At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Reagan continued to defend the Goldwater positions against Medicare (“socialized medicine”) and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “I would have voted against it if I had been in Congress,” he said, and denounced the 1965 Voting Rights Act by extension as an encroachment on local control, “humiliating to the South.” Significantly, however, Reagan hired political advisers to make his test speeches palatable to voters beyond the Goldwater base. Political consultants Stuart Spencer and William Roberts, having managed the California primary campaign against Goldwater by liberal Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller, counseled him to advocate decency and restraint rather than outmoded defiance. Reagan said unruly students could be reclaimed with firm discipline. He avoided talk of civil rights with the nimble evasion of Southern moderates then calling the entire race issue “somewhat passé.” He described domestic freedom as a natural possession that was constantly threatened—but never enhanced—by national politics, and therefore he credited no net progress in liberty from the Founding Fathers down through the daunting new commitments to fulfill their national creed. “The original government of this country was set up by conservatives, [and] defined years later by Lincoln,” Reagan declared, “as a preference for the old and tried over the new and untried.”

  By overlooking patriotic wonders in stir from the modern civil rights era, which he recognized as liberal and certainly troublesome, Reagan invited listeners to shed defensive anxiety about racial barriers. He lodged timely charges to degrade the movement’s reputation for selfless witness by association with rioters and external enemies, denouncing antiwar demonstrations at Berkeley as “the fruit of appeasement.” Reagan called for “a political decision to achieve victory” in Vietnam, and waved off “silly” fears of protracted war. “Why, with our power,” he said in October, “we could pave the whole country, put parking strips on it, and be home for Christmas.”

  Early stories made sport of his film roles and campaign biography—Where’s the Rest of Me?—but Reagan captured audiences through 150 trial speeches. He called himself a “hemophiliac liberal” converted to citizen-politician, innocent of professional experience or government terminology. Even so, the unannounced candidate distanced himself from the John Birch Society with a strategy fixed on the decisive middle voter. Reagan rebuked founder Robert Welch for “utterly reprehensible” statements that former President Dwight Eisenhower himself was a Communist, but carefully spared the organization and its sympathizers, citing assurance from J. Edgar Hoover that “the FBI has not investigated the Birch Society, because it only investigates subversive organizations.” Reagan’s pinpoint attack on Welch signaled his refusal to be lumped with “a bunch of kooks,” according to his staff, and gained him stature to run on mainstream morality. A New York Times Magazine article in November warily recognized his genial appeal: “Tom Sawyer Enters Politics.”

  SHORTLY BEFORE Reagan’s formal entry into the California governor’s race for 1966, Director Hoover confronted a potential scandal from the FBI’s unilateral use of spy methods in nearby Las Vegas. A December story in the Los Angeles Times disclosed the first public hints of intrigue stewing since the owner of the Fremont Casino Hotel had discovered a microphone bug at his office in 1963. Security technicians traced intercept signals to a dummy business called the Henderson Novelty Company, and officials from the Sands and the Desert Inn soon joined in a lawsuit against eleven FBI employees found monitoring numerous bugs from the Henderson storefront. Publicity spread novel allegations of criminal trespass by law enforcement officers—“FBI Red-Faced on Use of ‘Bugs’”—with growing pressure on FBI headquarters either to disown the agents as renegades or show proof of legal authorization for the surveillance. Hoover swiftly dispatched Assistant Director DeLoach to see the Attorney General. “I told Katzenbach that obviously this was no time for feuding in the family,” DeLoach reported to FBI headquarters, “and that I wanted to make certain that he fully understood the approval that former Attorney General Kennedy had given with respect to microphones.”

  Katzenbach tried to calm DeLoach. He predicted that the well-known Washington lawyer Edward Bennett Williams would settle the Las Vegas lawsuit before it generated publicity that his clients were conspiring with organized crime partners to skim profits from their casinos. The greater lesson for Katzenbach was a reminder that surreptitious eavesdropping allowed a shrewd defense attorney like Williams to thwart prosecution by ferreting out government misconduct. (For his track record of stinging discovery motions, Hoover already disparaged Williams as a “shyster.”) DeLoach refused to be mollified, and described the threat as more political than legal. Unlike Katzenbach, he knew that Williams was likely to obtain records in a separate criminal appeal that another client, Washington lobbyist Fred Black, had been overheard by coincidence in the bugged executive suite at the Desert Inn. Worse, Black was a business partner of former Senate aide Bobby Baker, the most visible corruption name of the Johnson era, and had been the Johnson family’s next-door neighbor until the new President moved into the White House. Still worse, collateral discovery could reveal to Williams that the FBI had bugged Black deliberately in his Washington hotel suite, which was far too political to be excused as a well-intended crusade against gangster influence in Las Vegas casinos.

  Undaunted, DeLoach insisted that the real motive behind the bugging story was Senator Robert Kennedy’s ambition to ruin President Johnson and the FBI. Williams was a Kennedy friend, he noted darkly, and Kennedy’s former press secretary, Ed Guthman, worked for the Los Angeles Times. Katzenbach “seemed rather stunned” by the charge, DeLoach later reported. While he tried to assure DeLoach that he did not disclaim involvement with microphone surveillance himself, despite his recent efforts to forbid it, the Attorney General said he did believe private statements from Kennedy himself that he had authorized no bugs during his tenure at Justice. DeLoach warned Katzenbach not to provoke Hoover on this point, then made ready for battle by summoning Kennedy’s FBI liaison officer, Courtney Evans. Hoover had fired him after Dallas, exercising sudden freedom to demonstrate disdain for the lame-duck Attorney General, but Evans felt obliged to appear at headquarters for a prolonged inquisition on Christmas Eve.

  DeLoach and colleagues knew from the FBI files that they could not confront Evans with Robert Kennedy’s signature on a bugging document, or even with evidence that Kennedy ever showed awareness of a bug as opposed to a formally approved telephone wiretap. They coaxed him merely to agree that Kennedy should have perceived the peculiar source of some reports by their nature, without being told, and a miserably conflicted Evans—“upon having his recollection refreshed”—gave ground toward the FBI position. From memos about one lurid intelligence report from Chicago, DeLoach recorded, “he admitted that Kennedy stated that he did not desire to know the location or the source.” Evans conceded murkiness in the most sensitive files until DeLoach counted him a vital witness for shared complicity: “He did admit that Kennedy must have known that our information came from microphones.” FBI officials seized upon the inference as bedrock. They claimed a general acquiescence from Kennedy in place of verifiable permissions for specific bugs, which they substituted in turn for a gaping void of authority or procedure in law. Without a blush, they transformed the wisp of retrospective accountability into armor for aggressive defense. Katzenbach and Kennedy would “‘leave us to the wolves’ if allowed to do so,” DeLoach advised Hoover, which made it prudent for the Bureau to put them on notice that “we clearly know the facts and will not hesitate to use them if necessary.”

  “THREE DAYS after Christmas,” began a SNCC memorandum of record, “Gloria Larry was in the Atlanta SNCC office at 360 Nelson Street looking for help.” The document registered shock in two respects. First, the Atlanta office was an unlikely rescue stop because SNCC faced $100,000 in debt, suffered terminations of phone service, and had missed several of its meager subsistence payrolls for staff workers. Jailgoing energy and the treasury were drained so low—“John Robert Lew
is is TIRED (me too),” warned an internal notice—that Chairman Lewis issued a melancholy year-end statement pronouncing the miracle achievements of 1965 dimmed “when we have laws that are not being enforced…. The scars of racism are so deep that they will take many years to remove.” Second, Larry was a surprise choice to speak for Lowndes County on any desperate mission, being a staff newcomer known more for elegance than grit. Larry was already gaunt, however, which reinforced her hammering alarm about the plight of sharecroppers newly registered to vote. Of twenty evicted families that lacked the wherewithal to move, or relatives to pile in with, at least eight wandered helpless outdoors. Larry commandeered $2,000 from SNCC’s secret emergency fund and rushed back to Alabama in a loaded caravan. “It has been raining for three weeks in Lowndes County,” the office memorandum noted in her wake. “The following supplies have been purchased to protect the evicted families from the elements”: ten Army surplus tents, sixty cots, and twelve potbellied stoves.

  Carmichael stayed behind to fire a staff worker he caught soliciting and stealing crisis donations from distant white supporters. “Please make sure that they do not send another penny to Eugene,” he urged fund-raisers, noting painfully that the scam targets discovered so far included Rev. Francis Walter, Rabbi Harold Saperstein the summer volunteer, and even the mother of Jonathan Daniels. (“I guess you realize this is a very touchy area,” Carmichael confided.) He managed also to secure squatter’s space for the evicted farmers on land owned by Rosie Steele, who had donated the second night’s campsite for the great march toward Montgomery, then rounded up help to dig a latrine, lay plank floors, and pitch the tents. Sammy Younge was a surprise among workers who showed up on Thursday, December 30. “I just can’t kick it, man,” he told Carmichael sheepishly. Having tried hard to stick with his studies, he decided that the movement was “in me,” and disclosed his hope to organize an independent “black panther” party for his home county around Tuskegee.

  The primitive shelter attracted scattered notice from the outside world. “‘Tent City’ Rising In Alabama Field,” announced the New York Times on New Year’s Day. The Negro weekly Jet emphasized hardship: “Evicted Farmers Wallow in Beds of Mud at Lowndes.” These accounts noted large cauldrons for water to be hauled from a neighboring well, and ascribed escalating tension to local awareness that some 1,900 new Lowndes County registrants approached parity for Negroes in local voting strength. Jack Crawford had been evicted after his photograph appeared in a magazine article about the federal registrars. Amanda Glover, arriving from the plantation where she had lived since January 20, 1931, said her husband had been too scared of voting “but could have went on and registered for all the good it did him.” Annabelle Scott came with her husband, four children, and several grandchildren, one of whom soon contracted hepatitis. Elderly movement stalwarts Will and Mary Jane Jackson occupied cots in the field of tents facing Highway 80, not far from the spot where they had waited all of March 22 to see the distant speck of Martin Luther King approach with flags and soldiers like a biblical mirage. Carmichael said people who registered under such conditions were forever changed, and local leader John Hulett agreed. “People in Lowndes County, whether they live or die, will put up our own candidates,” he told reporters. “That’s a sure thing.”

  On Sunday, January 2, Rev. Francis Walter sat on the stage among hometown hosts in Mobile for a historic address by the sitting Attorney General of the United States. Before an overwhelmingly Negro crowd of 4,500, Nicholas Katzenbach marked the 102nd anniversary of slavery’s official demise by predicting “a new emancipation” under the Voting Rights Act. Backstage, Walter took his chance to consult briefly about reprisals against new registrants in several counties. Katzenbach renewed a public promise for the Justice Department to initiate lawsuits against voter intimidation, and suggested that affidavits would make stronger evidence if the sharecroppers could brace themselves through formal eviction by sheriffs rather than vacate the plantations on demand. Guardedly, he advised Walter to consider his words mere legal speculation and not a commitment on behalf of the United States. Jet magazine noted another nuance of volatile racial politics: Mobile’s white newspapers declined to show Katzenbach at the Emancipation Day ceremonies, indicating that racially mixed photographs of a kind once prized to attack white officials might be losing favor because of the offsetting honor implied for Negroes also in the picture, especially now if they had to be identified.

  With many Alabama courthouses filled for first Monday registration on January 3, FBI agents arrived in Tuskegee by late afternoon to investigate two complaints relayed from the Atlanta SNCC office. Jimmy Rogers reported first that a registrar had threatened to “spill your guts on the floor” after refusing more than a hundred Negro applicants, evidently nettled beyond endurance that a continued stall would only push the Justice Department to deploy superseding federal registrars to Macon County. Sammy Younge, ducking from his escort post along the line of rattled applicants, added at four o’clock that the local registrar displayed a knife when repeating the same words.

  Toward midnight at the local Freedom House, agitated calls about a familiar car sighted near a police commotion at the Tuskegee bus station jolted into panic a vague awareness that Younge had not returned from an errand to buy cigarettes, and Rogers was among those who identified his body. Younge lay face-up next to wide rivulets of blood spreading from his head past his feet, with an arm draped over a golf club. Witnesses said Younge had engaged in what sounded like a running quarrel over the refusal of an elderly attendant to let him use a gasoline station’s restroom reserved for whites. He drove off, stopped abruptly, and walked back to renew the argument, but ran across the street into a half filled Greyhound bus once the attendant, Marvin Segrest, waved a pistol. Seizing a golf club from luggage bound for Atlanta, Younge darted in and out of the bus to exchange more shouts. When Segrest fired a shot, the Greyhound sped away and Younge fled exposed on foot until a second bullet struck him in the back of the head. Segrest said he meant “to bluff him.” Alarms rousted much of the campus before dawn and collected nearly all the scattered Alabama SNCC staff except Stokely Carmichael, who declared himself immobile. “I just got me three bottles of wine,” he told James Forman, “and drank one for me and one for Sammy and one for Jonathan Daniels.” More than two thousand students marched Tuesday in small-town Tuskegee. Many returned the next day with a list of eight demands, including prosecution of Segrest and a chance for “more Negroes to be able to work in the downtown area.” They rallied around the statue of Robert E. Lee on the courthouse lawn.

  In Atlanta, the southwide SNCC staff conducted a marathon debate to frame a response. New marches for more laws were rejected as lame. A proposal to denounce the Younge murder jointly with the Vietnam War met the objection that the connection was strained and that the two issues best be kept separate. A volley of counterarguments recalled Bob Moses on the tendency of race to corrupt democratic values with self-deluded conquest both at home and abroad, which shifted qualms about the statement toward naked practicality. With SNCC nearly bankrupt, leaders warned, an attack on the government’s war policy would trigger ferocious opposition, choke off donations from white liberals, and blot out attention to the death of Sammy Younge. Some fretted that they had voted already for SNCC to take a public stand against the war, but had failed timidly to follow through. Others foresaw widespread indifference to any statement about Younge’s death without the Vietnam linkage, and a majority welcomed Gloria Larry’s volunteer effort to distill the prevailing thought into a draft by Thursday, January 6. “We believe the United States government has been deceptive in its claims of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people,” she began. “The murder of Samuel Younge in Tuskegee, Ala. is no different than the murder of peasants in Vietnam…. We ask: where is the draft for the freedom fight in the United States? We, therefore, encourage those Americans who prefer to use their energy in building democratic forms within this country…knowing full well
that it may cost them their lives—as painfully as in Vietnam.”

  ON FRIDAY in Chicago, at what the New York Times called “a crowded news conference in the garish red-and-gold Gigi Room of the plush Sahara Motel,” Martin Luther King released a thirteen-page launch blueprint for “the first significant Northern freedom movement.” For the betterment of greater Chicago, whose Negroes had come to outnumber those in all Mississippi, he announced a new campaign aimed at conditions broader than de facto school segregation or the harsh legacy of the rural South. “This economic exploitation is crystallized in the SLUM,” said King, which he defined as “an area where free trade and exchange of culture and resources is not allowed to exist…a system of internal colonialism not unlike the exploitation of the Congo by Belgium.” His Chicago blueprint identified trade unions and welfare boards among twelve institutions that perpetuated slums in an interlocking pattern difficult to understand, he acknowledged, let alone to change. (Five unions shut down final construction on the monumental Gateway Arch project that same day in St. Louis, when a contractor hired the first Negro plumber under sustained pressure from the new U.S. Office of Federal Contract Compliance.) King announced an escalating series of community rallies, organizing drives, and test demonstrations to culminate in May, but he hedged predictions by analogy with the voting rights campaign launched a year earlier. “Just as no one knew on January 2, 1965, that there would be a march from Selma to Montgomery,” he announced, “so now we are in no position to know what form massive action might take in Chicago.” The uncertainty of future confrontation muted news coverage, but King gained banner headlines in the Defender with a promise to move his own family into a freezing local tenement before the end of January: “Dr. King Will Occupy Chicago Slum Flat in New Rights Drive/ He’s Out to Close Ghetto.”