At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  A controversy from the Panama Canal project lifted the Restriction League near victory in 1914, when dark-skinned West Indian diggers sought entry to the United States as an earned reward. “You cannot have free institutions grounded on anything in the world except a homogeneous race,” Mississippi Senator John Sharp Williams cried against them, but a comprehensive bill to admit only white people faltered in the mists of science. Williams himself abandoned the legislative term “Caucasian” once a perplexed Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, grandfather of the future U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, read from the dictionary on the Senate floor, complaining that it would exclude “very excellent” Finnish constituents assigned to “a branch of the Mongolian race” along with Magyars, Bulgarians, Permians, and Laplanders. Thereafter, Congress managed to restrict legal immigration with an ingenious series of laws culminating in the 1924 National Origins Act, which, according to historian Desmond King, finessed definitions of race by prescribing immigration quotas for individual foreign nations. Henceforth only three countries—England, Germany, and Ireland—were reserved fully 70 percent of the annual 150,000 immigration slots. The remaining quotas heavily favored what Woodrow Wilson had called “sturdy stocks of the north of Europe,” over Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Hungary, and eastward rim countries deemed problematic for assimilation. Black Africa received a quota of zero per year, and allotments for all the world’s non-European countries added up to 6 percent of the total. Dr. Harry Laughlin of the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory spent eleven years as chief legislative consultant to design and implement the quotas. “National eugenics is the long-term cure for human degeneracy,” he said. The Chicago Tribune pronounced the National Origins Act “a Declaration of Independence, not less significant and epoch-making for America and the world than the Declaration of 1776.”

  From 1924, the year J. Edgar Hoover became the first FBI director, immigration policy stayed fixed more than forty years before President Johnson sought to abolish the national quota system in 1965. The restrictive era began about the time the Ivy League heavyweight wrestling champion from Princeton, Charles Colcock Jones Carpenter, battled the professional champion Ed “Strangler” Lewis to a draw in a celebrated exhibition match at the New York Athletic Club. By 1938, when Carpenter was elected Episcopal Bishop of Alabama, the Depression and immigration quotas reduced the American school population by nearly two million children. After 1952, when the McCarran-Walter Act renewed the quota system with minor concessions to the Cold War (token ceilings of one hundred slots for previously excluded Asian and African countries), the national United Church of Christ acquired the dilapidated Old Midway Church property, where Carpenter’s great-grandfather C. C. Jones had preached alone among slaves before the Civil War. Church officials restored the site as a rustic retreat center called Dorchester, which Andrew Young rented for Martin Luther King to plan the decisive 1963 Birmingham campaign against segregation. In an abandoned mansion nearby on the Georgia coast, English professor Robert Manson Myers discovered a trunk of musty letters that once maintained communication among the scattered Jones family plantations. Published in 1972 as The Children of Pride, the collection would win a National Book Award for the intimate display of far-ranging literary sensibility from the antebellum South. Into the sweet-tempered letters of the patriarch Jones crept bitterness over the collapse of his historic mission to redeem slavery by faith. Denouncing abolitionists as “fanatics of the worst sort, setting at defiance all laws human and divine,” Jones hailed Jefferson Davis as the first North American President who “openly professed the orthodox faith of the Gospel,” and embraced the Confederate battle cause in his last public sermon.

  Like his storied ancestor, the modern Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter soured against events that overtook his lifelong view of progressive race relations. The Episcopal Diocese of Alabama had already named its Gothic stone headquarters in Birmingham permanently for him, but Jonathan Daniels among others had picketed Carpenter House as a “whited sepulchre” of false Christian teaching. Carpenter would be forgotten or forgiven as the principal author of a white clergymen’s manifesto against the freedom demonstrations in 1963, which made him the first-named addressee for King’s responding “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

  The fundamentals of race still were volatile. Equality held sway in public profession, but reputation or actual behavior could skitter for cover beneath popular notions of authority. The geneticists at Cold Spring Harbor regained immense prestige with the discovery of DNA in 1953. The word “Caucasian” still conveyed an air of neutral science. Race kept its childish role as a handy badge to organize conflict, and social scientists rushed into the public clamor for an explanation of Watts.

  THE IMMIGRATION Reform Act of 1965 further established the legal blueprint for a model democracy of citizens drawn from the entire world. Its transforming impact lay dormant, destined to accrue slowly on the far horizons of the twentieth century, and many who celebrated the principle were preoccupied with lingering hatreds very close at home. In Hayneville, an abbreviated trial for the August 20 killing of Jonathan Daniels ended on the morning Congress sent the finished immigration bill to the White House. Alabama Attorney General Richmond Flowers, “shocked and amazed” that a local grand jury indicted Tom Coleman only for manslaughter instead of murder, had assumed control of the prosecution himself, but he failed successively to upgrade the charges, shift the venue from Lowndes County, or postpone the trial until the state’s surviving vital witness, Richard Morrisroe, was released from the hospital. Death threats led Flowers to send an aide to court with a last flurry of motions. (“I was afraid,” he told reporters.) Judge Werth Thagard briskly denied the motions, reinstated the county prosecutors, and commenced trial all on the same day, before a confident crowd of Klansmen that included Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton, Alabama Grand Dragon Robert Creel, and the three Birmingham defendants due for retrial in the Viola Liuzzo case.

  The large national and international press corps scarcely had time to convey the flavor of the proceedings over a trunk of rented phone lines. Reporters noted the old triangular prisoners’ cage and the bailiff’s quaint method of raising a window to holler down to the yard for witnesses. Young Ruby Sales endured a scathing cross-examination about the nature of her association with the white victim—“a personal friend of yours?” Lifelong friends of Tom Coleman testified brazenly that Daniels had seemed to be carrying “something shiny” like a switchblade, and that the wounded Morrisroe had begged not only for water but had cried out, “Where’s my gun?” Most telling, according to case historian Charles Eagles the prosecutors incorporated fantastic defense suppositions into their own arguments. The Lowndes County solicitor doubted that a smelly seminarian deserved to be killed for “trying to force his way” into the Cash store, and his assistant suggested a lack of evidence “that Jonathan Daniels was making any attempt to actually cut him [Coleman] with that knife.” A defense lawyer in summation, citing chivalric custom that “a man has a right to defend himself and his lady,” praised Coleman to the jury as their neighbor and champion: “God give us such men! Men with great hearts, strong minds, pure souls, and ready hands! Tall men…”

  A verdict of acquittal on all charges required ninety-one minutes in deliberation, after which all twelve white men stepped impulsively from the jury box to shake Coleman’s hand, one reminding him that they could keep a dove hunting date without further worry. Reactions elsewhere ran toward disbelief and nausea. Commentator Eric Sevareid charged on that night’s CBS Evening News that Lowndes County “lives by quite different concepts from the justice that took a thousand years of suffering and martyrdom to establish.” Cartoonists lampooned Alabama’s Lady Justice variously as sleeping, weeping, stabbed in the back, and a Klansman in disguise. Columnist Max Friedman, who had blistered King as an “intruder” and “self-appointed apostle of peace” for his statements about Vietnam,* predicted that “this contemptible trial” would shame the nation enough to make sure “that e
qual justice shall never again be so easily mocked.” The Birmingham News referred to the trial as “an obscene caricature of justice,” quoting the National Council of Churches with rare notice and unprecedented approval. “All across the land have come reverberations of shock, even horror, over the outcome,” observed the Atlanta Constitution. Columnist William S. White confessed on October 4 that the Hayneville courtroom “has broken the heart of Dixie,” and raised a native son’s conflicted lamentation: “What is left, then, for Southerners who love the South and do not apologize for it and never will?”

  King had dispatched aides to shore up two of many hard-pressed movements outside Alabama. In Natchez, Mississippi, site of picturesque antebellum mansions along the famous Natchez Trace, Andrew Young found a powder-keg boycott sustained by nightly mass rallies since the August 27 bombing of George Metcalfe, yet besieged by an all-white detachment of 650 National Guard troops under orders to prevent demonstrations. Local people complained to an SCLC survey team of segregated conditions in blatant violation of civil rights laws, including primitive treatment at federally subsidized Jefferson Davis Hospital: “All Negro patients, irrespective of diagnosis, are packed into one isolated ward in the hospital basement.” After Governor Johnson replaced the Guard with Highway Patrol units, and another Negro church burned, long protest lines filed into downtown Natchez over the first weekend of October. Choosing arrest over orders to disperse, five hundred marchers steadily overflowed both the jail and city auditorium until authorities transferred those above twelve years of age to the notorious Parchman prison farm two hundred miles north in the Delta. Prisoners smuggled out word that guards were beating the known leaders, including SCLC’s Rev. Al Sampson, and that the 409 Natchez inmates were stripped, force-fed laxatives, and chilled by night fans. “Several people were unable to [bear] the intense cold,” wrote Phil Lapansky, a holdover SNCC volunteer from Seattle, “and broke down into intense fits of screaming and crying.”

  A seesaw crisis also made October 1 headlines from a tiny hamlet known as the home of the Confederate Vice President, Alexander Stephens: “Crawfordville, Ga., Again Denies Buses to Negro Students.” Since the school board abruptly had transferred all 165 local white students to schools in surrounding counties, in a unique rebuff to seventy-two freedom-of-choice applications, groups of the Negro applicants tried to board special buses along with the transfer students, only to be repulsed daily by police and Georgia state troopers. Nonviolent vigils supported the young applicants at the bus stops, led by one of the few schoolteachers who pioneered voter registration, Calvin Turner, and opposing crowds of Klansmen cheered the officers. “Kill him!” shouted Herman Jones, a KKK “security squad” lieutenant on October 4, as seventeen-year-old Frank Bates tried to dash around troopers into the bus. Georgia Grand Dragon Calvin Craig gathered waves of out-of-town followers, vowing to force Governor Carl Sanders to suppress the Negroes. SCLC’s Hosea Williams exhorted Sanders from the other side while encouraging protests with mixed success. A swim-in succeeded at Stephens State Park, but the town’s one restaurant became a private club rather than integrate, and an effort to use the white-only coin laundry merely earned twelve trips to jail.

  King himself, back from the planning workshops in Chicago, drove with Coretta a hundred miles east from Atlanta to Crawfordville. “The hardship of the rural South has made it virtually impossible for men and women such as yourselves to engage in the freedom struggle,” he told a night rally on October 11. Reviewing the local initiatives—lawsuits over the closed white school, failed petitions for federal registrars, the dismissal of Turner and five colleagues from the Negro school, the shutdown of an early-learning center in the new Head Start program “to kill even this limited opportunity”—King saluted the movement for perseverance. “So you were left with no choice but to demonstrate,” he concluded, “and we were left with no choice but to support you.”

  The next day, as SCLC’s Willie Bolden led two hundred marchers back from the courthouse to a church outside Crawfordville, Howard Sims and Cecil Myers broke from a crowd of Klan hecklers past restraints to pummel stragglers. Sims said their “Black Knights” splinter group favored “a little more action” than rival Klans, and papers from the Augusta, Georgia, Chronicle to the New York Times featured the graphic picture of Myers chasing down SCLC photographer Brig Cabe with a fist raised to strike. The attack made extra news because Sims and Myers were accused in the July 1964 night bushwhacking of Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel Penn on a highway near Athens, Georgia. A local jury had needed only eighty-one minutes to acquit them of murder, despite two confessions from Athens Klan Klavern 244, and the Justice Department was trying to convince the Supreme Court on a separate appeal that Sims and Myers at least should face lesser federal charges for willful violation of protected civil rights. (Hoping so, President Johnson privately opined that Penn had been targeted with two other visibly Negro officers on their drive home from U.S. Army Reserve summer duty: “I think a soldier in uniform ought to have something to do with it, doesn’t it?”)

  In Natchez, 1,200 movement supporters marched downtown on the night of October 6, shortly after a federal judge lifted curfews with an order upholding the right to peaceful protest. Grand Dragon E. L. McDaniel mobilized a counterdemonstration of paramilitary Klan units along the route, and his deputy roamed nearby streets in a sound truck that blared the local theme song, “Move Them Niggers North.” Face-offs primed for disaster brought a negotiated settlement within forty-eight hours, but overnight reaction to its most basic concession made city authorities renege. “Never,” Mayor John Nosser announced on October 9, could a deal go forward that would “ask city employees to address anyone as Mr., Mrs., or Miss.” The mayor’s statement, which quieted charges that white leaders had “knuckled under” to the NAACP on courtesy titles, renewed a standoff of marches, boycott, and cross burnings that lasted for weeks, with constant sparks of violence and grim pressure on everyone, including the mayor himself. Born in Lebanon, Nosser had two sons in the Klan. While the boycott of segregated businesses already had forced him to lay off nearly half the 147 employees at his four food stores, renegade Klan units also had bombed his home and two of his Jitney Jungles to underscore warnings against suspected compromise. The vise squeezed Nosser into a wishful escapism, and soon he would claim that Natchez could have prevented the entire racial crisis by offering a police escort at Negro funerals.

  Charles Evers mastered his own internecine strife from the day of the George Metcalfe bombing, when he arrived in Natchez to supersede the wounded NAACP leader with a declaration of war. “We’re armed, every last one of us!” he shouted at the emergency mass meeting. “And we are not going to take it!” By his startling audacity, Evers once again baited the fury of NAACP superiors in New York. Roy Wilkins had seethed against his maverick presumption since the 1963 funeral of Medgar Evers, when Charles took an unassailable public moment to inform Wilkins that he would assume his martyred brother’s job in Mississippi, notwithstanding the lack of an offer or his dubious qualification as a self-described Chicago bootlegger and petty criminal. Wilkins publicized his latest maneuvers to fire Evers in September, only to be checked when Evers invited King’s SCLC and other civil rights groups into Natchez with open hints that a hidebound NAACP might fail the challenge of a united movement. A month later, having consolidated a central position in the high-visibility boycott, Evers jettisoned the allied groups. On October 19, his aide privately demanded that King withdraw Rev. Al Sampson “and those individuals who are here with him,” charging that criticism of Evers by the SCLC team betrayed an “unwillingness to cooperate.” Evers himself disparaged the Natchez SNCC staff as “outside agitators.” On December 3, with Metcalfe still in the hospital, he alone would join a dyspeptic Mayor Nosser with news that commanded the front page of the New York Times: “Natchez Boycott Ends as Negroes Gain Objectives.” The thousand-word agreement called for a biracial commission, the opening of some city jobs to Negroes, integration of public
facilities including the library and hospital, and the required use of courtesy titles by city officials and signatory merchants alike, specifically banning the diminutives “boy,” “uncle,” “auntie,” “hoss”—“or any other offensive name.” Success made Charles Evers indispensable to Roy Wilkins.

  EVERS ECLIPSED a worn, fragmented Natchez SNCC project. A bomb meant for its first Freedom House had destroyed the building next door in August of 1964, after which local sentries posted themselves nightly at the few Negro homes that offered shelter. The acceptance of armed protection, except in avowedly nonviolent demonstrations, was a common adjustment of movement standards to Mississippi gun culture, but the Natchez project gained whispered notoriety when young staff members themselves stockpiled firearms in a shack bought with Freedom Summer donations. Sending notice to the powerful Klan units of Adams County, they deliberately left shotguns and rifles on display for white service workers who installed the telephone. Annie Pearl Avery, a strong-voiced former dishwasher and disciple of Fred Shuttlesworth, who had strained to keep herself nonviolent into jails from Albany to Danville, left Natchez for Alabama with a pistol strapped to the inside of her thigh.