At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  The Immigration Reform Act on October 3 (at the Statue of Liberty). By repealing race-based quotas on foreign applicants, President Johnson declares, American law “will never again shadow the gate to the American nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.”

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  Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels (with Bunny West in Selma), who stayed among civil rights volunteers after the Montgomery march, is arrested at the first Lowndes County demonstration and then murdered by shotgun ambush upon his release from the county jail on August 20, 1965.

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  An emergency “tent city” shelters Lowndes County sharecroppers who have been evicted from plantations after trying to register for the vote.

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  On primary day, May 3, 1966, voting for the first time in their lives, black citizens of Lowndes County choose their own candidates for local office. Seated at one of the outdoor election tables, school teacher Sarah Logan (in white glasses) collects ballots bearing a novel black panther as the required election symbol, observed by Jesse “Note” Favors (far right), a runner-up for the sheriff’s nomination.

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  Stokely Carmichael, SNCC project director in Lowndes County, hugs a young friend to celebrate the creation of an independent political party under Alabama law.

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  A pioneer in educa-tion for civil rights, Septima Clark teaches literacy and citizenship to an aspir-ing voter in Wilcox County, Alabama.

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  With his son Marty and daughter Yolanda (squeezed next to Hosea Williams), King hur-ries through a rural Alabama rainstorm in spring 1966 to encourage registration under the Voting Rights Act.

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  A large crowd in back-alley Chicago hears King’s pitch to build a movement against slum conditions in their heartland city.

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  In January of 1966, King begins the Chicago campaign by moving into a freezing, dilapi-dated tenement on the West Side.

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  Seminary student Jesse Jackson leads marches against segregated Chicago housing and schools in the summer of 1966.

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  Chicago Mayor Richard Daley mounts programs to reduce urban poverty and discrimination, then switches to repres-sion when shocking violence against King’s integration movement threatens the Democratic power base in white neighborhoods.

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  Summit negotiators Al Raby (left), Ross Beatty of the Chicago Real Estate Board (center), and Edwin “Bill” Berry of the Chicago Urban League inspect an open-housing agreement in late August 1966. King’s Chicago campaign national-ized the issues of poverty and racial injustice but failed to draw a broad response like Selma.

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  A march of 200 miles through Mississippi becomes a political and cultural watershed in June of 1966, after integration pioneer James Meredith was shot trying to prove that it was safe for black people to walk in his home state.

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  The new SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael proclaims a “black power” slogan at the Meredith March rally in Greenwood on June 16, six weeks after his independ-ent voting effort in Lowndes County was either scorned or ignored.

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  At a night meeting (clock-wise from left), Bernard Lee, Andrew Young, Robert Green, King, Lawrence Guyot, Harry Bowie, and Stokely Carmichael struggle to maintain unity on the Meredith March.

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  Behind sensational public controversy over black power and Vietnam, the Meredith marchers recruit new voters such as 104-year-old Ed Fondren, hoisted with his first registration card out-side the Panola County, Mississippi, courthouse.

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  In September 1966, King escorts students with Andrew Young, Joan Baez, and Hosea Williams (behind, left to right) past adult mobs that have terrorized black children outside the schools of Grenada, Mississippi.

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  A weary King waits with Andrew Young for a flight out of Mississippi.

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  Among Vietnam protesters jammed outside the White House gates in May 1967, James Bevel, Coretta King (behind Bevel), and pediatrician Benjamin Spock (above Coretta King) stand vigil to deliver a peace petition.

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  Soldiers in Detroit are deployed to suppress one of several large ghetto race riots in the summer of 1967.

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  Early in 1968, President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara reflect the strain of a government and country divided over the Vietnam War.

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  SNCC founder and NAACP counsel Marian Wright, testifying about acute hunger in Mississippi, urges King to mount a national movement to reduce poverty.

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  King labors to convince skeptical advisers Andrew Young, Stanley Levison, Clarence Jones, Cleveland Robinson, and James Bevel (clockwise from King) that an uphill poverty movement offers a more positive emphasis than all-out effort to stop the Vietnam War.

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  On a recruiting drive in March 1968, moved by the extreme hardship of displaced sharecroppers, King pledges to begin a poor people’s pilgrimage to Washington from Marks, Mississippi.

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  A movement for the basic dignity of sanitation workers diverts King to Memphis, where supporters collect donations in symbolic garbage cans.

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  In Memphis, after violence breaks out for the first time in a march led by King, sanitation workers maintain a picket line alongside National Guard armored vehicles.

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  On April 3, determined to overcome a court injunction and restore nonviolent discipline for a renewed march, King and James Lawson (in clerical collar) follow Abernathy into Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel. King will be assassinated on this balcony the next day.

  The barber, Frank Beck, defended segregation during the uproar over Booker T. Washington’s dinner invitation from Theodore Roosevelt. By accepting, Beck was quoted to say, Washington flirted with social equality and “let the President tempt him to walk in paths untried. Goodbye, Booker!” A white newspaper defended Beck’s last, lone Negro vote as a safe reward, saying he “always votes the Democratic ticket.”

  New York governor Nelson Rockefeller replaced his wife of thirty-two years with campaign volunteer Margaretta “Happy” Murphy, which many believed cost him the 1964 Republican presidential nomination.

  “Men hate each other because they fear each other,” King had said on September 2, 1957. “They fear each other because they don’t know each other. They don’t know each other because they can’t communicate with each other. They can’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other.” Rosa Parks and Aubrey Williams, Lyndon Johnson’s New Deal boss at the National Youth Administration, were among those present for King’s speech on the meaning of segregation.

  The sanctioned anthology of King’s major works (1986) shifts nonviolence to the past tense, from “can transform” in the actual speech to “transformed.” It omits the first and last blocks of the delivered speech advocating nonviolence (“And so I plead with you…”). Also omitted in the preserved version are King’s entire discussion of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, his peroration on normalcy, and his recitals of “Lift Every Voice” and “The Battle of Jericho,” among other passages. Some of the errors and abridgments appeared first in excerpts compiled overnight by the New York Times.

  An FBI agent, not medical examiner Paul E. Shoffeitt, speculated that one glass nick in Liuzzo’s arm “was observed as though a needle was recently used.” The toxicology report found no evidence of drugs. Hoover’s other slurs were similarly baseless. Against common sense and Moton’s testimony, he adopted the Klan informant’s stereotype of mixed Selma marchers as a “necking party.”

  William Moore, a white Baltimore postman killed on April 23; John Coley, a twenty-year-old shot while standing near Fred Shuttlesworth on September 4, after a bombing at the home of Arthur Shores; Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing on Sept
ember 15; and Virgil Ware, a thirteen-year-old shot randomly from his bicycle by an Eagle Scout on the same day.

  “Even if tomorrow Negroes were to become white, they would still be entrapped in their joblessness,” Rustin declared earlier in March, as founder of the new A. Philip Randolph Institute to combat poverty.

  Notably, the police-arranged Klan beating of Freedom Riders on May 14, 1961. A news photograph of Rowe pummeling one victim in the Trailways bus station worried control agents, who nevertheless assured FBI headquarters that their informant engaged in no violence.

  The editors of Sports Illustrated, having concluded from studying film of the fight that “a stunning right-handed punch” stopped Liston fairly, criticized the press for raging against the bout’s perceived brutality and nonbrutality with indiscriminate zeal that “verged on the hysterical.” Times reporter Robert Lipsyte was embarrassed that his paper insistently referred to Ali as Cassius Clay, denying him an identity right routinely accorded the users of stage names from Lauren Bacall (Betty Perske) to the Pope.

  “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” Lincoln said toward the end of his address on March 4, 1865. “Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’”

  McNamara warned that news “may begin to leak out, because it is quite a substantial operation to move 15–16000 men, 450 helicopters, 10,000 miles, and get them there within eight weeks from today, roughly.”

  Norman’s younger sister Jessye, then a student at Howard University, would become a noted opera singer.

  “Because he has got to die, and if you have got to do something that you don’t want to do, and it’s going to be the last thing that you do, then you have been licked. So instead of fearing death, let us learn with the young man who wrote Thanatopsis, not an old man but a young man…to approach our graves by living daily so that we can subordinate ourselves to the greatest thing that comes our way, and then the soul will finally throw off the body like a worn-out feather without consequence. Amen.”

  “As always your eloquent and generous words are a source of strength and comfort,” Johnson replied to King. “The struggle to end oppression, and to heal the scars of oppression will not be easy, but it is easier because of your courageous leadership. No cause—no goal of my Presidency—is dearer to my heart or more important to our nation than the achievement of full emancipation in our time.”

  Troy X (Augustine), Clarence X (Jingles), and Robert X (Rogers) were arrested both in 1962 and 1965. An account of the April 27, 1962, incident, in which Robert X received four gunshot wounds, forms the first chapter of Pillar of Fire, the second volume in this series. Prosecutors dropped charges against these three defendants. Eleven others were convicted in 1963, and remained in prison during the Watts uprising.

  “The master of hate, who planned the operation,” Clark asserted, “was in the White House.”

  “I was wrong about Johnson on voting,” Minnis said thirty-eight years later.

  In December 1965, Attorney General Katzenbach quietly bemoaned the school board’s first self-study as follows: “The report, to say the least, is not very good.” A second attempt in January of 1967 backed toward concession that some school policies defied explanation “by factors which do not include race.” By then, Keppel’s successor, Harold Howe II, said publicly that Northern school segregation fell “beyond the clear purview of the Civil Rights Act.”

  Blumenbach, a founder of anthropology, discovered no empirical boundaries to support classification by race. “Innumerable varieties of mankind run into one another by insensible degrees,” he wrote.

  “Since he won the Nobel Peace Prize, something tragic and unexpected has happened to Dr. King,” Friedman wrote on August 20, the day of the Daniels murder. “He has become pompous and dull.”

  As a white married couple conspicuous in civil rights work, Francis and Elizabeth Walter decided they could not “emotionally take living in Selma.” Walter covered his territory from the university town of Tuscaloosa, where his Selma Inter-Religious Project found office space in a black funeral home.

  “Mere knowledge or belief is too feeble to be a cure for man’s hostility to man, man’s tendency to fratricide,” Heschel told a convention of rabbis, introducing King. “The only remedy is personal sacrifice, to abandon, to eject what seems dear, even plausible, like prejudice, for the sake of a greater truth, to do more than I am ready to understand for the sake of God.”

  “We strongly believe that the objectives of the march do not justify the danger and the resources involved,” declared the SNCC letter mailed to King that day. A stand-in signed Lewis’s name.

  McNamara, without confirming that he actually saw the immolation, focuses in the memoir on a vivid image: “When he set himself on fire, he was holding his one-year-old daughter in his arms. Bystanders screamed, ‘Save the child!’ and he flung her out of his arms. She survived without injury.” This implausible account contradicts witnesses who said Morrison first set his daughter aside, and disregards uniform reports that she suffered not so much as a scratch or singe mark. McNamara’s conflicted portrait recalls empathy for Morrison—“I believed I understood and shared some of his thoughts”—yet bends logic to dehumanize him as fiendishly indifferent toward his own offspring. By contrast, the Vietnamese poem interprets innocent life as the embodiment of Morrison’s conscious purpose.

  Stationed with troops on alert to suppress the riots feared during the 1963 March on Washington, Forrest had been unaware that his own parents were among the marchers. He stood three months later in the honor guard for President Kennedy’s casket at the Capitol Rotunda. Forrest would return to the Ia Drang Valley for a 1993 reunion of combatants from both sides, and later became chief administrator for St. Mary’s County, Maryland.

  After twenty ballots, an all-white jury convicted Hubert Strange on December 2 for the random murder of Willie Brewster on the way home from a July 1965 white supremacy rally, at which Connie Lynch and J. B. Stoner had praised the Liuzzo ambush as a model extermination. Stoner, who served as defense counsel for Strange, denounced the jury as “white niggers.” Civil rights supporters celebrated in the Anniston courtroom by tearing up leaflets that protested an expected acquittal.

  Gandhi: “Men say I am a saint losing myself in politics. The fact is that I am a politician trying my hardest to be a saint.”

  Moynihan would go on to serve as counselor to President Richard Nixon, 1969–71, ambassador to India, 1973–75, ambassador to the United Nations, 1975–76, and U.S. senator from New York, 1977–2001.

  Reagan’s January 4 announcement speech set a dual tone. He warned darkly of oppressive liberal government, “neurotic vulgarities” on the college campus, and disorder from thinly disguised minorities—“Our city streets are jungle paths after dark”—balanced by flourishes of hopeful disposition. “Our problems are many,” he said, “but our capacity for solving them is limitless.” On Meet the Press, to a barrage of skeptical questions about how he could hope to escape a landslide defeat running on discredited Goldwater positions, Reagan patiently replied, “I think by simply telling the truth,” and he brushed off suggestions of political stigma from his opposition to civil rights: “I am just incapable of prejudice.”

  Smith lamented naïveté in SNCC: “Julian Bond (whose parents are wonderful people, one of the finest Negro families in Georgia) is, I fear, pulled this way and that.” Conflicted about Vietnam, she sensed that critics were quicker to loathe LBJ and Dean Rusk as Southerners (“I find myself thinking this”) than to offer practical plans for peace. “So: I am not agreeing with those who criticize harshly,” Smith wrote, “much less those who want to burn their draft card
s.”

  FBI director Hoover sent agents to warn Cody that King was “influenced by communist-oriented thinking,” and received assurance that the archbishop found King too “glib.” Cody, who had presided over the integration of parochial schools in New Orleans, may have devised this improbable reading of King to placate Hoover. His actions would remain cautious but friendly to the Chicago movement.

  The FBI wiretap on Levison, who was not invited to the Riklis dinner, later picked up Wachtel’s gossipy report that Bernstein promised Coretta a concert solo and diva Maria Callas flirted with King.

  A 1913 Massachusetts law, for example, voided marriages between persons not eligible to be wedded in their home states. That obscure statute would be reapplied from race to gender in 2004 as a legal impediment to the recognition of same-sex marriage. Some states banned miscegnation only if a white person was involved, to prevent what Virginia judges called “the obliteration of racial pride.”