Bishop Carpenter denied Francis Walter even pro forma recognition as unpaid, unattached clergy, like a retiree, so long as ESCRU and the National Council of Churches sponsored his continuation of the Daniels interracial ministry. “I am not able to grant your request to license you to officiate as a Priest of the Church in the Diocese,” he wrote after a dismissive audience. This meant Walter could not preach or otherwise hold himself to be an Episcopal priest anywhere in Alabama, including churches of other denominations, on pain of being defrocked under canon law. When Walter appealed to Carpenter’s kindly heir for mediation, Bishop Coadjutor George Murray instead closed ranks against his proposed mission as a “direct insult” to all who labored “under proper authorization from their churches.” Shifting ground from Christian conscience to the chain of command, he said Walter was not qualified for the task. “One of the heartbreaking things about the kind of undertaking in which you are engaged is that you may well be killed,” Murray added, “and the killer will simply feel that he is removing an offending object.”
Subsequently, as Walter persisted on his own, both bishops hounded him directly and indirectly to the point of opposing his pending application for parenthood by adoption. They argued that an integrationist couple in Alabama was inherently unstable and bereft of friends, therefore unfit to raise even a white child. Legions of contending psychologists and lawyers would build a massive government file before the Walters adopted a girl four years later.
FROM LOS Angeles, King made his way to Montreat, North Carolina, near the home of Billy Graham. His anticipated address there to a church retreat had become newsworthy since the 105th General Assembly of the Southern Presbyterian Church in April, when delegates had debated and voted down a motion to rescind the invitation to him as “unwise under the present circumstances.” Running behind as usual, King traded places with another Negro speaker scheduled later on the program, and spoke formally. “The ultimate logic of racism is genocide,” he said, “and every Christian must take a stand against it.” Preoccupied, King made plans from the road to reevaluate “our whole programmatic thrust” in light of widespread reports that Negroes were turning violent since Watts. “If you don’t go North, we’re damned,” he told Stanley Levison, “but if you do go, we’ve got some problems.” FBI wiretappers soon overheard Levison say goodbye to his son for the last weekend of August. “Martin called a quick meeting,” he said.
On Wednesday, August 25, the House of Representatives passed the immigration reform bill by a vote of 318–95, with nays concentrated among subdued Southern members. President Johnson teased Attorney General Katzenbach about whether “you’ll ever get that damned immigration bill past the Senate, if you’ll ever get Teddy Kennedy to catch up with old man Celler. Here he is seventy years old, and he’s already got his bill passed.” Exhorting Katzenbach to help the Senate manager match the legislative performance of Judiciary Chairman Emanuel Celler, the President envisioned a wildly grand ceremony to repeal the national quota system among children of immigrants. “And we’ll bring Edgar Hoover to scare everybody” like a Halloween mask, he said with a zany chuckle, “and then we’ll go up there to Ellis Island with old Manny and get a picture in the paper with him and salute him and click our heels. Does that suit you?”
King’s gathering convened Thursday in Atlanta. Northern advisers, including Bayard Rustin, Norman Hill of CORE, and Don Slaiman of the AFL-CIO, caucused separately from the staff for rambling debates on the movement at a crossroads. Most of them emphasized the disadvantages of a move north. They presumed an adverse shift in press coverage once demonstrations hit the home cities of newspapers that crusaded for integration in the South. Levison predicted a decline in fund-raising. Rustin strongly recommended that King not abandon Southern black churches as the proven recruiting base for nonviolence. SCLC should work to consolidate freedoms just beginning to be won under the landmark civil rights laws, he argued, and on Friday harsh news from Natchez, Mississippi, underscored the primitive obstacles still faced by traditional movements. A bomb exploded when the local NAACP chapter president George Metcalfe turned his car key at the end of a work shift in the Armstrong tire plant. Through the previous year of terror across southwest Mississippi, Klansmen had abducted and whipped four of Metcalfe’s co-workers, killing Clifton Walker with a shotgun, and they also bombed the popular, arch-segregationist mayor John Nosser, either as a Jew or because he once suggested that Natchez might have to consider the NAACP’s mildest demands. Governor Paul Johnson sent the elite Cattle Theft Division of the Mississippi Highway Patrol to investigate the attacks on Nosser. Metcalfe survived with mangled legs and a damaged eye.
King sent staff members to support the Natchez movement. Hosea Williams pushed at the weekend retreat to help across the South with a revamped SCOPE project, conceding that delay in passing the Voting Rights Act had truncated his summer work. Williams was on his best behavior—even praising rival Alabama SNCC workers for superior efforts to develop basic electoral skills among the people—but he could not overcome raw allegations that circulated privately within King’s inner circle. “In my candid opinion,” wrote SCLC staff director Randolph Blackwell, “the project has degenerated in the main to an experiment in liquor and sex, compounded by criminal conduct, no less than a series of reported rapes.”
Drawbacks plagued every option, including the Northern cities King had toured since Selma. He originally preferred familiar Boston, but backed off because he found its Negroes too divided and whites too insulated by patriotic heritage. New York meant subterranean jousts with the master, Adam Clayton Powell, who whispered mischievously that he might fire Wyatt Walker, his assistant minister at Abyssinian Baptist, to sting King a little for thinking he could ever help Harlem. Andrew Young once favored Rochester because of its manageable size and Kodak funding, but decided that a city that lacked a good movement choir must be too small to make an impression. King’s Los Angeles base was too middle-class, the city too freighted by colliding images of Hollywood and Watts. Bevel offered at a mass meeting to spare California the expense of its McCone Commission to investigate the Watts riots, with the simple observation that a majority of L.A. Negroes were migrants from Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, unschooled and untrained, dismayed to find conditions too much like home.
King cast his decisive vote for going north. “In the South, we always had segregationists to help make the issues clear,” he said. “This ghetto Negro has been invisible so long and has become visible through violence.” Unless the movement could establish that the race issue was national—not a deviation peculiar to the Bull Connor stereotype—the promise of nonviolence inevitably would shrivel. King chose Chicago for the music of Mahalia Jackson, the transplanted heartland of Mississippi, and in part because the Al Raby coalition pushed hardest for his help. Among many dissenters, Bevel objected that the Chicago movement lacked strategy beyond the primitive goal of ousting School Superintendent Willis. “In Selma, we didn’t organize to get rid of Jim Clark,” he said. “We organized for the right to vote.” Its Negroes needed to “pick up their souls” to define a movement that could engage the country, he said, and by the end of the meetings on Saturday King assigned Bevel to lead a preliminary staff of twelve to help Chicago do just that.
On Sunday, August 29, King surfaced into the white lights of national television on CBS’s Face the Nation. The first reporter asked if he worried about charges that his Vietnam “peace initiative” would encourage the enemy, the second why he had not yet sent his letter to Ho Chi Minh, the third whether he intended to undertake negotiations in violation of the Logan Act. A series of Vietnam questions gave way indirectly to Watts. “Have you read the Moynihan Report, so-called?” asked Rowland Evans. King replied that he had read newspaper accounts but not the report itself, which he understood was still confidential. Evans asked, in light of Moynihan’s sensitive findings on the illegitimate birth rate among Negroes, whether King favored a new government birth control program. Another repor
ter asked if such programs should be “addressed specifically to the Negro segment of the population,” which led to a series of questions about what city King thought had “the greatest potential to erupt in the manner that Los Angeles has just done.” He managed to endorse Johnson’s Howard University speech before inquiry shifted to signals of violence beyond Watts, specifically a report from Natchez “the other night where it is alleged that Negroes at a rally shouted ‘Kill for Freedom.’” King defended nonviolence. The program closed with “one quick question” on politics: “Do you favor a separate Negro party in the South now that Negroes are registered to vote?”
Public schools opened across the South on Monday, August 30. The U.S. Office of Education announced that nearly two-thirds of the school districts had submitted satisfactory desegregation plans, many admitting Negro students for the first time, and that the extensive breach of segregation was more significant than the small numbers of pioneer students. Nine Negroes safely entered formerly white schools in Philadelphia, Mississippi, near the jail from which Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had been lynched in 1964. Peggy Williams, the first Negro admitted to the Gainsboro, Tennessee, elementary school, was elected president of her eighth-grade home room by thirty white classmates. In Atlanta, three Abernathy children joined Yolanda King, nine, and Martin III, seven, to integrate Spring Street School under a “freedom of choice” plan. “Several parents welcomed us and said how happy they were to see us,” said Coretta King.
King missed the family drama. Arthur Goldberg had invited him to the United Nations for the promised meeting on Vietnam diplomacy, which fell through. Minor news reached him that four former SCOPE volunteers had been arrested for stealing SCLC’s office safe during the Birmingham convention earlier in August, and he learned in New York also on Tuesday that Adam Clayton Powell fired Wyatt Walker, “effective as of this day,” sending King a saucy note: “Martin—for your info—Sincerest regards, Adam.” In Hayneville, the first four Negro students arrived at the county high school. Hulda Coleman had asked them to stay home Monday so that last-minute security concerns could be resolved. Forty special deputies, a flock of reporters, and assorted adults watched John Hulett’s tenth-grade son nervously shine his black shoes with a handkerchief before he went inside. “No one spoke to me the whole day,” he said with relief that afternoon. “Some of the white children in the lower grades at Hayneville School wore no shoes at all,” reported the New York Times.
CHAPTER 22
Fragile Alliance
September 1965
KING prepared diligently to see Ambassador Goldberg at the United Nations on Friday, September 10. His advisers boasted that their New York–based research committee functioned smoothly at last to compile material about Vietnam policy for an important discussion they knew was initiated by President Johnson. Bayard Rustin prepared reports based on sources as diverse as the Buddhist exile Thich Nhat Hanh and the French military scholar Bernard Fall. To broaden perspective, Andrew Young arranged for briefings from foreign reporters who had covered both Vietnam and the American civil rights movement—Sven Oste, a Swede, and the Italian correspondent Furio Colombo. Young also secured research papers from King’s neighbor and friend Vincent Harding, a Spelman College professor who had become a Mennonite peace pastor since being drafted into the Korean War. Background themes in Vietnamese history were familiar to King from his absorption with anti-colonial movements in Africa. French rule in Asia, like segregation in America, dated to the late nineteenth century. It made a lasting impression on King that “native” freedom struggles developed similar messages through common sufferings on three continents, and he found an American thread worth sketching to Goldberg.
As a teenage student in 1908, the year of Lyndon Johnson’s birth, a Vietnamese of destiny volunteered to translate into French for peasants protesting the colonial corvée, or conscription to forced labor, only to be beaten when militia charged the protest with truncheons. He was expelled from his Mandarin academy at the old imperial capital of Hue, then tracked for subversion by the French intelligence service. He fled Vietnam for thirty years, first stowing away on freighters to foreign ports, gaining fluency in seven languages while surviving variously as a cook’s helper at the Parker House Hotel in Boston, houseboy in Brooklyn, and assistant pastry chef in Paris. In 1919, under the pseudonym Nguyen Ai Quoc (“Nguyen the Patriot”), the fugitive rented a proper suit and bowler hat to deliver a petition to the assembled peacemakers after World War I on behalf of the Vietnamese people. Though he invoked the right national self-determination from Woodrow Wilson’s world-famous Fourteen Points, Nguyen Ai Quoc stopped short of demanding Vietnamese independence and sought merely protection for traditional democratic freedoms such as assembly and speech, plus an end to the despised monopoly sales of alcohol and opium. He received neither satisfaction, reply, nor bare acknowledgment from the Great Powers, but did attract renewed notice from police agents who chased him from France into nomadic years between revolutionary agitation and jail, supported intermittently by the anti-colonial bureaus of the Communist International. Nguyen Ai Quoc’s ex-wife was among hundreds executed in a disastrously premature uprising in 1940, when the Japanese invaders swiftly subdued the ruling French. (“Imagine,” a Vietnamese peasant later recalled. “France became a colony just like us!”) From caves along Vietnam’s border with China, Nguyen Ai Quoc built the Vietminh independence party and a small guerrilla army that harassed Japanese occupation forces so effectively as to gain the respectful wartime cooperation of American OSS officers working behind the lines. On the capitulation of Japan after the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Quoc entered the capital of Hanoi for the first time in his life, under yet another new name, Ho Chi Minh (“He Who Enlightens”), to proclaim independence on the American model.
It was this historical moment that King emphasized to Goldberg twenty years later. Huge crowds had gathered outside the governor’s residence and Hanoi’s colonial security garrison on August 19, 1945, ten days after Nagasaki. They carried motives for vengeance far beyond civilian casualties from guns of the occupying armies, as Japanese commanders and Vichy French administrators had requisitioned so much scarce rice, and forced rice farmers to grow so much jute for war matériel, that some 1.5 million Vietnamese had died of starvation within the previous six months in the northern provinces alone—fully 10 percent of the population—with terrible famine of less mortality in the south. The foreign authorities, for their part, still commanded troops and heavy weapons but suffered confusion about the import of the surrender news from distant Tokyo. In the tense standoff, Vietminh leaders persuaded the massed units of both foreign countries to stack arms and withdraw under promise of safety. New Vietminh flags went up. Crowds repeated the transfer of public symbols, buildings, and meager utilities across the country in ten days of nearly bloodless revolution before Ho Chi Minh invited the American OSS commander, Major Archimedes “Al” Patti, to dinner for a last review of his public proclamation. “All men are created equal,” Ho began the next day, September 2, speaking in Vietnamese from a wooden platform above a sea of banners, faces, lanterns, and flags. “The Creator has given us certain inviolable Rights.” He explained that “these immortal words” came from the American Declaration of 1776, then transposed its bill of grievance against British tyranny to indict the French colonial record. “They have built more prisons than schools,” he said. “They have mercilessly slain our patriots. They have…fleeced us to the marrow of our bones, reduced our people to darkest misery, and devastated our land.” At one point, Ho looked up from his text. “Do you hear me distinctly, fellow countrymen?” he asked, and voices from Ba Dinh Square—some said a million, others 400,000, with like numbers listening by radio hookups in Saigon and elsewhere—cried yes in unison. “For these reasons,” Ho concluded, “we…solemnly declare to the world that Viet Nam has the right to be a free and independent country, and in fact it is so already.”
King summarized the American thre
ad of Vietnamese history with commanding detail. His advisers present—Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young, Bernard Lee, and Harry Wachtel—noted with approval that much of the information seemed new to Goldberg, who broke unaccustomed silence to ask questions. King did not argue, as did some of the former OSS officers recorded in World War II files, that Ho Chi Minh was a Jeffersonian at heart rather than a Communist. He tried to convince Goldberg that Ho was above all a nationalist—potentially a maverick Communist like Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, amenable to pragmatic reform. Ho had appealed to Wilson’s Fourteen Points, FDR’s Atlantic Charter, and to America’s long anti-colonial heritage because he needed a balance of allies to survive the harsh geopolitics of Asia. China had subjugated Vietnam for a millennium, and Joseph Stalin, Ho’s Soviet Communist sponsor, did not bother even to recognize his 1945 government for more than four years. Chinese generals, who marched armies into Vietnam ostensibly to process the Japanese surrender, plundered the feeble new country at leisure—Ho called them “locusts”—and characteristically ordered every clock in Vietnam set back to reflect the hour in Beijing.
Most urgently, Ho Chi Minh had wanted American support to forestall postwar reimposition of colonial rule. In the independence speech of September 2, 1945, he vowed that his people would rise above fear, weakness, and ingrained subservience to former masters: “If the French should invade our country once more, we swear that we will neither serve in their army, work for them, sell them food, nor act as guides for them!” British forces entered southern Vietnam only ten days later, bolstering and rearming French holdovers to assert European control. President Charles de Gaulle, stung that rival allies once again were redressing his nation’s military weakness, curtly hastened the expedition of General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc: “Your mission is to reestablish French sovereignty in Hanoi, and I am astonished that you have not yet done so.” For more than a year, Ho Chi Minh negotiated defensively for compromise status within the French Union, vainly seeking an agreement that would promise or even mention independence. (“If I listened to such nonsense,” de Gaulle cabled Leclerc, “soon France would have no more empire.”) Leclerc’s successor, General Jean-Etienne Valluy, shelled the port city of Haiphong on the morning of November 23, 1946, causing “no more” than six thousand Vietnamese deaths by the count of a French admiral who went ashore, and the year-old Vietnamese government soon retreated again to jungle caves.
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