At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  For project director Dorie Ladner, the guns closed off one line of SNCC’s competitive distinction from Charles Evers, and compounded divisions that already plagued the interracial cadres thrown together in Mississippi. Bill Ware, a black Mississippian educated in Minnesota, advocated clarifying pan-African doctrines he had encountered in Ghana as a Peace Corps volunteer. Mary King, a white minister’s daughter from Virginia, escaped Natchez jointly with Dennis Sweeney into a short-lived marriage in California. Sweeney, a charismatic aspiring political theorist from Stanford, for two years had chosen to test a “naked affirmation of democracy” in the most violently persecuted projects of Natchez and McComb, which freighted him with a brooding edge. Brooding herself, Mary King joined Sandra (Casey) Hayden to circulate that November an influential manifesto aimed in part to heal one rift festering inside the civil rights movement—between its black and white women—with a solidarity based in gender. “There seem to be many parallels that can be drawn between treatment of Negroes and treatment of women in our society,” they wrote, proposing to analyze a “caste system” they found pervasive and personal because the sexes, unlike the races, could not find practical respite in isolated communities. “Women can’t withdraw from the situation (a la nationalism),” they observed, but the Natchez staff of fifteen dwindled away in separate colors. By October, three of them—Bill Ware, Janet Jemmott of Chicago, and George Greene of Greenwood—migrated to Lowndes County in Alabama.

  In the absence of Silas Norman, now conscripted into the Army, the Alabama SNCC staff gathered to confront emergencies such as a cutoff notice for the utility bill of $11.66 at one Freedom House. Martha Prescod, badgering the Atlanta SNCC headquarters for support funds, received mostly evasive requests for cutbacks. Direst scarcity mandated Stokely Carmichael’s rule that no county project could spend more than $40 per month, restricted to gasoline, leaflets, and rent. The two stick-shift Plymouths for drop-off and rescue were reserved for Carmichael and George Greene, who enjoyed an admiring debate over their relative skills as chase drivers. Scott B. Smith worked Barbour County mostly alone. Cleophus Hobbs and Annie Pearl Avery covered Hale County on foot. Donald Hughes and Cynthia Washington divided Wilcox. Jimmy Rogers elicited a pledge that fellow fieldworkers, resolving never to pay for food, should canvas long and well enough to gain donated meals at farmhouses.

  Throughout the Black Belt, fear since the Jonathan Daniels murder and Coleman trial had dropped the pace of voter registration to a third of the early rush to federal registrars, but cumulative totals for Negroes began to approach white registration: 1,328 to 1,900 in Lowndes. As pressures rose, including threats of eviction against potential voters, SNCC workers joined other civil rights groups on October 9 at the Tuskegee Boy Scout camp to exchange organizing ideas for subsistence, such as food cooperatives and primitive health clinics. Alabama investigators patrolled the camp to take file photographs, refusing to leave. Preachers from Mobile brought a troubled boy disowned by his family for taking part in the movement, and the delicate task of arranging foster care for reenrollment in a school somewhere fell to Rev. Francis Walter, who succeeded Daniels in an ecumenical ministry* sponsored by church groups and the Synagogue Council of America. SCLC representatives, including Albert Turner and Harold Middlebrook, reached agreement with the SNCC project directors to reinforce each other’s registration drives in key counties. They mobilized together a trial run for Negroes to vote first in a low-stakes November election of farm councils, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. After lengthy exploration, however, SCLC staff members were undecided about SNCC’s proposal to form separate political parties by county.

  A lone SCLC emissary turned up to report on October 18 that King’s staff in Atlanta found the idea of independent parties legally and politically troublesome, requiring an enormous diversion of energy. Gloria Larry was among observers who heard the SNCC staff members resolve to go forward by themselves. Since the Daniels funeral, she had tried to resume her graduate studies at Berkeley, but soon withdrew with apologies to the department chair for a persistent emptiness toward literature, and made her way back to Selma by bus. Only the day before, Larry had slipped again into St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, which precipitated a hushed suspension of worship. An usher had appeared in the painful silence, taking messages quietly back and forth about a woman member’s wish not to have a Negro seated in the same pew, then stood exasperated behind Larry to notify the congregation: “She won’t move.” The three sudden words jolted Larry up and out of the sanctuary. She yearned to join the SNCC staff, but movement friends wondered why Larry still hazarded white churches at all. Almost penniless, she scrounged to the point of coveting the irregular $10 staff stipend, but she found herself slightly apart from a SNCC ethos she called “relational.” Young black veterans were turning inward. Emotional exposure at St. Paul’s no longer made sense to them, any more than SCLC’s worry that independent county parties would alienate the national Democrats.

  No movement worker attended the retrial of Klansman Collie Wilkins for murdering Viola Liuzzo, and the only Negro at the Lowndes County courthouse stayed just long enough to testify on October 20 about surviving the night ambush while helping Liuzzo ferry marchers out of Montgomery. “Leroy,” a lawyer called out wryly to Leroy Moton on cross-examination, “was it part of your duties as transportation officer to make love to Mrs. Liuzzo?” Judge Thagard blocked the gratuitous suggestion by defense counsel Arthur Hanes, who had replaced Klan Klonsel Matt Murphy after serving as a pallbearer at his funeral. A hard-line former mayor of Birmingham, who had closed city parks rather than integrate, and refused audiences with Negroes (“I’m not going to meet with ’em,” he told the press late in 1961. “I’m not a summertime soldier, I don’t give up when the enemy shows up”), Hanes nevertheless was known as a gentleman segregationist of sober deportment befitting a former FBI agent. He presented the case to the jury as a “Parable of the Two Goats,” describing his accused client as a Scape Goat for the nation’s sins, and the state’s chief witness, FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe, as the Judas Goat who had betrayed his Klan oaths and Southern heritage to a revamped empire of pagan Romans in Washington. “Maybe the murderer is from the Watts area of Los Angeles,” Hanes proposed. For the prosecution, Richmond Flowers offered a folksy, derisive rebuttal that the unsupported defense theory—of murder committed by Liuzzo’s own civil rights friends—required jurors to believe that phantoms had borrowed, used, and returned a murder weapon owned by the Birmingham Klansmen. “It is absolutely undisputed that this is the gun that killed that woman,” he declared, holding the pistol. In a fiery summation on the honor of his Confederate grandfather, and on the dangers of corrupting fact with hatred, Flowers ripped from Black’s Law Dictionary the page that defined “true verdict,” shredding it before the jurors. “If you do not convict this man,” he argued, “you might as well lock up the courthouse, open up the jail, and throw away the keys!” Tempering any hope that his skill or prestige as attorney general might seal victory in the case, which had split 10–2 for conviction in May, Flowers posted a well-known marksman conspicuously in the Hayneville courtroom to cover his back. The jury took ninety-five minutes to acquit the indicted triggerman of all charges on Friday, October 22. By Monday, national reaction spurred the Justice Department to announce formal support for the ACLU lawsuit against all-white juries in Alabama, and President Johnson received strategy memos on the intractable “chamber of horrors” in racial crimes: an “unbroken chain” of jury verdicts that were unanimous and binding, yet perceived almost everywhere to be grossly unjust.

  KING WAS in Europe for a brief speaking tour. He addressed the Free University in Amsterdam, visited the expatriate blues pianist Memphis Slim as well as Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, and was treated with Coretta at the Haynes soul food restaurant in the Montmartre district of Paris. Learning there of the Hayneville verdict, he canceled his British engagements to rush home for protests. The alternative, he told French rep
orters, was to accept “the beginning of vigilante justice” that could nullify the civil rights laws. New “OPEN SEASON” bumper stickers already proclaimed that integrationists could be killed with impunity in Alabama, and advance news of his return prompted a detailed threat relayed from Lowndes County to the FBI, that attackers waited to kill King “and anyone who is there to protect him.”

  Andrew Young told Stanley Levison that it was hard to cut short the visit to Europe, where people lined the streets and pressed King for autographs. On his last day, King preached to an interfaith service that overflowed the American Church of Paris, then addressed the topic “The Church in a World in Revolution” before a packed audience of five thousand in the Maison de la Mutualité auditorium, with an estimated ten thousand more listening to loudspeakers outside. Both crowds responded fervently to King’s discussion of international crises, such as the holdover colonial secession in Northern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which proved to Young that King did have an audience to speak on Vietnam. An ecumenical spirit waxed through Europe partly because the fourth and last annual plenary of the twentieth century’s only Vatican Council was gathered from around the world, with civil rights clergy active in the final struggles to reform Christian doctrines on Judaism.

  Unremitting intrigue seeped from the walls of Rome even after a committee of cardinals approved another draft of the Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”) declaration on October 15. Rumors predicted that its statement on Jews would be modified or postponed again. Critics took heart from the hesitancy of Pope Paul VI to implement the mandate of his predecessor, John XXIII, for penitent recognition that two millennia of Christian teaching had contributed to the Nazi Holocaust. At a critical moment, the Pope himself had repeated a liturgical broadside about crimes against Jesus by “the Jewish people,” who “not only did not recognize Him, but fought Him, slandered and injured Him, and, in the end, killed Him.” Reportedly at the Pope’s behest, Vatican deputies removed from Nostra Aetate a clause that explicitly revoked church portrayals of Jews as a “deicide people” cursed by God. An observer of the warring caucuses wrote that key cardinals “realized fairly late that there were some Catholics, more pious than instructed, whose contempt for Jews was inseparable from their love for Christ.” Against them, American cardinals led unsuccessful fights to restore the exculpation clause as the purest antidote to poison within the church. Others objected that the very word “deicide” raised thorny heresies from yesteryear about the dual nature of Jesus, and whether God could be killed; some warned that any positive statement about Judaism risked riots against Christians in Muslim countries. Meanwhile, Rabbi Abraham Heschel had dared to plead secretly in person with Paul VI against a separate new clause seeking final reconciliation with Jews by their mass conversion to Catholicism, saying he would rather “die at Auschwitz” and that what he understood of Christian grace should not countenance a prayer for him to annihilate his faith. Last-minute scandalmongers charged that Vatican reformers were paid agents of a Jewish conspiracy, and a pamphlet proudly claimed that “Christ and the Apostles John and Paul were the first anti-Semites.”

  On October 28, porters lifted the papal sedan through a sea of spectators into the Basilica of St. Peter, which was decked in full sacred pomp of bishops with miters in long ranks of white and scarlet robes. Votes against Nostra Aetate collapsed from the roiling dissent on both sides, leaving an advisory show of consensus—2,221–88—and Paul VI officially promulgated the epochal new teaching on “Non-Christian Relations.” In place of “deicide repeal,” proponents of reform accepted the qualified statement that treatment of Jesus by Temple authorities “cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today,” along with an edict that “the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews…decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.” The declaration commended Paul’s scriptural advice to the earliest generation of Jewish and Christian rivals: “So do not become proud, but stand in awe.”

  Most significantly, Nostra Aetate discarded the substitute clause that prescribed ultimate peace only by the conversion of Jews to triumphant Catholicism. In its place, the final version looked to an age when “all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and ‘serve him shoulder to shoulder.’” The three small words—“shoulder to shoulder”—conveyed a breakthrough image of separate identity and common stature. There was equal footing, with no hint of dominant authority. For the Roman Church, which remained vertical in every respect—claiming one truth and superior faith sustained by its steadfastly monarchical organization—a horizontal bond with Jews was revolutionary. It suggested new church governance and belief, comparable in religion to the political shift from a vertical world of rulers and subjects toward horizontal experiments in structured self-government. It introduced a hint of democracy to religion built on hierarchy. In the single month of October, the United States opened citizenship to legal immigrants from the whole world, and the Vatican opened fraternal faith to the remnant people of Jesus.

  Among many others, President Morris Abram of the American Jewish Committee hailed Nostra Aetate as “a turning point in 1,900 years of Jewish-Christian history.” Adherents of both traditions were slow to plumb its meaning, however, in a postwar era marked by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and enduring stupefaction over the Holocaust. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik and other Jewish authorities continued to forbid dialogue with Christians on religious questions as improper, impossible, and impolitic—a proven noose for persecution of Jews. Only gradually, sustained by an explosion of scholarship on the parallel historical development of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism, interfaith pioneers gained confidence that textual exchange and interpretation could enrich understanding without surrendering vital points of difference. In September of 2000, American rabbis and Jewish scholars issued Dabru Emet (“Speak Truth”), the first formal response to Nostra Aetate. They offered a series of eight elaborated propositions, beginning, “Jews and Christians worship the same God.”

  JUST WHEN Rome’s ecumenical machinery clasped its rough mandate to tame ancient enmities, the psychology of war triggered fresh ones. Among some hundred thousand protesters at scattered Vietnam demonstrations over the weekend of October 16, David Miller, a young Catholic pacifist, lacked confidence in his oratorical ability to communicate urgent shortcomings of “just war theory” to crowds outside an Army induction center in New York. Nervously, he tried instead to burn his draft card in a gusting wind that blew out his matches. He succeeded with a cigarette lighter. As a registered conscientious objector, legally exempt from military duty in all wars, Miller told reporters that he hoped to commit “a significant political act” by inviting punishment needlessly upon himself, and the October protests exposed raw political nerves long before Miller went to prison for two years.

  Overnight, James Reston of the New York Times scolded the campus intellectual and “dreaming pacifist” alike for paradoxical stupidity: “They are not promoting peace but postponing it.” By Monday, Mike Mansfield told the Senate that he was “shocked at pictures showing some of the demonstrators,” and a chorus from both parties seconded his stern reminder that Congress had outlawed the willful defacement of draft cards “within the past month.” Senator Russell of Georgia, while confessing his own prior opposition to the war, declared that “the time has passed now to discuss the wisdom of our entrance into Vietnam”—with troop commitments made, the battle flag planted, and American heritage in jeopardy “if we tuck tail and run.” Senator Dirksen joined Russell with a call for swift punishment of “the wailing, quailing, protesting young men themselves.” From Chicago, Attorney General Katzenbach pledged to investigate peace groups for actions “in the direction of treason.” Former Vice President Nixon said that to tolerate comfort for enemies in wartime threatened free speech worldwide. President Johnson, recovering from gall bladder surgery, issued a statement of surprise that anyone
“would feel toward his country in a way that is not consistent with the national interest.” Life magazine disdained the “annoying clamor” of “chronic show-offs” it dubbed “Vietniks.” Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel of California branded them “vicious, venomous, and vile.” Public animus surged so broadly that defiant SDS leaders Paul Booth and Carl Oglesby called for a modified strategy of “build not burn.”

  A hundred New York religious leaders signed an emergency appeal for open debate. “It concerns us that the President should be amazed by dissent,” explained Lutheran minister Richard J. Neuhaus to an October 25 press conference at the United Nations Church Center. With Rev. William A. Jones of Brooklyn’s Bethany Baptist, Neuhaus warned that recent efforts to squelch protest, emanating from “the highest levels of Government,” threatened “to subvert the very democracy which loyal Americans seek to protect.” Asked whether additional statements could be expected, Rabbi Heschel spontaneously assured reporters that a coalition would organize and function for the duration of the Vietnam War, and afterward defended his promise to startled fellow spokesmen. (“Are we then finished?” he asked. “Do we go home content, and the war goes on?”) Heschel spurred new colleagues to prophetic witness against the “evil of indifference,” in language reminiscent of his tribute to King before Selma.* “Required is a breakthrough, a leap of action,” he said. To accommodate rabbis and women, the ad hoc New York “churchmen” became Clergy Concerned About Vietnam. When superiors promptly ordered two priests to withdraw, and banished the Jesuit co-founder Daniel Berrigan to South America, Heschel joined Neuhaus to protest the Catholic hierarchy’s “injury” to ecumenical conscience.

  On October 28, a planned anti-conscription ceremony outside New York’s Foley Square courthouse degenerated beforehand into an imploded mix of hecklers, reporters, brawlers, angry police officers, and lapsed pacifists—“the most miserable mob scene ever,” said Dorothy Day, who had seen plenty of them since founding the Catholic Worker movement in 1934. With A. J. Muste, she called off the demonstration for lack of pacifist discipline, and assorted violence from elsewhere filled the front pages. A Pennsylvania Klan leader committed suicide hours after a Sunday New York Times story exposed his concealed Jewish ancestry. Murky reports from Indonesia suggested purge deaths running into the hundreds of thousands after an army coup, with victims concentrated among Chinese immigrants. U.S. Marines at the Da Nang airbase killed fifty-six Vietnamese guerrillas who mounted a “human wave” attack, including a thirteen-year-old scout they recognized as a Coca-Cola peddler, and captured an eighty-year-old woman with drawings of military installations in her banana basket. Also in Vietnam that Sunday, October 31, transposed numerals on grid coordinates led A1-E Skyraider pilots to drop white phosphorus erroneously on the hamlet of Deduc, killing forty-eight civilians.