At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  A small story the same day from southern Mississippi revealed a first hint of Klan conspiracy attached to the corpse fished out of Pretty Creek, quoting the police statement by James Jones that deafening shots had blasted the head of Ben Chester White and left “parts of it all over my new car.” King left to raise funds for the Meredith campaign at a rally of 12,000 on Sunday in Detroit’s Cobo Hall, sponsored by Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers. The FBI received death threats against King from a Klan unit among Reuther’s members at Cadillac Assembly Plant Number 1, which they didn’t disclose, but inquiries about black power generated headlines along his trail back to Mississippi: “Supremacy by Either Race Would Be Evil, He Says.” On Tuesday, June 21, King and Ralph Abernathy detoured by car with twenty volunteers from the main column to commemorate three victims of Klan murder exactly two years earlier, on the first night of Freedom Summer. Several hundred local people joined a rattled walk from Mt. Nebo Baptist Church to the Neshoba County courthouse in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Shocked employers along the sidewalk pointed out their family maids. (“Yes, it’s me,” the matronly Mary Batts called out to acknowledge a stare, “and I’ve kept your children.”) Hostile drivers buzzed the lines at high speed, and one young woman shouted from the back seat of a blue convertible that swerved to a stop: “I wouldn’t dirty my goddamned car with you black bastards!” When a line of officers blocked access to the courthouse lawn, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, face-to-face with King, granted respite for public prayer among the bystanders closing in from both sides of the narrow street, scores of them armed with pistols, clubs, and at least one garden hoe.

  King turned to raise his voice above the lines kneeling back along the pavement. “In this county, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner were brutally murdered,” he cried. “I believe in my heart that the murderers are somewhere around me at this moment.” Reporters heard “right behind you” and “you’re damn right” among grunts and chuckles in response. One wrote, “King appeared to be shaken.” King knew Deputy Price himself was among eighteen defendants in the pending federal conspiracy indictment, which had been filed in the absence of a state response to the murders and remained stalled in pretrial legal maneuvers.

  “They ought to search their hearts,” he continued out loud. “I want them to know that we are not afraid. If they kill three of us, they will have to kill all of us. I am not afraid of any man, whether he is in Michigan or Mississippi, whether he is in Birmingham or Boston.” Jeers soon drowned out the closing chorus of “We Shall Overcome.” Only darting blows struck the return march until someone toppled newsmen carrying heavy network cameras. “Some 25 white men surged over the television men, swinging, and then flailed into the line of march, their eyes wide with anger,” observed New York Times correspondent Roy Reed. “The Negroes screamed.” Attackers “hurled stones, bottles, clubs, firecrackers and shouts of obscenity,” he added, and police did not intervene “until half a dozen Negroes began to fight back.” That night, careening automobile posses sprayed Philadelphia’s black neighborhood with gunfire. Riders in the fourth wave narrowly missed a startled FBI agent posted near the mass meeting at Mt. Nebo. Return shots from one targeted house wounded a passing vigilante, and this noisy postlude attracted a misleading headline for Reed’s dramatic front-page account of the courthouse standoff: “Whites and Negroes Trade Shots.”

  The Philadelphia trauma intensified conflict within the movement over strategy. King, lamenting “a complete breakdown of law and order,” requested federal protection in a telegram to President Johnson, and rejoined the main march in Yazoo City during a fierce debate that erupted during the Tuesday night mass meeting. Ernest Thomas of the Louisiana Deacons for Defense and Justice ridiculed hope for safety in the hands of federal agents he said were always “smiling, writing a lot of papers, sending it back to Washington, D.C.” He advocated vigilante committees to meet lawless repression. “If I must die, then I have to die the way that I feel,” Thomas shouted to a chorus of cheers.

  King came on late with an impassioned rebuttal. “Somebody said tonight that we are in a majority,” he said. “Don’t fool yourself. We are not a majority in a single state…. We are ten percent of the population of this nation, and it would be foolish of me to stand up and tell you we are going to get our freedom by ourselves.” He challenged boasts of armed promise in the isolated black-majority counties: “Who runs the National Guard of Mississippi? How many Negroes do you have in it? Who runs the State Patrol of Mississippi?” Any vigilante campaign would backfire “the minute we started,” he argued, not only in military result but also in public opinion—“And I tell you, nothing would please our oppressors more”—so that “it is impractical even to think about it.” King won back the crowd with a sermon against violence. “I am not going to allow anybody to pull me so low as to use the very methods that perpetuated evil throughout our civilization,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of violence. I’m tired of the war in Vietnam. I’m tired of war and conflict in the world. I’m tired of shooting. I’m tired of hatred. I’m tired of selfishness. I’m tired of evil. I’m not going to use violence no matter who says it!” Then he retired to internal debates through the night and most of Wednesday. Carmichael rejected “black equality” as an alternative to black power, insisting there was nothing inherently violent in the word “power.” King vowed to leave the march if the inflammatory rhetoric continued. The leaders compromised on a pledge to avoid the overtly competitive sloganeering, which advertised divisions at the core of a small movement based within an impoverished racial minority.

  President Johnson deflected King’s request for federal protection by relaying assurances from Governor Paul Johnson “that all necessary protection can and will be provided.” Additional units of the Mississippi Highway Patrol “were promptly dispatched,” he advised from Washington, urging King to “maintain the closest liaison with Assistant Attorney General John Doar, who will remain in Mississippi until the end of the march.” Johnson’s reply telegram reached King late June 23 on a long day’s walk through rainstorms into Canton. Latecomers were building numbers toward the finale set for Jackson, twenty miles ahead, and local supporters swelled the crowd above two thousand for a night rally on the grounds of McNeal Elementary School for Negroes, where Hosea Williams was arrested in a new dispute over permits. As tent workers rushed to put up shelter, a Highway Patrol commander announced over a megaphone: “You will not be allowed to erect the tents. If you do, you will be removed.”

  Hushed disbelief spread with the realization that the Highway Patrol phalanx was turning inward. “I don’t know what they plan for us,” King called out from the back of a flatbed truck, “but we aren’t going to fight any state troopers.” Giving the microphone to Carmichael, he ran his right hand nervously over his head as armed officers spread along the perimeter. Carmichael chopped the air again with his finger. “The time for running has come to an end!” he shouted, soaked in perspiration, his eyes and teeth gleaming against the dark night. “You tell them white folks in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead!” Cheers covered an interlude just long enough for newsmen to count sixty-one helmeted officers fastening gas masks in unison. John Doar helplessly parried a cry for intervention: “What can I do? Neither side will give an inch.”

  When the first loud pops sounded, King called out above the squeals that it was tear gas. “Nobody leave,” he shouted. “Nobody fight back. We’re going to stand our ground.” The speakers’ truck disappeared beneath thick white clouds, however, as guttural screams drowned out his attempt to sing “We Shall Overcome.” Choking, vomiting people ran blindly or dived to the muddy ground where fumes were thinner, but charging officers kicked and clubbed them to flight with the stocks of the tear gas guns. Within half an hour, the Highway Patrol units impounded the tents and dragged from the cleared field a dozen unconscious stragglers. They revived a three-year-old boy from Toronto, Canada. Hysteria lingered in the haze. Observers called the
violence “worse than Selma,” and Episcopal priest Robert Castle of New Jersey wondered out loud “if democracy in Mississippi and perhaps in the United States was dead.” Two friends held up Carmichael, who had collapsed and kept repeating incoherently, “They’re gonna shoot again!” Andrew Young, having leapt from the speakers’ truck in panic, bent at the waist to stagger through the streets, shouting hoarsely: “We’re going to the church! We gotta worry about the people now!” Reporters followed King as he retreated, wiping his eyes. “In light of this, Dr. King” asked CBS News correspondent John Hart, “have you rethought any of the philosophy of nonviolence?”

  “Oh, not at all,” King replied. “I still feel that we’ve got to be nonviolent. How could we be violent in the midst of a police force like that?” To the battered remnant that night in a rendezvous church, his remarks brushed with bitterness over the “ironic” assurances received only hours before from President Johnson. “And the very same men that tear gassed us tonight,” said King, “are the men that we are told will be our protectors.” Catching himself, he veered into a strangely subdued reverie: “You know, the one thing I have learned…on this march is that it is a shame before almighty God that people earn as little money as the Negro people of Mississippi. You know the story.” He spoke of the humbling, bonding effect of seeing faces in desperation so closely.

  REFUGEES SCATTERED for the night, many to sleep on the floor of a Catholic school gym. While the marchers regrouped in Canton on Friday, June 24, some two thousand white Mississippians converged on Philadelphia to see if any Negroes dared to reappear as promised at the courthouse scene of Tuesday’s mayhem. “We were brutalized here the other day,” King declared over a megaphone in their midst, “and I guess someone felt that this would stop us and that we wouldn’t come back. But we are right here today standing firm, saying we are gonna have our freedom.” Catcalls and shouts of “nigger” drowned out most of his remarks. A few bottles and eggs landed among the three hundred exposed volunteers who pushed with King back to Mt. Nebo Baptist Church, none too trusting of their Highway Patrol escort.

  The glum but dutiful line of officers was a visible result of the latest private tussle between Washington and Governor Johnson along the razor’s edge of Mississippi politics. (John Doar was filing a new federal lawsuit against Neshoba County authorities for failure to provide basic law enforcement.) On the movement side, relations were equally charged but more fraternal than supposed. In Philadelphia, Carmichael, Floyd McKissick, and Willie Ricks stood with King once again to face the quivering hostility of armed civilians and officers alike. Ricks had pulled King to safety through the tear gas in Canton, and King knew Carmichael and Ricks had endured many of the toughest movement projects for years, each suffering the death of more than one young friend. In private, King conceded to his advisers that the Meredith march had been a “terrible mistake,” but he insisted that its troubles lay beyond the publicized internal squabbles. While he tolerated the loyal exuberance of subalterns like Hosea Williams, who contested SNCC rivals in everything from card games and water pistol ambushes to shoving matches, King respected SNCC’s earned right to an independent voice. “Listen, Andy,” he told Young, “if Stokely is saying the same thing I am saying, he becomes like my assistant.” He teased Ricks over his new nickname, “Black Power,” in a way that Ricks prized as collegial recognition from a lifelong master of striking fire in an audience. When King said he lacked only clothes to make a fine minister, Ricks boldly asked to borrow some, and King surprised him with an invitation to take freely from his closet in Atlanta. When Carmichael confessed that he had used King’s fame as a platform to test the black power slogan, King shrugged, “I have been used before.” For all their strategic arguments, which outsiders fanned into a presumption of deep enmity, King and Carmichael discovered a common sense of fun to relieve tedium and tension on the exposed hike through Mississippi. On the last night, King bolted from interminable disputes about overdue bills and the rally program. “I’m sorry, y’all,” he told the collected leadership. “James Brown is on. I’m gone.”

  Carmichael hurried with King from a dean’s house to musical bedlam on the Tougaloo College football field, where the soul star Brown writhed in French cuffs and a pompadour through a freedom concert arranged by Harry Belafonte. For want of a piano, Sammy Davis, Jr., performed scat songs a cappella. At the microphone, actor Marlon Brando playfully slapped to his sweaty forehead one of the bumper stickers Willie Ricks had been plastering surreptitiously on police cars: a black panther emblem with words adapted from Muhammad Ali, “We’re the Greatest.” Brando said he felt “wholly inappropriate,” and fumbled for words: “You can’t imagine how I feel, because I haven’t really participated in this movement, not in the way my conscience gnaws at me that I should.” He paid tribute to the estimated ten thousand Mississippians who had walked part of the way from Memphis, and to the array of visiting marchers. Ann Barth, granddaughter of Swiss theologian Karl Barth, joined Allard Lowenstein and numerous veterans of Selma, including one-legged Jim Leatherer and Henry Smith of Mississippi, who wore the orange vest given those who had made the whole trip to Montgomery on foot. Unable to push through the crowd, the thirty-year pacifist Jim Peck sent King a note about an early staff purge against white people: “I wanted to assure you that, despite the dirty deal I have received from CORE, I am still with The Movement and shall be as long as I live.”

  On Sunday, June 26—three weeks after Meredith left Memphis—the marchers swelled to 15,000 over the final eight miles from Tougaloo into Jackson. Newcomers included Walter Reuther of the autoworkers and Al Raby with ten busloads from Chicago, plus both King’s “twin” white lawyers from New York, Harry Wachtel and Stanley Levison. Film crews from the television networks gathered reactions from the bystanders along the way. “I don’t like the niggers,” said a typically blunt man. “They stink.” A reporter quoted seventy-eight-year-old Monroe Williams as he hobbled on a cane in his first demonstration: “If my daddy had done this, it would have been a lot better for me.” Investigators recorded feverish anxiety over social norms in flux. A waitress on North Mill Street, confronting integrated customers from Texas, summoned a Negro cook to take the order while she telephoned a gang of segregationists to intervene. The latter arrived almost simultaneously with the Deacons for Defense and agents from the new Jackson FBI office, both called by the Texans, and the FBI agents in turn called local police officers, who resolved the standoff by shutting down the restaurant.

  The closing rally gathered at the “rear” plaza of the state capitol, because Highway Patrol officers in gas masks, backed by National Guard with bayoneted M-1 rifles, sternly blocked the southern front where Mississippi governors traditionally took office near a goddess statue to Confederate womanhood. Disjointed speeches wilted in the heat. King preached from Luke on the parable of Lazarus and Dives, then improvised on his dream oratory “that one day the empty stomachs of Mississippi will be filled, that the idle industries of Appalachia will be revitalized.” James Meredith, healed enough to make cantankerous public comments about the reshaped march (“The whole damn thing smells to me”), mis-introduced “Michael” Carmichael, who called upon black soldiers to resist “mercenary” service in Vietnam and declared, “Number one, we have to stop being ashamed of being black.” Short prayers between speeches provided respites of inspiration. “We thank Thee, O God, that Thou hast given us the courage to march these past days,” said Robert Green. Reverend Allen Johnson of Jackson prayed from the thirteenth chapter of Hebrews: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unaware. Remember them that are in bonds as though bound with them, and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in body.”

  Gnomish Harold DeWolf, King’s theology professor from Boston University, had collapsed of heatstroke near Tougaloo. Negro rescuers urged him to disregard occasional taunts of “We don’t need whitey” from black power advocates along roads to the hospital. Finall
y released, DeWolf heard Andrew Young call his name on the public address system as he approached the capitol, and soon was drafted to give the last prayer captured for the hour-long CBS television special that night. “O God, father of all mankind,” he said, “we see spread out before Thee the red and black soil of Mississippi, an altar on which a great burnt offering has been laid.”

  A New York Times retrospective said the Meredith march “made it clear that a new philosophy is sweeping the civil rights movement…. It had Mr. Carmichael as its leader and the late Malcolm X as its prophet. It also had a battle cry, ‘Black Power,’ and a slogan directed at whites, ‘Move on Over, or We’ll Move on Over YOU.’…Reporters and cameramen drawn to a demonstration by the magic of Dr. King’s name stay to write about and photograph Mr. Carmichael.” Primal signals compelled action in distant quarters. Within a month, religious thinkers bought space in the Times to interpret “the crisis brought upon our country by historic distortions of important human realities.” Their joint composition—“BLACK POWER: Statement by National Committee of Negro Churchmen”—rode the conceptual mix of theology and blackness like a fresh rodeo bull, using the noun “power” fifty-five times. “We are faced now with a situation where conscience-less power meets powerless conscience,” declared the consortium of bishops and pastors, “threatening the very foundation of our nation.”

  Stanley Levison downgraded the contagion with a jeweler’s eye for politics. To him, the cry of black power disguised a lack of broad support for SNCC and CORE with cultural fireworks that amounted to an extravagant death rattle. “They’re just going to die of attrition,” he predicted when King called after midnight on July 1, “and as they die they’re going to be noisier and more militant in their expression…. Because they’re weak, they’re making a lot of noise, and we don’t want to fall into that trap.” Levison, perceiving a larger obstacle than the demise of two civil rights groups, worried that the movement’s historic achievements were not consolidated enough to resist or reverse what King called a “mood of violence” throughout the country. He deflected King’s instinctive response to formulate a warning about the spillover dangers of “defensive violence,” an understandable and prevalent doctrine. When King pressed to “clarify many misconceptions” and to refine nonviolence as “a social strategy for change” in the democratic tradition, Levison gently but firmly said he and literary agent Joan Daves had unearthed no interest. New York publishers and magazine editors considered King’s position “well-known and obvious.” They wanted something novel and strong. Black power was hot, whether or not it would last. King was too Sunday School, and he no longer commanded attention at the White House.