most project workers opposed the extra dangers and headaches posed by a radioactive white presence in Lowndes, but Carmichael prevailed with the Bob Moses argument that a freedom movement could not throw up barriers of race. He assured Bob Mants, Willie Vaughn, and other SNCC workers that white volunteers would not overrun them as in Mississippi Summer. Carefully, after Daniels, the wonder of a rabbi and wife soon appeared behind knocks on sharecropper doors, wearing business dress in July heat, radiating with news that the trick questions were banished.

  Registration lines lurched forward without the literacy exams. “We’ve fought for the removal of this test for so long it’s hard to believe it’s really gone,” Stokely Carmichael declared in a SNCC press release. Mass meetings at Mt. Gillard Baptist ratcheted up from weekly to nightly for the push, and Carmichael, though far from conventionally religious, preached to high-spirited crowds in the language of the Bible. He imagined from the visionary text of Ezekiel how black folks of Lowndes would rise up dancing like “dry bones” in the valley of Israel, the sinews of life restored.

  Hulett presented a separate breakthrough to Mt. Gillard: posted notices that Lowndes County was taking applications for “freedom of choice” assignment to high school. Some argued from the floor that a second front was u
nwise, but families of nearly fifty children answered the agreed policy of volunteers. Daniels accompanied several to the courthouse for the required forms, which turned out to be nonexistent until Superintendent Hulda Coleman typed her own version. Staff members preserved details of swift, widespread reaction, punctuated by nearby Klan rallies on July 10 and 16, in sworn affidavits collected for the Justice Department. “Buster Haigler sent for me to his house,” Cato Lee said of the county’s largest private financier. “He took his book out of his pocket, and asked me did I have any children enrolled to go to Hayneville High School.” Eli Logan said a white teacher twice advised that “the Ku Klux Klan would be through here next Tuesday” unless Logan took young Stephen’s name off the list for twelfth grade. Martha Johnson affirmed that the teacher’s son—“the same man who measured my land last year”—said she would “be in a squeeze” if her daughter tried to switch schools. Jordan Gully told how a creditor for farming loans warned that white people were fed up over his daughter’s application. “Then he said, ‘We didn’t bother y’all about registerin’. We didn’t bother y’all about goin’ to mass meetings,’” recalled Gully. “He told me, ‘I’ll be goddam if this shit is going over this time…. We going to stop it. Don’t you ask me for no damn help for nothing.’”

  PRESIDENT JOHNSON frantically avoided inertia toward war from the moment in July when he announced the nomination of Henry Cabot Lodge to return as U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. He moved Bill Moyers to White House press secretary simultaneously, the better to present foreign upheavals ahead, and Moyers dazzled reporters by calling the President right in front of them to resolve a question. To drive the domestic agenda in place of Moyers, Johnson added to his staff Joseph Califano from the Pentagon and Harry McPherson from State. He ordered a verbatim transcript of Califano’s first encounters with education officials over the running daily count of delinquent school systems, and then, unsatisfied that Califano was lashing them forward vigorously enough, sprang upon them without warning. “Get ’em! Get ’em!” the President shouted at Commissioner Keppel. “Get the last ones!” Keppel had approved desegregation plans for less than a quarter of three thousand Southern districts, with Lowndes County among a majority of pending new submissions, but Johnson cared most about the four hundred holdouts by late July. He was possessed to break the psychological barrier by inveigling every last district to give up segregation in its own words—almost any words. While this one priority nearly crushed the emergency teams at Temporary S (“We were going absolutely nuts,” Keppel recalled), Johnson yanked aides to other tasks. The second time Califano momentarily missed a presidential buzz, an abashed secretary knocked to alert him that Signal Corps technicians were there with orders to install a telephone in the bathroom of his new office.

  Johnson shocked former NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall with an offer to become Solicitor General of the United States. That same day, the first for Moyers as press secretary, he tried to answer Senator William Fulbright’s complaint that the intended nominee to replace Harry McPherson would mean too many senior Negroes at the State Department. “They won’t have any if I don’t name this fella,” countered the President. Fulbright narrowed his objection to the particular job, which included managerial control of the prestigious Fulbright scholar exchange program in foreign countries. “It never occurred to me that they were outstanding in the cultural field,” he told Johnson. “I mean, after all, they’re not. The big universities are not predominantly colored.” Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that participating universities more than governments would recoil if his namesake endeavor were administered by a Negro. “I wouldn’t object at all if you made him Secretary of State, for that matter,” he stressed in a quavering voice, “because I have a rather personal interest in this program.”

  Fulbright managed to block Johnson’s choice for the assistant secretary post, but a bigger appointment commanded public attention upon the sudden death in London of U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson. Within hours of an emotional eulogy at Washington Cathedral, the President called Abe Fortas for drinks on the Truman balcony, where he passed along a novel suggestion that Justice Arthur Goldberg might be enticed to leave the Supreme Court for a chance to catalyze a Vietnam settlement at the United Nations. Johnson completed one phase of maneuvers by July 20, the day after Stevenson’s burial in Illinois. He announced Goldberg’s U.N. appointment in the morning, then called to thank Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith for the idea. Ebullient, Johnson said Goldberg was the perfect choice to shatter a political taboo that no Jew could represent the United States at the world body, and he told Galbraith flatly that he would name Thurgood Marshall to a future vacancy on the Supreme Court “after he’s Solicitor for a year or two.” By then Marshall would have added to the twenty-nine tough cases he had won in the highest court as an NAACP attorney, the President observed, which would make him more than eminently qualified to become the first Negro Justice. “I think we’ll break through there like we’re breaking through on so many of these things,” he said.

  KING TESTED another potential northern site on Saturday, July 24. “If you want a movement to move, you’ve got to have the preachers behind you,” he told an Interfaith Breakfast of 220 clergy in Chicago. Among sixty whites present for the kickoff event were Jews gathered before sabbath services, including the national president of the conservative synagogue association, Rabbi Jacob Weinstein of Temple KAM, who had just returned from an interfaith mission in Saigon with Vietnamese peace petitions directed to King. The Negroes featured a minority of local Baptists thus far willing to defy Rev. J. H. Jackson of Olivet Baptist, the “Negro pope” who in 1961 had branded King an apostate, driving him with two thousand pro–civil rights pastors from the National Baptist Convention. To those familiar with the hidden world of pulpit politics, Rev. Jackson in Chicago loomed a daunting obstacle for his proven exercise of machinelike powers in tandem with Mayor Daley.

  King exhorted the religious leaders to “sacrifice body and soul” for the cause astir, then rushed an hour behind schedule into a three-car motorcade bound for Carver Park in far Southside Chicago, with a police escort and a fleet of trailing reporters. The approach of sirens soon released the team of advance SCLC speakers—Abernathy, Bevel, citizenship teacher Dorothy Cotton, Fred Shuttlesworth—toward the rally ahead, where they in turn released the warmup Freedom Singers. King followed with a twenty-minute address on the challenge of de facto segregation. “The Negro is not free anywhere in the United States,” he said from the back of a flatbed truck. Al Raby brought a neighborhood leader to brief King on the Robert Taylor Homes project en route to a brick-strewn field at 48th and State Streets, where a second crowd of five hundred was gathered. Uniformed Cub Scouts waited to pass collection buckets.

  On through eight speech stops in the lead car, covering 186 miles of city streets before dark, King had the rare extended company of his adviser Bayard Rustin. Always entertaining, sifting rascals and tactical conundrums in his high-spirited Caribbean accent, Rustin addressed King’s confluent pressures from experience. He had practiced nonviolence in Northern cities for more than two decades. He knew well the raw methods that Harlem Representative Adam Clayton Powell was using to hamstring competition from King on urban turf, having been driven off King’s advisory staff himself in 1960 by Powell’s blackmail threats over his homosexuality. From prior work on four continents, Rustin also helped interpret nonviolence in a context of pell-mell slide to distant war. Less than a month before, King had supported the interfaith mission to Vietnam: “Let me commend you…. America must be willing to negotiate with all parties…. Our guns and our bombs do not prove that we love democracy but that we still believe that might makes right.” More than this cablegram, or the stature of Pastor Martin Niemoeller of Wiesbaden, president of the World Council of Churches, Rabbi Weinstein reported that King’s nonviolent instructor James Lawson, the only black person among the fourteen delegates, “gave us great
prestige and opened many doors to us.” Chief among their discoveries in Vietnam was the monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who had sent King a letter on the meaning of self-immolation. The sensational fires were not acts of despair, suicide, or even violence, he argued. Mahayana Buddhism, while abhorring self-destruction, teaches that life is immortal. Candidate monks burn small spots on their bodies at ordination to signify devotion, and immolation expresses merely the extreme degree of constructive hope for a people’s salvation above the nihilism of war. “To say something while experiencing this kind of pain,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “is to say it with the utmost courage, frankness, determination, and sincerity.”

  This communication taxed even Rustin’s nimble mind for adapting nonviolence across cultures. Witness by flame was “difficult for the Western Christian conscience to understand,” the monk’s letter conceded, and the interfaith delegation found realistically that the two Vietnamese governments themselves were locked into opposing rationales for conventional terror. Still, from his study of the nonviolent movement against caste in Alabama, Thich Nhat Hanh challenged Americans to reciprocate in Vietnam by applying parallel Buddhist belief that war from any quarter is a greater evil than Communism, capitalism, or colonialism. They should “not allow American political and economic doctrines to be deprived of their spiritual element,” he wrote King, quoting a Christian theologian in his personal plea: “You cannot be silent since you have already been in action, and you are in action, because, in you, God is in action, too—to use Karl Barth’s expression.”

  The nonstop Chicago relay ended late Saturday at Friendship Baptist, the former grand Russian synagogue of Anshe Kneseth Israel in Lawndale. When King complained of exhaustion after preaching at two churches Sunday morning, the Freedom Singers improvised an extra hour to cover a breather before motorcades rolled toward six afternoon stops. At a shopping center in Chatham, then in Calumet Park, he urged large middle-class crowds to remember those behind them in the struggle from desperate poverty. “Dives didn’t go to hell because he was a millionaire,” King explained from the parable in Luke. “He went to hell because he passed Lazarus by.” Until dusk, outside Scatchell’s BBQ on Pulaski Avenue, King pleaded with listeners to march with him in numbers. “Take a day off on Monday,” he cried. “You know, we don’t make much money anyhow.” Leaving behind most of the entourage to scatter in recruitment, hoping to silence press jibes that recent downtown protests had mustered fewer than a thousand, King ventured seventeen miles north along Lake Michigan to one of the country’s wealthiest suburbs. Brown-shirt Nazis were picketing the village green of Winnetka, and police guards had thrown up protective fencing after a bomb threat. Few at the night rally of ten thousand people knew any freedom songs, but Rev. C. T. Vivian, SCLC’s director of affiliate chapters, had been holding them with preacher riffs and choruses of “America the Beautiful.” King spoke for nearly an hour on the moral imperative to overcome fearful hatred at home and abroad. From dead collapse, he startled Vivian on the way back into Chicago. “You don’t think I know what I’m doing when I talk about Vietnam, do you?” King asked.