At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Daniels begged a dime from Ruby Sales on the way. He climbed the two small steps to a narrow porch entrance and froze at a sudden command from inside the screen door: “The store is closed. Get off this property or I’ll blow your goddamned heads off!” Daniels retreated a step, leaning to sweep Sales behind with an arm, before Tom Coleman burst forward behind a Savage twelve-gauge barrel fired so close that lead and shell wadding tore a ragged hole only an inch wide from the rib cage downward through liver into spine, hurling Daniels back across the sidewalk to land face-up over the grassy curb. Joyce Bailey was twenty feet away in full flight when a second deafening blast wrenched her hand from Morrisroe’s as the priest was swatted down by buckshot spread over his back. Sales crawled madly around the store to hide. Jimmy Rogers and Gloria Larry dived to the ground near Morrisroe, then scrambled behind a hedge when they glanced back to see the man walk toward them from the porch, pointing the shotgun.

  Coleman wore a holstered pistol. He stood in survey over each prostrate form, then walked to his car and drove slowly up to the courthouse. From the sheriff’s office he called Montgomery, where his state trooper son served as driver and bodyguard to Colonel Al Lingo. “I just shot two preachers,” he told them. “You better get on down here.”

  Joyce Bailey gave way to loud hysteria when Coleman was gone. “You traitors!” she screamed at the empty street. “You just ran off and left!” Heads appeared from scattered places. John McMeans came close and could not shake from his mind the image of blood running as copiously from two people as water when he washed a car. Fort Deposit teenagers banged on the Jackson Beauty Shop and nearby houses, but no one came to the door. Gloria Larry backed away helpless, ears ringing, unable to bear the unworldly moans of Morrisroe begging for water. Spinning around, Rogers locked eyes with several armed men on a path behind the cotton gin. “Nigger, if you don’t git, you’re gonna be lyin’ right down beside ’em,” shouted one.

  Rogers herded his companions away from the victims and from jailhouse reading books abandoned where shock had dropped them in the road—The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Native Son by Richard Wright, The Church and the New Latin America. An hour later, when Dr. William Dinkins arrived from Selma in one of the ambulances used to take James Reeb to Birmingham, he could find no wounded nor anyone who would speak of a shooting. Coroner Jack Golson had hauled the casualties away in the county hearse, Morrisroe barely conscious of Daniels stacked beneath him on a short-legged stretcher.

  With both President Johnson and John Doar engaged among featured speakers at the first White House Conference on Equal Employment Opportunity, operators from the SNCC telephone bank left desperate messages for Doar—that Hayneville jailers insisted Peter Hall’s clients were still in their cells but refused to let him speak to any as of late Friday, that none of the surrounding hospitals or mortuaries acknowledged arrivals who matched the vanished Hayneville prisoners. Doar broke the wall of silence when an employee of the White Chapel Funeral Home acknowledged to him possession of a fresh arrival fitting the description for Daniels. He notified the FBI at 6:15 P.M. A Catholic priest, called separately to administer last rites at Baptist Hospital, found a surgeon of war experience he knew to look at the victim without identity papers still breathing on a hallway gurney, and Dr. Charles Cox assembled trauma teams that worked eleven hours to remove his spleen, part of a punctured lung, and buckshot fragments embedded from a shoulder blade to the small intestine. An FBI agent waited outside on promise of immediate word, he assured headquarters, “if Morrisroe should die.” Morrisroe would survive.

  From the Los Angeles airport, meanwhile, Andrew Young had been trying to arrange an afternoon call with the President, but White House aides notified FBI headquarters that Johnson spurned King’s information on Watts. If they meant to placate Hoover with their hostile speculation that King meant only to puff himself up or lay a political trap, they did not go far enough. “The White House makes a great mistake,” Hoover wrote on his rush memo, “in even allowing King et al. to get access to it.”

  PRESIDENT JOHNSON in fact gathered his advisers for a cross-country telephone summit just before King’s homeward flight. Unaware of new trouble—they spoke through the very hour of Doar’s inquiries into Alabama—the two principals addressed a history-making civil rights alliance that was menaced already on larger fronts, marked by skewed public attitudes about violence as sickness or cure. Each looked to the other for unlikely rescue, and neither betrayed hostility over rupture near at hand. Their skittish, intimate consultation left few clues that it would seal the last words on record between King and Lyndon Johnson. Unwittingly, they were saying goodbye.

  Johnson put Lee White and Harry McPherson on extension telephones to hear him complain to King that he had been swarmed all week by hostile votes in Congress. The Senate had just cut his second-year poverty budget by 13 percent, he said—from $1.89 billion to $1.65 billion—“and now my bill has got to go back to the House, and go through Judge Smith again, go to conference.” That setback already stunted the package of new job and education programs, such as Head Start, that Johnson hoped to grow into the range of $10 billion per year. More ominously, the administration had to fight for a 43–43 deadlock on a separate vote to delete another $800 million. The amendment would have “just cut me in half,” the President told King, but failed on a tie. “That’s how close it was.

  “They’re determined to destroy it, to scandalize it,” Johnson charged. He put King abreast of thorny, nonpartisan obstacles to change within his own government—that Mayor Yorty opposed even limited poverty funds unless he controlled them, for instance, and chairman Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., had taken a long yachting holiday rather than testify before a congressional committee that in his absence halved the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s first budget. When the President asked about Watts, King spoke frankly about the risk of “full scale race war.”

  Johnson accepted his prognosis but soon cut it off. “So now what should we do about it?” he asked impatiently. “What is your recommendation?”

  King hesitated. He had advised already to expect no help from “absolutely insensitive” local politicians such as Chief Parker (“a very rude man, we couldn’t get anywhere with him”), which left federal hopes that Johnson had just portrayed under relentless siege. “Well, the problem is, I think,” King stammered. “If they can get in the next few days, this poverty program going in Los Angeles,” he suggested, “I believe that it would help a great deal.”

  “We’ll get at it,” Johnson promised crisply. His aides and his Cabinet would keep working on the mechanics of “crash action,” but he prescribed an urgent message for King to shore up the national mandate. “And just say that uh, we, uh, the clock is ticking,” the President exhorted, “that, that, uh, that the, the hands are moving, and uh we we just, uh, the good Lord is going to allow us some time, and he’s trying to give us some warnings, but the country has just got to stand up and support what I’m doing. And I can’t have these poverty things hitting me 43 to 43.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” said King.

  Johnson said that King’s statements, while already reasonable and just, should reflect more explicitly the language of the Howard University presidential address on poverty. Treating King as a fellow expert on the treachery of speech in a divided society, he warned that the press “might misunderstand” his own attempt that day to discourage racial hatred from any quarter. “I said a man has no more right to destroy property with a Molotov cocktail in Los Angeles than the Ku Klux Klan has to go out and destroy life,” Johnson told him, saying he had made that point “to the Equal Employment people today and made it pretty strong.” Although the President said he only paraphrased King on the subject, he knew—and he knew King knew—that the filter of race would implicate Negroes broadly while sparing whites except for Klan extremists. Johnson hastened to recall his offsetting plea for understanding. “There’s no use giving lectures on the law as long as you’
ve got rats eating on people’s uh, uh, children,” he told King, quoting himself, “and unemployed, and no roof over their head, no job to go to, and maybe with a dope needle in one side and a cancer in the other.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” said King.

  “Because they don’t have very good judgment. People don’t—that got that kind of condition.”

  “That’s right,” said King.

  “And we’re not doing enough to relieve it,” said Johnson, “and we’re not doing it quick enough.”

  “Yes.”

  The President twice reprised his riot-and-rats refrain, going so far as to preach in rhythm that the neglected of Watts “are all God’s children, and we better get at it.”

  “Yes, yes,” King intoned, giving the sort of church response he usually received.

  “I want you to know I said that,” added Johnson. “Pardon me for interrupting.” He used language nearly identical to an earlier, confidential encouragement for John McCone, the former CIA Director, to accept appointment from Governor Brown to lead the Watts riot commission. If anything, the President understated both to King and McCone his lyrical commitment to make civil rights “the most important cause of our time,” as proclaimed earlier Friday on the White House lawn. “For our cause is the liberation—the liberation of all of our citizens in all of our sections in all of our nation, through peaceful, nonviolent change,” he had declared. “And we shall overcome. And I am enlisted for the duration.”

  Still, the President anticipated that his once shocking embrace of movement purpose would be lost beneath harsh front-page headlines tomorrow: “Johnson Rebukes Rioters As Destroyers of Rights.” He coached King into the bully pulpit as his counterbalance and substitute. “Refer to that Howard University speech,” he repeated. “Nobody ever publicized that.”

  King replied that he had done so already “in almost every speech I’ve made.”

  Johnson detected no such message in media coverage and pushed King to shift the focus of the news. “You, you’re on television, and you ought to make ’em,” he pressed. “Hell, have, tell ’em to read it, write, and get it, and let’s get busy.” Flustered, the President longed for him to plow forward ground for another Selma spring. “We’ve got to keep ahead of it,” said Johnson, “and we’re not now.” He decried instead a landslide slipping away. “They think that I’m getting far away from the election, and that I haven’t got the crowds supporting me anymore,” he told King, then struck a glancing blow: “They all got the impression too that you’re against me in Vietnam.”

  Johnson pulled back at once. “You don’t leave that impression,” he assured King, only to writhe for and against violence. “I want peace as much as you do, and more so, because I’m the fellow that had to wake up this morning with fifty Marines killed,” he groaned, referring to temporarily secret casualty figures from the first American pitched battle, at Chu Lai. “But these folks will not come to the conference table, and I’m—”

  “I’ve said that, Mr. President, I am concerned about peace,” King interjected. “And I have made it very clear, I think, my position is often misinterpreted,” he said defensively, alert to Johnson’s volatile passion. “Because I’ve made it very clear that at the present time, two things, first that it is just unreasonable to talk about the United States having a unilateral withdrawal. On the other hand, you have called fourteen or fifteen times for unconditional talks, and it’s Hanoi—”

  “That’s right, that’s—”

  “—that hasn’t responded.”

  “That’s the perfect position!” Johnson pounced. “Just exactly the position.” He said King should coordinate with Ambassador Goldberg, which prompted King to recall a phone message lost in the chaos of Watts—“I guess two days ago”—about an invitation to visit Goldberg at the United Nations.

  “I told him last week to talk to you,” the President disclosed. With a burst of restored energy, he said he would have Lee White call King in Atlanta to facilitate not only a Goldberg conference but emergency programs for Los Angeles and plans for the White House conference on race. Johnson thanked King for leadership in Watts—“You did a good job going out there”—and invited suggestions anytime King had money to pay for the phone call. “If you haven’t,” he said wryly, “why, call collect.”

  “All right,” said King, chuckling.

  After Johnson signed off, he and his aides switched briefly to derisive laughter about King’s reluctance to salute the battle flag in Vietnam. They mocked him for wobbly judgment and dubious political loyalty, which, together with the fresh ambush from Watts, raised for them a specter of inexplicable, concerted betrayal by Negro allies. Angrily protective of his boss, Harry McPherson had drafted the day’s stern language aimed at ingrates who rewarded the administration’s historic partnership with riots in California, of all places, and was disappointed that Johnson undercut the message with so many extemporaneous remarks on racial justice. White House aides leaked exaggerated stories about how sharply the President admonished King on Vietnam.

  The President squelched the sarcasm with peremptory orders for his staff to mobilize poverty initiatives for Los Angeles by the next morning, Saturday, at ten o’clock. “Let’s get up a program,” he concluded in a pep talk. “Get everybody that’s possible. Let’s move in—money, marbles, and chalk.” Johnson’s manic enthusiasm covered a truce that was inherently unstable. King’s oratory could not offset political drift against minority rioters any more than Johnson could maintain the Goldberg initiative as a peaceful approach to Vietnam. Since the President privately entertained faint hope for any Vietnam settlement short of defeat, he seized upon Goldberg as a fig leaf to cover the inescapable hard choice between full-scale war and withdrawal. King, like most leading war opponents then and later, shied from adopting forthright withdrawal as his recommended solution. It is highly doubtful, of course, that he could have preached nonviolence for Vietnam effectively to Johnson on this one chance, even had he known that he would complement informed misgivings shared secretly from George Ball and Richard Russell to the President himself.

  President Johnson spoke no more boldly for military force in Vietnam than King did against it. Part of him strongly resisted—even feared—the destructive psychology of war. He still worried that national wrath would steal the remaining energy of his Great Society, and he knew it was far easier to make new enemies than to transcend old ones. George Wallace among many others would rise ardently to cheer combat in Asia. For all Johnson’s personal discomfort with King, who to him was no congenial horse trader like Roy Wilkins, he was loath to break from the nonviolent phenomenon that King represented. Johnson’s presidential distress sprang from experience that inverted the conventional perspective on violence in politics. He needed military success ahead to govern, but already he knew better than to presume the triumph of superpower might even in obscure Vietnam. Looking back a decade, he appreciated more than anyone the marvel uniquely without arms that had broken the smug, snug world of his U.S. Senate under segregation. “Who of you could have predicted ten years ago,” he cried out to five hundred civil rights experts on the White House lawn, “that in this last, sweltering August week, thousands upon thousands of Negro men and women would suddenly take part in self-government? And that thousands more in the same week would strike out in an unparalleled act of violence in this nation?”

  THE HAYNEVILLE shootings made Saturday’s front pages nationwide, but nearly all its lasting effects started beneath public view. ESCRU director John B. Morris called the White House apologetically for help with dilemmas that made no sense to most outsiders. Funeral arrangements were stalled, but Lee White could not explain to himself or to President Johnson why local authorities and shippers furtively curtailed the very transactions they yearned for in order to rid Alabama of the controversial corpse. “What does he mean, they’re discouraging?” asked Johnson. “The train won’t carry it? Or the plane, or what?” White vouched for Morris as troubled but re
asonable, and could only guess the Alabama companies were nervous about publicity. Puzzled, and reminded of criticism over the dispatch of a government plane for the body of James Reeb, Johnson told White to let Morris persevere with commercial transport for Daniels to New Hampshire. Unlike the Reeb case, or June of 1964, when Johnson personally had maneuvered J. Edgar Hoover to lead the search for three civil rights workers who disappeared on the first day of Freedom Summer, there was no compelling mystery with national attention foregathered nor any historic legislation in the balance. The President denounced a crime of fleeting priority. In private, when he mentioned “Downs County” as a synonym for injustice, Katzenbach gently corrected his reference to Lowndes.

  Colonel Lingo asserted local control of the Hayneville investigation. He first told FBI agents that Tom Coleman was a special deputy sheriff whose actions deserved leeway for his duty under pressure to guard the public, and Sheriff Frank Ryals produced corroborating appointment records going back years. Then the Alabama authorities reversed themselves overnight, most likely on legal advice that any official status for Coleman opened avenues for federal prosecution by the Justice Department, as in the pending triple murder case from Mississippi, using statutes that made it a crime against the United States to deprive anyone of basic civil rights under color of law. Sheriff Ryals recontacted FBI agents with new information that Coleman’s identification badge was merely a gun permit. He said he had been aware of a potential false impression from its imprint—“The Bearer Is Appointed and Empowered as a Deputy Sheriff in and for Lowndes County”—and explained that only a lack of clerical help had delayed revision. Carleton Purdue, the county prosecutor, offered a confirming legal opinion that the commonly understood “intent” of the badges was to regulate private firearms.