At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  More important, FBI supervisors accepted the turnabout with transparent relief. By agreeing that Coleman did not function as a deputy—that he was “alone and acted independently”—they found no threshold basis to investigate a host of questions pertinent to federal laws, such as who arranged for the sudden release of the Hayneville prisoners and how Coleman came to be waiting with his shotgun. This preemptive judgment spared agents from sifting through a hostile courthouse, which in turn foreclosed federal indictment not only of Coleman but of any collaborators. Having eschewed jurisdiction, FBI officials resisted Justice Department requests to develop facts that might justify reconsideration. “In order to avoid any possibility of subsequent criticism,” their case record shows, they followed orders to pose the few questions Justice Department lawyers took the trouble to spell out for them in writing, but they did so narrowly, without follow-up or initiative, while advertising the Bureau’s distaste for the “somewhat nebulous” theory that Coleman may have acted in concert. FBI headquarters pointedly instructed Alabama agents to notify Lowndes County officials and each person interviewed that limited review “is being conducted at the specific request of Mr. John Doar, Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, U. S. Department of Justice.”

  SEPARATELY, CIVIL rights forces set off tremors in American law that rumbled far beyond Alabama race crimes. Charles Eagles, the biographer of Daniels, would discover nearly three decades later that Rev. John Morris sought help from his friend and fellow Episcopalian, Charles Morgan, Jr., who, since a conversion speech to fellow professionals about collective responsibility for the 1963 church bombing (“We all did it”), had been driven from his Birmingham law practice into ACLU work based in Atlanta. Rushing to Lowndes County, Morgan saw a legal opportunity in the very absence of hope for fair prosecution through the state courts, and within five days he conceived, researched, wrote, and filed a federal lawsuit to strike down the systematic monopoly of white males on Alabama juries. To salvage puckish humor in the face of numb sorrow and rampant fear, Morgan recruited as lead plaintiff one Gardenia White, granddaughter of Rosie Steele, donor of the Lowndes County campsite for the Selma march, and as lead defendant he picked the white jury commissioner Bruce Crook, thus contriving for clerks to name the landmark constitutional case White v. Crook. “The jury system stands behind the power to vote,” Morgan argued. “How easy is it to cast a ballot when you are afraid someone, from the sheriff on down, might shoot you and no one will do anything about it?”

  John Doar soon intervened for the United States on the side of Morgan’s clients, spearheading a successful petition that records be opened to document the blanket exclusion of Negroes from Lowndes County juries over the previous fifty years. However, the Justice Department pleadings made no mention of the lawsuit’s tandem attack on Alabama statutes that barred female jurors of all races. Theories of sex discrimination remained far-fetched to government lawyers as well as to the mainstream press (a front-page story in the August 20 New York Times wondered whether executives must let a “dizzy blonde” drive a tugboat or pitch for the Mets), and the breadth of adverse law magnified risk in Morgan’s litigation strategy. While only Mississippi and South Carolina matched Alabama’s total prohibition of women from trial juries and grand juries, the laws of thirty states from Massachusetts to Wyoming retained some form of jury restriction by sex. Hoyt v. Florida, the most recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in the field, upheld a state law excluding women jurors except those who petitioned a court individually for the chance to serve.

  To reinforce his novel case, Morgan brought in the more seasoned legal visionary Pauli Murray, who at fifty-four had just received the first Yale doctorate of law earned by a Negro woman. Murray had experienced formal rejection from the University of North Carolina on one score (“members of your race are not admitted to the University”), and from Harvard on the other (“you are not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School”). More recently in 1963, Murray had upbraided the grand champion of civil rights, A. Philip Randolph, for paradoxical blindness to the rights or contributions of women at his own March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In White v. Crook, Murray helped Morgan highlight the inconsistent legal status of Annie L. Price, presiding judge of the Alabama Court of Appeals. “She can reverse the verdict of a jury,” stated the brief. “She could resign and practice before a jury. But solely because she is a woman she is not eligible to serve on a jury.”

  POLITICAL EFFECTS, which also would reach the whole country, already churned from the Hayneville crime scene through a traumatized Lowndes County movement. Most of the teenagers had run terrified through woods and brambles halfway to Fort Deposit, and parents smuggled or shooed them out of the county ahead of the expected follow-up murders. Rumors whipped through white areas that Stokely Carmichael was collecting firearms for revenge, while Carmichael warned fearfully of massacre the first night. “Sheriff Clark has deputized over three hundred whites in the past few hours,” he told reporters in Selma. In the name of SNCC chairman John Lewis, the Alabama SNCC office issued a public statement that Hayneville survivors “have gone into hiding because they fear for their lives.” Panic crackled over one who disappeared somehow past their barricades of protection, and it receded only partly when Gloria Larry turned up safe, having slipped away to the Selma Freedom House desperate for a shower. Colleagues complained of her as a tag-along volunteer still oblivious to SNCC’s institutional memory and methods. Recognizing the Hayneville ambush as a “jailhouse giveaway plot,” like the one that had delivered Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner to Mississippi Klansmen, the young movement veterans recoiled from investigating authorities they considered not only hostile but likely conspirators. From SNCC lore about the murders of Herbert Lee and Louis Allen in Mississippi, after cooperating with the pioneer registration work of Bob Moses, they knew that witnesses who dared to tell the FBI about semiofficial crimes had been targeted and killed themselves. Huddled together, meaning to hide the key Hayneville witnesses from FBI agents as well as the Klan, they criticized Larry’s trusting autonomy even before learning that she called Rev. Frank Mathews from the Freedom House to tell him what happened to Daniels. They could scarcely imagine her reflex urge to confide at that moment in the white pastor of segregationist St. Paul’s.

  These tensions flew far from Alabama on Monday, August 23. Rabbi Harold Saperstein found sponsors for Joyce Bailey’s first airplane travel to New York, where she and others spent the night with members of the Temple Emanu-El congregation. Stokely Carmichael made the continuing journey to New Hampshire with Rev. Bruce Hanson of the National Council of Churches’ Commission on Religion and Race, whom he knew from the commission’s sponsorship of Mississippi Freedom Summer. At St. James Episcopal Church, past the casket that John Morris had managed to accompany by charter relay through storms from Montgomery, filed a line of more than a thousand family, childhood friends, seminarians, fellow pilgrims to Selma, and, reported the New York Times, “several Negroes who had known Mr. Daniels in the South.” Carmichael muttered calming asides on the summer chill of picturesque Keene, near Monadnock Mountain. “Bruce,” he said, “now I know why there aren’t more black people up here.” The Times already had published excerpts from one intense seminary essay by Daniels, and in place of the eulogy a professor read another that reflected on Selma as “raw material for living theology.”

  What undid his colleagues beyond mortality was close awareness of a personal gift in Daniels to bond against type, not only as a civil rights explorer but before that, they knew, as an effete Yankee who chose strangely to test himself at Virginia Military Institute. Isolated there in a martial culture that revered the memory of Stonewall Jackson, cadet Daniels had grown to deliver the valedictory address by election of his senior classmates, before an all-white 1961 VMI graduation audience that included Virginia’s “massive resistance” Governor J. Lindsay Almond. He saluted future generals and national leaders—“as well as some magnificent buffoons�
�—within their ranks. “I wish you new worlds and the vision to see them,” said Daniels. “I wish you the decency and the nobility of which you are capable.” Only four years later, a new world lingered around his gravesite at Monadnock View Cemetery—Ruby Sales, John Morris, Stokely Carmichael, Harold and Marcia Saperstein, Jimmy Rogers, Francis Walter, Willie Vaughn, Bruce Hanson, Joyce Bailey, Gloria Larry. They joined hands and sang “We Shall Overcome” in tears.

  Carmichael and Jimmy Rogers returned to Lowndes County at a turning point. Like Diane Nash in the Freedom Rides, Bob Moses in Mississippi, and King in Selma, they called on movement witnesses to rally at the site of the most crushing persecution. “We want to show the people that we are not afraid of Lowndes County,” Carmichael announced, “and that they can’t run us out.” Unlike Moses in 1964, however, they did not recruit legions of white volunteers. Moses, responding to virtually unnoticed repression of movement Negroes, had anguished over a Machiavellian calculation that the likely sacrifice of high-profile white students might provoke the federal government at last to intervene. Now, by contrast, whites were sacrificed already and hopes for national politics were jaded, while white volunteers still posed twin burdens as cultural novices and visible targets for violence. Daniels and Morrisroe had set examples of solidarity to the last extreme, refusing bail, and yet the wider public reaction gravitated to their abstract purity rather than the urgent plight of black Alabama. For Carmichael, as for Moses, leadership in cross-racial politics proved almost unbearable close to death. He seldom spoke of Daniels in public, and protectively came to remember that he had opposed whites in Lowndes as being too dangerous for them. “We ain’t going to resurrect Jon. We’re going to resurrect ourselves,” he told a mass meeting. “We’re going to tear this county up. We’re going to build it back until it’s a fit place for human beings.”

  Carmichael asked SNCC’s research director to search Alabama law for footholds that might allow the Lowndes County movement to stand on its own. At thirty-nine, Jack Minnis had come late to civil rights from a rawboned first career as a Louisiana insurance claims adjuster. In 1959, when Tulane University had expelled a fellow graduate student for bringing a Negro into the student lounge, he informed awkward protesters that university officials, while impervious to academic petition, might be sensitive about their application for a large Ford Foundation grant. By 1964, his specialized skill in finding hidden pressure points to attack segregation helped Minnis persuade James Forman to create a fledgling SNCC research department in an abandoned Atlanta cotton warehouse, stocked with Moody’s corporate manuals, a Who’s Who, and used sets of statute books for Southern states. In his 1965 weekly newsletter, Life with Lyndon in the Great Society, Minnis chronicled acid disillusionment with liberal democracy. “That Great Medicare Bill that Lyndon flew all the way to Missouri to sign is like a full garbage pail in the sun,” he wrote. “Nice and shiny on the outside, but teeming with maggots within.” He traced cross-management between companies that received contracts for Vietnam as well as the War on Poverty, and lampooned King, the “Great Philosopher of Non-violence, with his chum Bayard Rustin,” for his Watts trip “to do some hand-wringing and soul-searching and whatever else ‘leaders’ do in such situations.” Life with Lyndon combed the anemic record of job and school desegregation to prove “just how phony the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is,” and ridiculed the Voting Rights Act as another Johnsonian fraud. “And another thing,” hedged Minnis, to hint at wounds beneath a cynical veneer. “When we think of all the murders and bombings and beatings and hunger and deprivation during the past five years, we don’t give Lyndon any credit at all. It was the Negroes of the South who passed that bill.” He scoffed at Johnson’s ballyhooed promise* that Negro votes would become real in transforming numbers (“You can believe that if you want to. And you can believe that Lyndon believes it if you want to”), and wondered where a movement burned by misplaced faith “will then turn.”

  Minnis responded positively to Carmichael’s task ten days after the Daniels funeral. “Here’s what I’ve been able to glean from the Alabama Code,” he wrote. “Alabama Law says it is possible to bring into existence a totally new political party.” Ironically, the obscure provisions were holdovers from late Reconstruction, when white “redeemers” had fashioned laws to facilitate slates of local candidates by county. The statutes spelled out exactly how, where, and when in the election cycle a new organization must meet to organize, Minnis reported, adding that its official symbols “could not resemble, in any way” existing ones such as the emblem (a white rooster) or motto (“White Supremacy for the Right”) of the Alabama Democratic Party. “IT IS ABSOLUTELY VITAL” that every participant have valid proof of registration, he stressed, warning that many technical faults would allow a judge to invalidate the entire effort. If the rules were followed scrupulously, however, and if any member won its nomination for county office with at least 20 percent of the total vote in the previous general election, Minnis discerned that the new group “would become a political party, in Lowndes County,” local but protected under state law, independent of the courthouse Democrats. “As you can appreciate, Stokely, there’s a bit more to it,” he wrote. “There are provisions [for] appointment of poll watchers, vote counters, election clerks, etc., that will have to be thoroughly understood by the people.” Excited, Minnis closed his long letter with a promise to bring law books for the next SNCC staff meeting in Alabama.

  THE HAYNEVILLE shootings brushed fault lines that ran deep beneath faith and culture, touching the fundamentals of modern knowledge. By coincidence, Klan Klonsel Matt Murphy died in a highway accident a few hours before Gloria Larry called St. Paul’s in Selma, and Rev. Francis Walter happened to be making a courtesy visit at the rector’s study when Rev. Frank Mathews received her news about Daniels. The two badly shaken priests masked polar anxieties by sharing liturgical words of peace from the Book of Common Prayer. Walter, apprehensive even beforehand about whether to take the place of the seminarian he met in the Hayneville jail, asked for a memorial service at St. Paul’s, which Mathews awkwardly refused on the ground that it would degenerate into “another civil rights demonstration.” When an Episcopal priest did preach the funeral for Matt Murphy two days later, at a service dotted with solemn Klan insignia, conflict at the root of church practice again reached Bishop Carpenter of Alabama, the senior Episcopal bishop in the United States. Carpenter defended the local prerogative of both priests. He had long straddled a line between procedure and doctrine—denouncing the Selma marches as meddlesome while endorsing integration as a Christian goal. Rev. John Morris of ESCRU reproached him as one of the leading “chaplains to the dying order of the Confederacy.” Yet Carpenter also suffered Klan threats for his statements of brotherhood, and Bishop Will Scarlett of Maine hopefully reminded his friend “that the sight of the great Bishop of Alabama ridden out of his State on a rail…would be one of the greatest events of many years. I still think so: I think you have an opportunity of a hundred years.”

  A dozen years earlier, Bishop Carpenter had helped the aspiring priest Francis Walter secure scholarship money to attend seminary in Sewanee, Tennessee, where a crisis simmered over the all-white student body. Carpenter knew Walter’s mother as a prominent Alabama Episcopalian with a rebellious streak, who had dropped out of MIT to compete in a women’s boat racing league. One day in the late 1940s, she came upon a solitary “costumed” Negro in the church vestibule and would not rest until, against fervent counsel, she paid a social call and returned home satisfied that the rector’s garb and library were genuine, amazed that neighboring Negro Episcopalians had existed all her life in Mobile. She repeated as epiphany the wife’s gracious first words at the rectory door: “May I rest your coat?”

  In 1957, her son Francis Walter had secured Bishop Carpenter’s permission to serve the missionary Negro parish of Good Shepherd, but family objections centered on the anticipated details of his new wife’s social duties at church functions, perhaps alone amon
g Negroes, and Walter painfully withdrew under veiled hints that a distant relative would pull investments ruinously from his father’s business. Carpenter, accustomed to such padded turmoil since the Brown decision, reassigned Walter quietly to a white Eufaula parish with instructions not to mention civil rights. They came to differ over what compliance meant when anxious parishioners asked how to treat a hypothetical Negro worshipper, and Walter relocated to New Jersey in 1961.

  By August of 1965, Walter felt compelled to come home to Alabama at the risk of succeeding Jonathan Daniels. He knew Bishop Carpenter had turned hard against the civil rights movement in the intervening four years of upheaval and recrimination, which were transforming the nation in echoes of the Civil War exactly a century before. Carpenter sanctioned not only the refusal of a Daniels memorial service but also orders to lock St. Paul’s and have Wilson Baker arrest anyone with civil rights contacts who approached a worship service. Rector Frank Mathews thanked Carpenter for heading off “spiteful retaliation” by Francis Walter and John Morris, saying they would have used the aura of St. Paul’s to praise Daniels as a martyr. “If I antagonize them they’ll get vicious,” Mathews confided in a sardonic repost, “and then I may have to call on Tom Coleman to get them off my back…. Keep the Maalox flowing.”