The President’s short speech set a tone of humble realism. He said the struggle for full equality “does not require that righteous anger be silenced.” He said no one should “expect us, even together, to put right in one year or four all that took centuries to make wrong.” Then he declared himself in one sentence: “I do pledge this—to give my days, and such talents as I have been given, to the pursuit of justice and opportunity for those so long denied them.” A standing tribute began a barrage of seventeen ovations that punctuated his recital of enduring goals since Selma. To close, Johnson deliberately broke status protocol that made it taboo for any speaker to follow a sitting President. He honored the pioneers of civil rights by introducing to the podium one of their own, his new Solicitor General of the United States, Thurgood Marshall, and the motorcade returned from thundering acclaim to the White House by 10:32 P.M. “In the light of his car, his eyes were large and his face almost incandescent with the pleasure of an unexpected and flawless triumph,” wrote McPherson. “It was about the last one he would have.”
Johnson had engineered a wondrous truce. Louis Martin, the shrewd minority aide he inherited from Truman and Kennedy, packed the conference rooms with security monitors and sprinkled the corridors with attractive female college students who dispensed goodwill Hawaiian leis. A loose debate structure fostered short, disconnected statements about race from the massive array of delegates. There were Rockefellers from three states alongside hundreds of jail veterans and movement workers. James Meredith shared the floor with the segregationist Governor Paul Johnson, who had barred him from Ole Miss. Jet magazine marveled to see “towering” Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics sitting beside Rev. J. H. Jackson, King’s pulpit nemesis in Chicago. (“Why don’t you picket him?” Chauncey Eskridge quipped to students of Jackson.) One delegate proposed a racism inquest on “America’s number one untouchable sacred cow,” J. Edgar Hoover. Another disavowed hope so long as the cost of war was headed up from $14 billion in Vietnam and down from $1.4 billion on poverty. The conference staff steered the action agenda away from tripwire controversy over budgets or the Negro family, which left Daniel Moynihan “a silent, unnoticed delegate” in the Times account. Delegates sustained Deputy U.N. Ambassador James Nabrit by a ten-to-one margin when he declared a rump motion on Vietnam to be out of order, which provided the closing banner headline atop the June 3 Washington Post: “Rights Session Rejects a Viet Pullout.”
Reporters noticed that King was “conspicuously missing” from photograph sessions to begin the second day. He remained in his hotel room, hurt by Thurgood Marshall’s victory speech that championed law to the exclusion of nonviolent movements past or future: “I submit that the history of the Negro demonstrates the importance of getting rid of hostile laws, and seeking the security of new, friendly laws.” Though accustomed to much saltier private criticism from Marshall, who once called him “a boy on a man’s errand,” and who still disparaged his “missionary” marches as a nuisance, King sagged under the cumulative evidence that he was being smothered to safeguard an official definition of freedom. He resisted staff entreaties to leave Washington early, fearing that segregationists would seize upon any whisper of disaffection, and regained composure to be “totally ignored” among the delegates. “Indeed,” wrote biographer David L. Lewis, “his wife came nearer to making a contribution to the proceedings when she was asked to sing.”
King returned home to preach from Isaiah 61 about religion’s core mission “to heal the broken-hearted.” (“You see, broken-heartedness is not a physical condition,” he told the Ebenezer congregation. “It’s the condition of spiritual exhaustion.”) He ordered all but a remnant of the Alabama SCLC staff to be dismantled by Tuesday, one week after the runoff primary confirmed only a seed of promise within the Wallace landslide. Lucius Amerson of Tuskegee won the Democratic nomination and presumptive election in November to become Alabama’s first Negro sheriff since Reconstruction—and vowed exuberantly to integrate his deputies “if I can find qualified white people who are willing to serve”—but other Negro candidates fell to fear and inexperience. A rarely subdued Hosea Williams, loath to be consolidated into Chicago under a cloud of failure, improvised a bittersweet parting hymn with seventy paid workers: “No more Alabama, over me…”
On Saturday, June 4, King and Coretta visited the prestigious Cathedral of St. Philip in Atlanta, center of protest since an affiliated Episcopal school rejected young Marty King’s application to third grade in 1963, citing his race. No one yet knew that the segregation policy would give way for September of 1967. The Kings comforted two priests finishing a week-long protest vigil inside the doorway.
ROBERT KENNEDY landed that Saturday night in Johannesburg with a traveling party reduced to two aides. To quiet his anticipated “publicity stunt” against apartheid, South Africa had revoked entry visas for forty American journalists who booked the flight, and a government spokesman announced that no officials would meet the senator at the airport or anywhere else in the country. Still, 1,500 people broke through glass doors to surround the airplane. Hecklers shouting “Chuck him out!” engaged in sporadic fistfights with surging admirers whose handshakes tore away Kennedy’s cuff links. He climbed on a car roof to make a rattled arrival statement about the common heritage of frontier settlers in the Transvaal and in his state of New York, including “those of Dutch descent like my wife.”
When swirling, destitute people shouted “master, master” in the Bantu areas, an embarrassed Kennedy pleaded with them not to use the word. An explosion of defensive public comment about his tour forced the government to let him see Chief Albert Luthuli, who had lived since 1959 under a formal ban that sealed him away without movement or communication. Apartheid law mandated a long prison term for anyone who quoted him. At a barren farm near Durban, Kennedy presented Luthuli with a battery-operated tape recorder and a cassette of President Kennedy’s June 11, 1963, address calling segregation a moral issue “as old as the Scriptures and…as clear as the Constitution.” Both the visit and the gift were suggested by Allard Lowenstein, the Democratic activist who had sought out Bob Moses with ideas from his own formative travels in southern Africa, and had recruited hundreds of student volunteers to Mississippi for the 1964 Freedom Summer.
Lowenstein knew what the recording would mean to Luthuli in his forced vacuum of news, and reciprocal exposure to South Africa proved captivating in part through the stubborn grace of the only black Nobel Peace Prize winner before Martin Luther King. Kennedy had begun the trip largely on an impulsive dare, like carrying a flag to the summit of a mountain named for his late brother, but he wrote more personally in his journal that Luthuli’s eyes could turn “intense and hard and hurt, all at once,” and came to treasure indelible faces that emerged from the starkest confinements of race. At Natal University, Kennedy absorbed questions from twenty thousand white students about the biblical authority for apartheid, then blurted out, “What if God is black?” Challenged to name the U.S. President who had proclaimed an everlasting gulf between the races in 1885, he shrugged with a combative grin, “the one who was beaten in 1888.”
On Monday, June 6, Kennedy flew over the political prison at Robben Island to Cape Town. An empty chair on a university stage there marked a place for the national student leader who had invited him to South Africa and had since been banned for five years. “We stand here in the name of freedom,” Kennedy told a crowd of 15,000 white people on their annual Day of Affirmation. His address placed “the racial inequality of apartheid” on a broad footing with hatred and suffering from New York to India—“These are differing evils, but they are the common works of man”—then confronted above all the “danger of futility, the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills.” He invoked nonviolent witness against the stronghold of South Africa. “It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped,” said Kennedy. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal,
or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and…those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
The Cape Town speech stirred imagination worldwide. “This little snip thinks he can tell us what to do,” protested a South African minister. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr cabled “enthusiastic appreciation” from New York. The Washington Post likened his “political safari” to Attila the Hun’s descent upon Rome. Hostile American journals chastised Kennedy for sharpening racial divisions, and for “attempting to shake hands with every black African he could reach.” From his car roof, above a sea of outstretched hands, he joined spontaneous renditions of “We Shall Overcome.”
JAMES MEREDITH’S maverick announcement had made no news from the White House Conference, where a wag hung a sign in the Sheraton-Park press room that the “March Against Fear” would be sponsored by an imaginary “World Committee for the Preservation of James Meredith.” A friend worried that Meredith was obsessed by the negligible response to his published memoir; others thought he resented gossip about poor spring grades in Columbia Law School. When he did proceed to Memphis, and set out as promised from the Peabody Hotel, reports noted eccentricities in keeping with his determination to walk 220 miles back into his home state without the marshals or U.S. Army brigades that guarded him at Ole Miss, proving that Negroes could exercise freedom now even in Mississippi. Meredith wore a yellow pith helmet, carried an ivory-tipped walking stick, and displayed a white horse’s tail among gifts from a Sudanese chief. He covered the twelve miles to the Tennessee line on Sunday, June 5, and another fourteen miles on Monday before a voice called his name from the wooded shoulder near Hernando, Mississippi. “I only want James Meredith!” shouted Aubrey Norvell, scattering reporters and a small entourage that included a white Episcopal priest and a volunteer publicist from New York. Norvell, a forty-year-old hardware contractor, fired his 16-gauge automatic shotgun three times and surrendered, still smoking his pipe, to a dozen assorted escort officers who jumped from their cars. The sheriff of DeSoto County said the suspect appeared to be intoxicated. An Associated Press bulletin flashed news of Meredith’s death at 6:33 P.M., in time for many evening broadcasts. A correction at 7:08 P.M. said he was in surgery.
President Johnson denounced “an awful act of violence” within the hour from his ranch in Texas. Attorney General Katzenbach, acknowledging the presence of FBI agents at the scene, convened an evening press conference to address the chances for federal prosecution under the Voting Rights Act. “James Meredith is not only a friend,” he said, “but also a brave man.” Robert Kennedy reacted from Stellenbosch, South Africa, wishing Meredith a full recovery, and CORE that night became the first civil rights organization vowing publicly to take up the “March Against Fear” at the spot of his ambush on Highway 51. In Atlanta, debating whether to join, Andrew Young argued that King’s staff was stretched far too thin already, “running back and forth to Chicago.” Hosea William said Young was scared of Mississippi. “He was furious with me because he thought I wasn’t angry enough over the shooting of Meredith,” Young recalled. “We almost came to blows right then and there.”
Young refused to join the early-morning flight to Memphis on Tuesday, June 7. Rev. James Lawson, the Gandhian mentor to the early Nashville student movement, escorted his SCLC colleagues through crowds of reporters and converging pilgrims into the hospital, past police cordons and anxious medical personnel into Meredith’s room. Surgeons by then had removed some seventy shotgun pellets from his back to his scalp. King, combining pastoral and political roles delicately, emerged with permission from the groggy but still temperamental Meredith to begin a march of tribute in his name, and Lawson’s station wagon, stocked with fried chicken for lunch in transit, led a caravan down into Mississippi. Twenty-one marchers, observed by at least that many reporters, resumed the walk from the point of the previous day’s bloodstains in the quiet afternoon heat. King locked arms with Floyd McKissick and Stokely Carmichael, the two new leaders of CORE and SNCC respectively, before a line of Mississippi state troopers confronted them at the top of the first gentle hill with orders to get off the pavement. King blinked with surprise, and called for protection instead, but the troopers resolutely shoved him aside with the others. “We walked from Selma to Montgomery in the middle of the road,” he protested to no avail, stumbling backward. Troopers knocked Cleveland Sellers to the ground. Carmichael lunged toward the most aggressive one, but King kept his arm crooked tightly with an elbow and called out for help.
The swirling scuffle would highlight the next day’s front pages, but the marchers quickly recovered and walked six miles on the dirt shoulder under the frowning gaze of the troopers. Lawson and Hosea Williams led closing prayers in a pasture before banter resumed over the incident. Carmichael said it was hard to fight while square-dancing with King, who mimicked his own profound sermon tones with a smile, “I restrained Stokely, nonviolently.” Carmichael apologized for his breach of discipline, reminding King that in six years “on the front lines” he had been beaten unconscious and arrested many times without a hint of retaliation. While mindful of demonstration protocol, and acutely conscious that King had congratulated him for the SNCC leadership with a friendly reminder of magnified danger in every public gesture, Carmichael insisted that the purpose for any joint march was not yet defined. This much became clear that night at a rally of a thousand people in Lawson’s Centenary Methodist Church back in Memphis. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League proposed to unite behind President Johnson’s civil rights bill of 1966, but McKissick swept away the crowd by scoffing at new laws, Johnson’s White House conference—“I still say it was rigged”—and even the Statue of Liberty: “They ought to break that young lady’s legs and throw her into the Mississippi!” Carmichael said he refused to beg for undelivered rights and protections, to great applause, and Charles Evers brought down the house with a pledge to avenge Meredith with an armed black host “like Buck Jones and Tim McCoy,” two Hollywood cowboys famous for gunplay. King managed to recapture movement themes with a closing reminiscence about Birmingham, saying Bull Connor was always happy to see a few Negroes throw rocks: “He was an expert in that. He had maps of the heart of violence.”
Raw leadership debate shifted to the Lorraine Motel. By midnight, Roy Wilkins lost any small inclination to march himself, in part because he could not bear to hear the President scorned as “that cat Johnson” in youth jive. “Dr. King, I’m really sorry for you,” he said on departing for the airport, and Whitney Young soon followed. All night, stripped down to an old-fashioned strap undershirt, King presided over a room jammed with movement veterans from Fannie Lou Hamer to the lawyer Charles Morgan. Hosea Williams and Ernest Thomas, founder of the Deacons for Defense, set a daunting tone with their loud argument—“Shut up, chubby,” said Thomas—about whether nonviolence took more guts or brains than armed protection.
By Wednesday morning, when King took a compromise agenda to Bowld Hospital in Memphis, Meredith remained too weak to sit but was feisty enough to reject the chain of command. He believed in only one general, and it was still his march. Roles crazily reversed when an administrator interrupted their long remonstrations with an agitated demand for Meredith to vacate the hospital within five minutes because of Klan threats. King objected loudly to the cowardly nonmedical “eviction,” but Meredith called for a wheelchair and rolled out to face a bank of television lights. Incoherently, he said he was embarrassed to have been bushwhacked by an amateur marksman, and would have dispatched Norvell himself if he had brought his gun as planned instead of his Bible, which for some reason he had given to a photographer during a rainstorm. Then Meredith fainted. Reporters saw tears running down his cheeks while doctors tried feverishly to revive him, and “three friends rolled him away from the tumultuous scene” for a flight home to New York.
The march resumed on a tenuous mandate
, covering only three miles that afternoon. “It’ll build up,” said Stanley Levison, predicting a “junior Selma” in spite of crippling handicaps: no logistical preparation, federal protection, or compelling reason for volunteers to walk four times the Selma distance. The lines grew to 208 people on Thursday, and finished nine miles. King paused on the road to announce the death by heart attack of a local sharecropper who had joined them. He flew away to Chicago meetings and returned in time to preach the funeral of Armistead Phipps in Enid, Mississippi, apologizing that he had never before stood in a pulpit without “proper ministerial attire,” telling mourners they had identified Phipps’s body by his poll tax receipt and his membership card in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. “This was a man who was not afraid,” he said.
King, Carmichael, and the other SNCC workers enjoyed their first prolonged company on the road. They detoured past country courthouses to register bystanders who gathered, and celebrated a 104-year-old farmer named Ed Fondren who came out on the shoulders of neighbors with his first voter’s card. King complained of private frictions only with Charles Evers, over his popular roadside speeches professing eagerness to shoot it out with the Klan. Such bravado had built a political base for Evers in Natchez, but King finally boiled over about hypocrisy rather than the politics. “If you really believed that sort of thing,” he said sharply, “you’d start by shooting ‘Delay’ Beckwith.” He reminded Evers that the Klansman who had killed his brother Medgar “is walking around Mississippi today,” not far from the line of march.
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