At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Antagonism spread also, so widely that the National Council of Churches already had asked Rev. Francis Walter to help investigate reprisals. On December 9, having documented twenty of the eighty reported cases in neighboring Wilcox County, the assigned replacement for Jonathan Daniels followed a wilderness road off the map from Possum Bend to a bridge-less dead end at a pig trail near skiffs tied in the Alabama River. He hiked toward bright colors on a distant clothesline, but Ora McDaniels fled her cabin upon sight of an approaching white man. Embarrassed, Walter spent the remainder of Thursday backtracking the river-looped county to find a Negro acquaintance who could mediate an affidavit about her being fired as a maid, and struck with a broom, for registering to vote. The bright colors turned out to be homemade patchwork quilts in distinctive patterns, sold locally at three for $5. Their striking quality inspired Walter to initiate a sustenance project that commanded auction space at New York galleries within six months. William Paley of CBS and Diana Vreeland of Vogue bought variations of the 1966 Chestnut Bud quilt. Artist Lee Krasner, widow of Jackson Pollock, would venture into Wilcox County to pick out Crow’s Foot originals. Bloomingdale’s in 1970 and Life magazine in 1972 offered tributes to the Freedom Quilting Bee, sustained more than two decades ahead by Ora McDaniels and her colleagues—among them Lucy Mingo, Polly Bennett, “Mama Willie” Abrams, Mattie Ross, Estelle Witherspoon, and China Grove Myles. Nearly all the folk artisans, who remained in their cabins, dated a new life from the wonder of a courthouse registration march the previous spring.

  On Friday, December 10, as Walter began to collect quilts along with affidavits, two public events flashed lingering travail for Alabama. A state trial acquitted the three men charged with the beating death of Rev. James Reeb after the March 9 “turnaround” attempt to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. The Dallas County courtroom erupted in applause. Richmond Flowers denounced a trial process epitomized by the blatantly prejudiced all-white jury that included a Klansman who had escorted Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell to assault Martin Luther King. “Reeb Verdict Outrages Justice Department / How Hard Did Prosecutors Try?” declared a blunt Washington Post headline. Simultaneously New York Times reporter Gene Roberts surfaced the first hint of volcanic legend from a scouting visit that found young movement workers at the Atlanta SNCC headquarters crushed by “battle fatigue” and spiraling debt—“the worst in its four and a half year history”—yet still “generating more ideas than money.” Courtland Cox described the launch brochure for an Alabama pilot project to “bypass Southern institutions.” Ruth Howard and other SNCC artists traced a cat logo from the mascot of Atlanta’s Clark College Panthers. “The Lowndes County Freedom Organization will function as an all-Negro ‘third party,’” Roberts disclosed in Friday’s New York Times. “It will operate in only one county and use a black panther as its party symbol.”

  KING CHASED his schedule through the week between Alabama trials, laboring to refine a prophetic message on the relative strengths of violence and nonviolence. He called Stanley Levison with word that rabbis from the Synagogue Council of America were pressing for Vietnam remarks because the American Legion of Boston had just canceled a citizenship award to Rabbi Roland Gittelson over his sponsorship of the Washington peace march. King felt obliged, saying he had preached in Gittelson’s synagogue only six months earlier, and called for specific quotations from the Hebrew prophets. Levison dictated paragraphs by relay through Dora McDonald, advising her to keep intact King’s favored adaptation of Amos 5:24—“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream”—as an improvement in rhythmic force on the exact biblical translation. King rushed to accept an award at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. “The stirring lesson of this age is that mass nonviolent direct action is not a peculiar device for Negro agitation,” he told the Synagogue Council. “Rather it is an historically validated method for defending freedom and democracy, and for enlarging these values for the benefit of the whole society.”

  By refusing to give up a bus seat in 1955, King argued, Rosa Parks sparked nonviolent power that opened prospects a decade later for Negro seats in the Alabama legislature. Protests against a constricted economy unleashed reforms that “ultimately will benefit more whites than Negroes,” he added, just as the crusade against segregated schools “brought to the fore” a larger realization that the antiquated educational system had been designed for nineteenth-century rural America. “When Negroes by direct action sought to participate in the electoral process,” said King, “they awakened the apathetic white who so took his rights for granted that he neglected to use them.” But he warned that an undertow of violence against new enemies threatened the bright promise of nonviolence to overcome old ones. “War enlarges itself inexorably,” he declared, discounting the repeated official assurance that the military conflict would remain limited. Pointing to “ugly repressive sentiment” against Rabbi Gittelson and others, he asked if dissent were not already “being shot down by bombers in Vietnam,” and wondered “whether free speech has not become one of the casualties of the war.” King summoned the bold protest of ancient sources—“Today we particularly need the Hebrew prophets”—whose words had goaded the movement past fear and silence. “They did not believe that conscience is a still small voice,” he said. “They believed that conscience thunders, or it does not speak at all.” He quoted Amos on justice, Micah on beating swords into plowshares, and Isaiah on what King called an “inescapable obligation” to renounce violence of spirit: “Yea, when you make many prayers I will not hear/ Your hands are full of blood/ Wash you, make you clean/ Put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes.”

  By the time his repression alert generated a tiny blip on page seventy-three of the morning New York Times—“Dr. King Sees Move Against Pacifists”—King was headed to Alabama by way of Atlanta. Documentary filmmaker Arnold Michaelis, in an interview arranged by Stanley Levison, seized a rare opportunity in the cabin of the airplane to film questions on informal background topics. King called plans for professional sports teams in the desegregated South “another very good step forward,” but confessed that the move of the baseball Braves from Milwaukee to his hometown would complicate a personal allegiance he traced to 1947, when Branch Rickey had integrated the old Brooklyn Dodgers with King’s teenage idol and subsequent friend Jackie Robinson. “And so I have been a Dodger fan,” he said, “but I’m gonna get with the Braves now.”

  Leaving Michaelis temporarily, King disappeared to embattled SCLC projects in rural Alabama, where a mob of nearly two hundred had blocked a Greene County march for school integration led by Hosea Williams. At a mass meeting on Monday, December 6, King and Andrew Young recruited 375 people to continue marches seeking the dispatch of federal registrars into Butler County, adjacent to Lowndes. “This was a heart-melting demonstration,” wrote grizzled staff leader Rev. Samuel Wells of Albany, Georgia, who reported that men and women sang in tearful prayer as they “stood toe to toe with the policemen…. On Tuesday we marched again…. I, for one, was knocked over the head.” King by then had hurried toward another rally commitment but was stalled by Alabama state troopers who arrested Young and his passengers alike for speeding, then held them until each paid a fine of $50.

  Back at home, King sat on December 9 for a rare filmed interview as his eight-year-old son Marty darted in front of the cameras. Producer Michaelis asked why he had departed from the philosophical acceptance of war expressed on page ninety-five of his first book, Stride Toward Freedom. “There was a time when I felt that war was, or could be, a negative good,” King replied. “I never felt that war could be a positive good, but…I felt that war could block the spread of some negative evil force like a Hitler, for instance.” Subsequent experience in the nonviolent movement had combined with apprehensions about the shrinking world, he explained, to convert him from the Christian pragmatism he once accepted from theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s anguished defense of World War II. “I came to the conclusion
that war could no longer serve as a negative good,” said King, “because of the potential destructiveness and the actual destructiveness of modern weapons of warfare.”

  When Michaelis pressed doubts that anyone could claim to oppose Communism in Vietnam without violence, King argued from colonial history that a long struggle for independence was blended into the identity of the Vietnamese Communist Party, while complicity in foreign rule there tainted American definitions of freedom. “There can be no gainsaying of the fact that we have taken a stand against a people seeking self-determination,” he said. “If one looks back over the history of this war, there are many things that turn out to be very ugly, and I am absolutely convinced that there is wrong on both sides.” King admitted personal indecision. “I don’t think President Johnson is a warmonger,” he said. “I think he is caught in a very difficult dilemma.” He surprised Michaelis by volunteering that he had received this impression in private talks with President Johnson since criticizing the war, “I would say on two different occasions,” and that he felt a heavy burden to “do something creative to create the atmosphere for negotiations.” King said he approved the dictum* of Mohandas Gandhi that seemingly impossible, saintly missions must be grounded in politics. “I certainly can’t claim to be a saint in any sense of the word,” he told Michaelis. “I try to emulate all the saints of history…and I think it is necessary for anyone who is working in these areas to have a keen sense of political timing.”

  The atmosphere of war confronted peacemakers with “a very practical problem that runs the gamut of history,” said King, “and that is face-saving…. If we could get rid of our pride, and this is the word that I think America must hear more and more, that we have got to get rid of our pride. It won’t hurt us morally. It isn’t going to hurt us from a military point of view to pull out of Vietnam.”

  Michaelis raised another awkward subject—“this is a very difficult thing”—about whether King could “see any advantage accruing to the civil rights movement by virtue of your death,” and King replied straightforwardly that any impact would depend on the circumstances. He pondered the example of recent suicides by immolation in both Vietnam and the United States. “I must say that I don’t think, personally, that this is the highest expression of creative sacrifice,” he said, and repeated instead the nonviolent standard of active readiness to die for a cause while refusing to kill. “I wouldn’t take my own life, but I would willingly give my life for that which I think is right,” King concluded. “And I am convinced that when one does this honestly, that death can have redemptive value.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Inside Out

  December 1965–January 1966

  THE Watts report posed an alarm starkly in its title, Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning?, and responded with words normally shunned as political suicide. “McCone Commission Urges a ‘Costly and Extreme’ Treatment of Causes,” declared the New York Times on December 7. Newspaper stories highlighted the call for massive improvements in education, transportation, and employment. The commissioners found that nearly all the 114 Los Angeles elementary schools without cafeterias were located in minority areas, which they correlated with “shockingly lower” test scores. They detected an enormous but immeasurable job shortage for Watts residents—quoting the resigned scoff of a teenage witness, “Go to school for what?”—which they associated with a tiny (14 percent) neighborhood ownership of cars to reach jobs elsewhere in the only major American city that did not subsidize public transportation. Their report warned that the August riots would be a mere “curtain-raiser” unless the American public adopted a “revolutionary attitude.”

  Bayard Rustin pronounced the McCone report a clever but specious bit of fireworks above the color line, in a detailed analysis that began with the commission’s baseline characterization of the Watts upheaval: “an insensate rage of destruction…not a race riot in the usual sense. What happened was an explosion—a formless, quite senseless, all but hopeless protest—engaged in by a few but bringing great distress to all.” Rustin cited McCone’s own investigators to counter that the violence had been anything but random. Rioters consistently attacked five types of stores, primarily pawnshops and food markets, made no attempt to steal narcotics from pharmacies, and were more likely to destroy than consume the stocks of liquor stores. He quoted acknowledgment in the report’s fine print that “no residences were deliberately burned, that damage to schools, libraries, and public buildings was minimal, and that certain types of business establishments, notably service stations and automobile dealers were for the most part unharmed.” For Rustin, steeped in Gandhian discipline, the Watts violence was wrong, mostly self-damaging, and it excused the commissioners to polarize identification with victims by race. The report lumped together thirty-two Negro riot deaths under “justifiable homicide,” identified three white deaths (obscuring evidence that two were from friendly fire), and broke down white injuries by occupation or branch of service. “To find out that about 85 per cent of the [1,032 people] injured were Negroes,” he observed, “we have to do our own arithmetic.”

  Violence in Rustin’s view gave the McCone Commission cover to finesse the central complaint against a Los Angeles police department personified by Chief William Parker. “Many Negroes feel that he carried a deep hatred of the Negro community,” stated the report. “However, Chief Parker’s statements to us and collateral evidence such as his record of fairness to Negro officers are inconsistent with his having such an attitude.” With that, the commissioners dismissed calls for external checks or civilian review in brutality investigations as a risk to police morale, and Rustin ascribed the brusque evasion to a battlefield mentality that dehumanized Negroes while lionizing the aggressive officer. “Every Negro knows this,” he wrote. “There is scarcely any black man, woman or child in the land who at some point or another has not been mistreated by a policeman.”

  No Negro ranked above sergeant in the Los Angeles police force of roughly eight thousand, although nearly twenty black officers over the past decade managed to attend law school after hours and pass the bar exam while stymied for promotion. Two who once briefly made lieutenant had departed also for law practice—Earl Broady and Tom Bradley, a future mayor of Los Angeles. Broady served with McCone as one of the eight Watts commissioners. He had been elevated to the California bench since being cajoled by Malcolm X to represent those shot and beaten, then jailed, in the sensational 1962 police altercation around and inside the local Muslim temple, and the McCone report bore signs of a truce. There was no mention of the fusillade storming of the same temple toward the end of the Watts violence in a vain search for weapons or riot plans. Judge Broady withheld experienced readings on raw blackjack solidarity in the precincts, perhaps to dampen Chief Parker’s countervailing charge that “pagan” conspirators had engineered revolt by contented Negro citizens. Parker, sticking mostly to the compromise thesis of mindless violence, reduced Watts to an image of copycat antics by caged animals: “One person threw a rock and then, like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing rocks.”

  Rustin warned of the treacherous ambiguity common to the McCone Commission and the Moynihan study of Negro families. Each document opened freelance controversy “on both sides of the Negro question,” he wrote, with a view fixed handily beyond the presumed end of segregated conditions on a ringing but abstract call for wholesale reform. Each mixed encouragement for civil rights with “more sophisticated and compassionate…shibboleths about Negroes.” Well before Rustin’s interpretation reached the small intellectual journal Commentary, Moynihan had become an established national oracle on Watts. “Remember that American slavery was the worst slavery the world has ever known,” he told a CBS News special about the new McCone report. He sketched the historical pressures on families that “break up when they leave the countrysides, rural peasant life, and sort of dump into slums,” where he said Negro women headed a quarter of modern households. The New York Times published a December 12
profile, “Moynihan Hopeful U.S. Will Adopt a Policy of Promoting Family Stability,” citing his figures that 44 percent of births in parts of Harlem were illegitimate. “I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen,” he told the Times. “My father was a drunk. I know what this life is like.”

  The same day on NBC’s Meet the Press, moderator Lawrence Spivak asked how new middle-class Negroes climbed above the report’s statistical trend toward family deterioration, and why others could not use the same ladder. “Some people are lucky and some aren’t,” replied Moynihan. “The world is that way. Some people got out of the South in time, some didn’t.” Jet reporter Simeon Booker protested that Moynihan could have focused on growing divorce in white families “to make it appear that they are the threat to the nation’s health.” He suggested that racial redress must fall to whites, whereas panelist Robert Novak wondered if Negroes would escape their own responsibility. Moynihan gamely grasped both thorns. “It is an American problem,” he told NBC viewers, “and any American must commit himself to it.” Lightning gathered from his resonant theories already made Moynihan the rarest of public figures—a sociology professor and former civil servant, specializing in urban race relations, with a bright future in national politics.*

  RONALD REAGAN’S public career neared the end of its incubation period. The previous March, on the popularity of his nationally televised speech for the losing presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, the Hollywood actor had begun an active exploration toward a run for governor of California just as students at Berkeley lifted ritual chants of “Fuck” to storm the far ramparts of permitted speech. The wildcat demonstrations, which veered notoriously from a campus movement built to support Mississippi Negroes, gave Reagan cause to join attacks on “filthy” rather than free debate, to disregard the disciplined youth then braving violence at the “Berlin Wall” of Selma, and to sidestep their cresting drive for the whole nation to secure voting rights for the powerless. In an address to California Republicans, Reagan combined spanking disdain for the rowdy Berkeley students with his caustic view of an omnivorous federal government. They were like a newborn baby, he quipped, with “an alimentary canal at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”