Spectacular success in Europe muffled tensions across the Atlantic Ocean all the way back into Alabama. King’s original church sponsors in Paris had canceled less than two weeks before the engagement under a cloud of government displeasure, and a last-minute appeal had yielded the emergency rescue led by artists. Actors Peter O’Toole of England and Melina Mercouri of Greece joined the French stars to commandeer a substitute venue ten times larger. Secretary of State Rusk ordered Ambassador Charles “Chip” Bohlen not to attend the reconstituted King-Belafonte event in Paris, and, as a precaution against Vietnam controversy, Ambassador Graham Parsons canceled plans to greet King at the airport in Stockholm. A soothing report from the U.S. embassy later found that the high-profile visit “did not create any difficulties for the American image here,” because King was “quite explicit” to say he opposed Vietnam as a matter of individual conscience rather than as a political priority for the civil rights movement. His conflicted restraint satisfied nervous sponsors of the Swedish gala, diplomats added, at the cost of press criticism that “King wears a muzzle” on the war in Vietnam.
KING RETURNED home April 10 buoyed by the dramatic rally of support overseas and determined to break through hesitancy that had been eating at him since the debates at SCLC’s convention in August. He pressed his SCLC executive board to take an official stance on Vietnam at the semiannual meeting in Miami, and announced the favorable result there on April 13. “It is imperative to end a war that has played havoc with our domestic destinies,” King told reporters. The approved resolution committed SCLC on nonviolent principle. “If we are true to our own ideals,” it stated, “we have no choice but to abandon the military junta under such manifestly vigorous popular opposition. We believe the moment is now opportune, and the need urgent, to reassess our position and seriously examine the wisdom of prompt withdrawal.” The words “abandon” and “withdrawal” vaulted past Robert Kennedy’s explosive call for negotiations, and landed King on the front pages without quite the voltage of a potential contender for the White House. The initial New York Times story noted that Vietnam dissent had nearly bankrupted SNCC, and cited a national poll in which 41 percent of Americans said dissent from that quarter made them feel “less in favor of civil rights for Negroes.” Several of King’s allies dismissed him archly to the Times for making “the greatest of mistakes to mix domestic civil rights and foreign policy.”
FBI wiretaps picked up Stanley Levison’s pragmatic assessment of infighting between and within civil rights groups. He observed that King’s peers were delighted to see him “sticking his neck out” on Vietnam. “Roy [Wilkins] and Whitney [Young] have snuggled up to Johnson,” he told Clarence Jones. “Martin is now in a different relationship to the White House than he used to be. They are on the inside, and I think they love it.” To Levison, this much was normal politics. He aimed for a long-range view of movement progress, and indeed wanted King to compliment the FBI for arresting thirteen Mississippi Klansmen recently to break open the Vernon Dahmer firebomb murder case. (“J. Edgar Hoover may dislike Martin intensely,” Levison said on the tapped line, “but his men are now doing the job in the field.”) What disturbed Levison was an internal breach with Bayard Rustin, who was “sore” at King for pushing the Vietnam resolution. The friction exceeded prior jockeying among advisers who shared bruises and miracles alike from service close to King. Rustin had grounded his idealism and tactical genius in nonviolence for more than thirty years, choosing prison over service in World War II, and it seemed inexplicable that he of all people would change his compass during an epochal surge of vindication and promise. Levison thought Rustin accommodated the war to protect his new stature in mainstream politics. Rustin said mature democracy demanded compromise at home and abroad.
King primed a new movement campaign while laboring to harvest practical results from the one just behind. Several trips after a perfunctory introduction to Mayor Daley, he left Chicago again on April 28 for what turned out to be his final meeting at the White House—a pep talk from President Johnson on the formal civil rights message to Congress, which received there a tepid response—then scurried south to give four speeches late into the same night on a get-out-the-vote push for the May 3 Alabama primary. From Montgomery at breakneck speed, he covered 825 miles to give nine speeches in scattered rural churches on Friday, April 29. At the second stop, in Wilcox County, 1,500 newly registered voters waited under a scorching sun outside Antioch Baptist Church, where movement supporter David Colson had been shot dead in January. “If they aren’t afraid to come to hear Dr. King,” SCLC organizer Dan Harrell told reporters, “they won’t be afraid to vote.” An afternoon rainstorm caught King far behind schedule as always, trotting across a field toward a Marengo County church between his two oldest children, Yolanda and Marty, flanked by Fred Shuttlesworth and Hosea Williams.
Opposing forces scrambled to master a new electorate. No fewer than nine white men ran for governor against George Wallace’s “stand-in” wife, Lurleen, with black registration already doubled to 240,000 under the Voting Rights Act. Attorney General Richmond Flowers, publicly recognized as “the first major white candidate in modern times to campaign directly among the Negro people in a Deep South state,” pledged to haul down the Confederate Battle Flag as a symbol of defiance rather than progress. SCLC ran workshops on rudimentary politics for the first fifty-four Negroes to qualify as candidates in a Democratic primary. A movement journal published a signal photograph of one kissing a baby. A grizzled out-of-state incumbent advised them to expect no quarter and accept only cash contributions. Church women taught new voters how to mark ballots. Newspapers erratically scolded Negroes as foolish rookies when two of them ran for the same office, as craven supplicants when a Tuskegee group endorsed the white sheriff over a Negro, and as sinister robots when reporters detected a potential “Negro voting bloc.”
Hosea Williams had assumed the role of slate-maker. “We must let the Negro vote hang there like a ripe fruit,” he told one crowd, his arms raised to mime the caress of a vineyard inspector, “and whoever is willing to give the Negro the most freedom can pluck it.” As King’s deputy for Alabama, he asserted primacy over traditional Negro leaders in deciding whether to broker deals with white moderates or push selected Negro candidates. “We’ve got the Black Belt sewed up,” he said, declaring unabashedly that whoever registered voters should control them. Editors at The Southern Courier, a small newspaper formed by Freedom Summer volunteers, chided his overbearing ways in an editorial: “Have a Seat, Hosea…but give him a hand as he goes, folks.” They reminded readers that each voter was “the anvil” of democratic trust and responsibility. “Remember that the choice in the end is yours,” they wrote, “and you do not have to vote the way you have said you were going to vote. No one can control your vote if you make up your own mind.” King echoed their advice with pleas above all for a large turnout. He avoided Lowndes County, and did not join the vituperation by Williams and others against its resolve to work outside the Democratic primary.
Sadly, the New York Times out-bossed even Hosea Williams. Fixed upon the “exciting, precedent-breaking” opportunity to defeat “old-line segregationists” behind Lurleen Wallace, the paper called late in April for Negroes to “fuse their strength with liberal white voters” in the Democratic primary race for governor, and aimed a laser of rebuke at Negroes who adopted a different political strategy. A lead editorial branded the Lowndes County plan to run an independent slate of local candidates a pointless “boycott,” as though the sharecroppers and canvassers risking their lives to vote for the first time, under conditions scarcely imaginable in New York, were madly possessed to throw away the ballot itself. The article, “Sabotage in Alabama,” perceived in SNCC workers only “destructive mischief-making…a rule-or-ruin attitude…extremism for the sake of extremism…a revolutionary posture toward all of society and Government.” The editors might well have paid tribute to a year of miraculous new citizenship in the county that killed Vio
la Liuzzo and Jonathan Daniels. Instead, America’s best newspaper—long a voice of authority sympathetic to civil rights—recognized no competing priorities or capacity for basic self-government. To portray the Lowndes County movement as frivolous vandals against the right to vote, the Times blotted out yearnings and exertions toward freedom seldom matched since Valley Forge. Such dismissal helped provoke black power conflict and rebellion soon to grip the whole country.
THE MAY 3 primary races showcased colorful politics at the historic divide. Lurleen Wallace, Alabama’s first female candidate for governor, sought to become only the third woman to hold that office in the United States. Her husband, George, pledged daily to “tote the wood and draw the water at the governor’s mansion,” quoting Governor Edward “Pa” Ferguson’s successful 1924 campaign for Miriam “Ma” Ferguson in Texas. Wallace had picked up Ferguson yarns from President Johnson at a governors’ briefing on Vietnam. He now omitted the word “segregation” from stump speeches, reporters noted, but pointedly renounced an agreement to integrate mental hospitals. Wallace said Washington’s “dictatorial” conditions for federal support insulted all Alabama, and so did Richard Nixon’s barb that the state was running “a dime-store girl for governor.” (The former Vice President demeaned the candidate’s only former employment in the hope that a Wallace family failure would forestall a third-party presidential bid for 1968, which third-party failure would help Republicans retain the Deep South Goldwater states.) Other public voices complained that federal “occupation” under the Voting Rights Act treated Alabama like “some kind of banana republic.” Attorney General Katzenbach did his best to hide civil servants being trained to safeguard new Negro voters at the polls—“I am attempting to do the least that I can safely do without upsetting the civil rights groups,” he assured President Johnson—and he quietly concentrated observers in Selma for the high-visibility showdown between challenger Wilson Baker and incumbent Sheriff Jim Clark.
John Doar diverted Justice Department lawyer Charles Nesson into last-minute negotiations over the Lowndes County nominating convention. “If we do not hear from you, or if the US Government does not find itself able to protect the participants,” Stokely Carmichael petitioned Doar, “we shall be forced to look to such resources as we can muster on our own.” On April 26, Sheriff Frank Ryals had forbidden access to the Hayneville courthouse, but Carmichael, citing Alabama law that founders of a local party must convene “in or around a public polling place on the day of the primary,” pressed a right to use the county’s only qualifying site. Ryals bluntly informed Nesson that it would be more than dangerous enough in Lowndes County for the first ordinary black voters, and any convention of Negroes on the courthouse lawn would become a “turkey shoot.” John Hulett insisted they had no choice. Rattled, Nesson dashed between Selma and Montgomery for ideas to avert a disaster.
The freedom organization meanwhile continued nightly mass meetings, and SNCC research director Jack Minnis finished local workshops on practical government. He used illustrated booklets to explore simple questions—“How does voting work?” “What is politics?”—plus primers and statute books for leadership seminars. New rivals for a “freedom nomination” addressed the packed candidates’ forum at Mr. Moriah Church. “Vote for me and I’ll stand up for fair treatment,” declared Jesse “Note” Favors, whose opponent, Sidney Logan, vowed to wipe out the ingrained fear of the sheriff’s uniform. The children of bricklayer John Hinson, who was running for a seat on the board of education, handed out paper cutouts of a schoolhouse marked “Vote for Hinson.” Some speakers wrestled regrets about missing their first vote for governor to nominate local candidates instead. Others jumped up to testify when Hulett relayed official warnings that a party convention meant suicide. “We been walkin’ with dropped down heads, a scrunched up heart, and a timid body in the bushes, but we ain’t scared anymore!” cried an old farmer who urged the crowd not to meddle or pick a fight, but to stand. “If you have to die, die for something,” he said, “and take somebody before you.”
Nesson returned on Sunday, May 1 with a proposal to relocate from the courthouse to a black church near Hayneville, where the convention, though still unguarded, would be less inflammatory to white voters on primary day. An emergency movement caucus rejected his verbal assurance that the change would be legal. Any judge who disagreed could strike their slate from the November ballot, Hulett replied, and his people would take their chances at the courthouse unless Alabama authorities specified in writing that the church met the statutory requirement to be “in or around a public polling place.” The renewed standoff obliged Nesson and cohorts to chase down Attorney General Richmond Flowers in the final sprint of his own campaign. To sign the proposed legal finding would encourage withdrawal from the Democratic primary, which would cost him votes for governor, and any accommodation to Negroes would further alienate white voters. On the other hand, Flowers knew from the Liuzzo and Daniels trials that he may not have a single white supporter in Lowndes County anyway, and his own fearful experience had kindled nagging admiration for the besieged movement. Flowers signed, and Nesson rushed the legal opinion back for posting at the Hayneville courthouse by three o’clock on Monday afternoon, May 2. Joyful news for Hulett reverted instantly to pressure. Less than a day remained to spread notice of the site switch across seven hundred square miles of plantations with few cars and virtually no telephones.
ON THE climactic primary morning, John Doar supervised five hundred federal observers in Dallas County. From Selma, where lines stretched back from the courthouse to Brown Chapel before the polls opened, he drove eighteen miles to find the tiny hamlet of Orville flooded with rural Negroes waiting to cast their first votes. The turnout jumped above 17,000, nearly triple the county norm, and voters across the state surmounted hardships in combustible crowds. Parents carried “Stand Up for Alabama” pamphlets that Governor Wallace had distributed through the students at every white school. An election official blamed the Negroes for delays, charging that one confused voter lingered in a booth for twenty-eight minutes. Negroes in Wilcox County complained that false information about a polling place ended only when voting equipment was spotted at Harvey’s Fish Camp, a bait shop decidedly unfriendly to them, but local women soon passed out fried chicken to boost morale along the line. In Birmingham, an old man who fainted in the hot sun refused an ambulance until he could “pull that lever” on what might be his last chance, and others waiting late into the night built fires to keep warm. A woman with a “Vote Wallace” sign stood hours behind a man wearing a “Grow with Flowers” button.
Nerves started tight at First Baptist Church in Hayneville, half a mile from the courthouse. A farmer fidgeted with three shotgun shells in his overalls. FBI agents took photographs, and reporters interviewed SNCC leaders from Atlanta and Mississipi. At three o’clock, having received final instructions, supporters of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization spilled outside the church into a roped-off area where movement clerks verified names against the county’s list of registered voters with poll taxes paid to date. “We wanted to make it all legal,” Carmichael announced. Those approved filed past seven stations to vote separately for each local office. For voters who wanted to match names with faces, the competing candidates themselves smiled from designated spots nearby. Voices on a bullhorn kept repeating the most important legal notice: no one should vote who intended to participate also in the Democratic primary, as overlaps could invalidate the entire freedom ticket. Groans answered reports that more than a hundred Negroes were voting at the courthouse. Volunteers collected the completed ballots—each one headed with the official black panther emblem and creed, “One Man, One Vote”—and placed them into cardboard boxes on the seven wooden tables. Worry turned slowly to relief among voters milling in the churchyard to await the count, mostly sharecropper men in Sunday hats and women in earrings and print dresses. Scattered SNCC workers sang freedom songs. “We’re making history, that’s right,” an old woman repeat
ed to herself. Jumping to the church steps, Willie Ricks praised the “bad niggers” of Lowndes County in a comically triumphant speech before Hulett called everyone back inside to announce the nominees. John Hinson defeated Mrs. Virginia White for the school board 511–327. Mrs. Alice Moore received 852 votes running unopposed for tax assessor (“Tax the rich to feed the poor, that’s my slogan”). Sidney Logan, having defeated Note Favors 492–381, accepted the nomination with brief remarks that he had wanted to run for sheriff since Deputy Lux Jackson and his gun had shooed them away from their first attempt to register.
A bigger story obliterated the Lowndes County initiative before the polls closed. “It’s a Lurleen Landslide!” declared an early edition of the Montgomery Advertiser dotted with cutlines of shock: “Exuberant Wallace…Ecstatic…Smiles, Hugs…No Runoff.” From the Jefferson Davis ballroom, Governor Wallace hailed a mandate “to return constitutional government to this country.” By contrast, Martin Luther King glumly observed from Birmingham’s Thomas Jefferson Hotel that “white Alabamians are desperately grasping for a way to return to the old days of white supremacy.” The editor of the Advertiser expressed amazement that “literally, most all white Alabamians voted for [Lurleen] Wallace.” Her vote far exceeded that of the nine male contenders combined, and nearly tripled that of second-place Richmond Flowers. With his heavy black support, the Attorney General had calculated that he could become governor with only 21 percent of the white vote, but so crushing was his loss that the New York Times said “it may be many years…before any serious Alabama politician will risk a close political identification with the Negro.” Stung by the results, Times editors wisely took solace in the huge biracial turnout: “The fact of overwhelming importance about Alabama’s primary was its peacefulness.”
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