Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Eisenhower’s patience snapped when Faubus allowed the mob to run free again the next morning. No longer denying the crisis, he convinced himself that Little Rock was not an issue of racial integration but of insurrection, like Shays’s Rebellion. “Well, if we have to do this, and I don’t see any alternative,” he told Attorney General Brownell, “then let’s apply the best military principles to it and see that the force we send there is strong enough that it will not be challenged, and will not result in any clash.” Brownell never forgot the surge of adrenaline he felt at the President’s words. Eisenhower phoned General Maxwell Taylor at the Pentagon and told him to scrap plans to use U.S. marshals. He wanted riot-trained units of the 101st Airborne Division, and ordered Taylor to show how fast he could deploy them at Central High School. Taylor put a thousand soldiers into Little Rock before nightfall.

  School integration in Little Rock resumed the next morning, when the presence of the U.S. Army settled the military question without casualty or engagement. What little resistance there was occurred inside the school, student style, in a campaign of Negro-baiting that produced a year-long ordeal for school administrators as well as the new students. Outside the school, the heat of the postmortem rhetoric varied inversely with the speaker’s capacity for action. As Governor Faubus was reduced to utter ineffectuality, his pronouncements reached at once for the heights of fantasy and the depths of racial fear. In a wild radio speech, he accused white soldiers from the “occupation forces” of following the female Negro students into the girls’ bathrooms at Central High. Faubus had failed by his own standards and brought international ridicule down upon his state, but Arkansas politicians conceded that his performance made him unbeatable in the next election.

  On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched into space the world’s first man-made satellite, named Sputnik. News of the achievement produced a tremor of fear and wounded pride in American politics. Overnight, nearly everything about America was deemed second-rate—its scientists, its morals, its math teachers, even its road system. Edward Teller, the hydrogen bomb scientist, told Eisenhower that Sputnik was a worse defeat for the United States than Pearl Harbor. A blue-ribbon commission reported shrilly that the West was indefensible without a drastic increase in weapons spending and a crash program to build underground “fallout shelters” for every American citizen. “Control of space,” declared Lyndon Johnson, “means control of the world.” When the first American attempt to match the Soviet feat exploded two seconds after takeoff, in full view of the television cameras, the national humiliation was complete. Reporters asked Eisenhower questions on practically no other subject. Faubus disappeared from the news as suddenly as he had appeared, and the entire race issue receded proportionally.

  As King struggled against the tide, competition from the NAACP was hardly the sole obstacle he encountered among his own allies. Tactically, he knew that he must carry the cause beyond bus segregation, but how could Negroes boycott facilities—libraries, schools, parks, restaurants, and others—from which they were already excluded? The bus system had provided political leverage to the great mass of Montgomery’s Negroes, and the boycott had allowed them to exercise it effectively through an action—staying off the buses—that did not require face-to-face, illegal confrontations with white authority. No other segregated institution offered such advantages.

  Lacking ready answers, King applied himself with a vengeance to his most obvious talent, speaking at the rate of four events per week, or two hundred a year. After interviewing King, one magazine estimated his annual travel at 780,000 miles—a staggering total, which, even if only a quarter true, put him on propeller-driven commercial airplanes steadily enough to circle the globe eight times a year. He acquired a reputation as the complete evangelist, who could preach integration to the humble as well as the elite, to the erudite and the ignorant, to the practical and the idealistic. As he did so, however, he contracted the evangelist’s curse. No matter how many cheers he received or how many tear-streaked faces assured him that lives were transformed, tomorrow’s newspaper still read pretty much like today’s. Segregation remained in place. People listened wholeheartedly but did nothing, and King himself was surer of what they should think than what they should do. Under these conditions, oratory grew upon him like a narcotic. He needed more and more of it because he enjoyed the experience, yet was progressively dissatisfied with the results.

  One idea for improvement was to amplify his message through the public media. “All we need is the sponsor to give us a half hour weekly,” Levison wrote King, half seriously. “We already have the star.” Television was beyond the reach of Negroes, and the best Levison could do was to help King obtain a contract from Harper & Brothers to write a book about Montgomery. This venture held out the prestige of authorship and the promise of a mass audience, but cultural and commercial pressures inhibited the project. King’s publishers wanted him to sound intellectual but not too dry, inspirational but not too “Negro.” One editor wanted to make sure that in listing the grievances of Negroes he never said anything that might be construed as favorable to communism. All the editors cautioned King against projecting familiarity or identification with the readers. He was to be billed explicitly as “a leader of his people,” addressing himself to whites. These complexities of voice and tone proved difficult even for King. He fell badly behind in meeting the deadline set by the publishers, to whom King was an unproven writer with a perishable story to tell.

  The pressure built steadily until a New York editor flew to Montgomery and ordered King to stop preaching. “To prepare and preach sermons is to use up creative energy that your soul and body wants to use on this book,” he wrote in a follow-up letter. King ignored the order, but he finally accepted an ultimatum that he pay $2,000 of his $3,500 royalty advance to a Harper’s staff employee, Hermine Popper, in return for her guidance as a writer and editor. Within days, Popper was functioning at the hub of an editorial network that kept updated revisions flying back and forth between her, King, Levison, Rustin, Harris Wofford, and MIA historian L. D. Reddick. King confided to Levison that the book project “has been the most difficult job that I have encountered.”

  In the first year of their acquaintance, King came to rely upon Levison as a counsellor, business manager, guide to big-time New York politics, and above all as a friend who made no demands. All King’s other advisers pressed personal yearnings, ambitions, or pet theories upon him, even when they tried not to, but Levison seemed to shun frivolity and stargazing, contributing his time freely so long as he was working efficiently. He and King seldom discussed the grand questions, as agreement on such things was largely unspoken between them. Levison did advise King in great detail about his personal investment strategy, observing that “bonds do better when common stocks weaken,” and even pitched himself into King’s tax records. To King, Levison was living proof that a crusader need not be a chump, a victim, or a failure, and in that respect it was gratifying that Levison got along so well with King’s parents. When Levison first visited King in Atlanta, Daddy King brought him home to dinner. Mother King served him her son’s favorite lemon pie. Such a festive interracial occasion was a noteworthy event in Atlanta, where even Daddy King’s white friends in the mayor’s office did not come home with him to share a meal. The Kings received Levison more warmly than they received Negro advisers such as Rustin, whom they regarded as possibly dangerous to their son. And Daddy King had a known weakness for rich men.

  Not long after meeting “a most extraordinary young minister” in Baltimore, Levison had stunned his wife by telling her that Martin King was his only true friend in the world. Levison liked nothing better than to talk politics with King. It was usually after midnight when King called, and they talked for hours, always blunt but friendly. King did not pretend to admire Levison’s taste in clothes, and Levison did not pretend to like the boiled cabbage served him when he went South. Their relationship seemed to be grounded in a neutral zone of corny ideal
s, beyond race. King refused to accept Levison’s profession of agnosticism. “You don’t know it, Stan,” he teased, “but you believe in God.”

  King pursued two alternative methods of spreading the movement by mass communications. It might be possible, he thought, to attack segregation in a specified city or town by means of a planned series of mass meetings, rallying night after night around the ideals he had put forward in Montgomery. His model, oddly enough, was the “crusade” developed by evangelist Billy Graham, whose skilled organizers prepared each target area for months—compiling mailing lists, enlisting church sponsors and volunteer groups, arranging publicity campaigns and special bus routes—before Graham arrived for two weeks of nightly mass meetings. The revival-style format held great promise for King, who, like Graham, was still above all else a proselytizer.

  Graham, for his part, thought enough of King’s purpose to invite him to deliver a prayer during the sixty-eight-night Madison Square Garden Crusade in 1957. The evangelist was acquiring a reputation among Negroes as an enlightened white fundamentalist. During the Little Rock crisis, one of Graham’s Negro staff members published an article titled “No Color Line in Heaven,” in which he compiled Graham’s views opposing segregationist dogma. Graham held rallies in Harlem, and his crusade committee included Gardner Taylor and Thomas Kilgore of In Friendship, two of King’s closest and most influential friends. At their suggestion, Graham held three private strategy meetings with King in New York, after which he became one of the few whites to call King by his birth name, Mike. The two men shared enormous optimism over the potential of serial crusades to advance the power of evangelism through mass organization and communication. On King’s side, there were even dreams about a Graham-and-King crusade that would convert racially mixed audiences first in the North, then in border states, and finally in the Deep South. These dreams foundered, however, on the question of emphasis between politics and pure religion. Kilgore and Taylor found Graham increasingly unwilling to talk about the worldly aspects of the race issue, without which the drama of interracial revivals would be lost. Furthermore, racial polarization was making it more difficult for Graham to hold interracial meetings at all. Like countless Southern moderates, he was being forced to choose, and within a year King would be writing to “Brother Graham” pleading with him not to allow segregationist politicians on the platform of the San Antonio Crusade. The two preachers tacitly agreed to confine their cooperation to privacy.

  King did not retreat so easily from his plans for the National Baptist Convention. With five million members and more than twenty thousand preachers, it dwarfed the NAACP and made the hundred or so founding preachers of the SCLC seem numerically insignificant. King’s goal—to turn the mammoth, unwieldy, politically inert National Baptist Convention into a reform vehicle—was a challenge to the most astute preacher politicians. He discussed it obsessively before the September 1957 convention, when J. H. Jackson had promised to step down. As many preachers suspected, however, Jackson developed second thoughts about his constitutional obligation. When the moment was ripe, a Jackson lieutenant sprang up, called for a suspension of the rules to keep him on as president, and led a great shout of acclamation. It was over more quickly than a Teamsters election. Afterward, Jackson moved steadily to consolidate power against active involvement in civil rights, growing more autocratic and more conservative. The preachers close to King, joking that Billy Graham was more likely to embrace the civil rights cause than was Jackson, drifted toward insurrection within their own church.

  King pushed doggedly to concoct the formula for a new movement. On October 18, at the first executive board meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he presented to the assembled preachers detailed plans for a campaign he called the Crusade for Citizenship, a modified version of a Billy Graham crusade to be directed toward the goal of Negro registration. There would be mass meetings, evangelical appeals to the unregistered, then registration classes and support committees for those making the attempt. Acutely aware that nearly all his board members were also NAACP officials, King tried to assure everyone that Roy Wilkins approved of the crusade, but the skeptical preachers told him that, if so, the word was not getting down to the local NAACP chapters.

  Almost desperate with haste, King announced plans to begin the Crusade for Citizenship simultaneously in at least ten cities by February. Quite apart from the NAACP’s skepticism, such a schedule was ambitious to the point of being foolhardy at a time when the fledgling SCLC consisted of nothing more than the preachers there in the church with King. Those men behaved like a council of barons. They were given to long-winded speeches of cross-pollinated tribute, to deliberative posturing, and to a work process consisting largely of decrees, delegations, and postponements. Recognizing that the SCLC did not even have an office, King appointed a committee (which included Daddy King) to discuss the best city of location. Then, after most of those present spoke of the personal qualities they would most like to see in the SCLC’s first paid staff person, King appointed a committee to select a director. After a few motions on minor housekeeping matters, the members moved to adjourn.

  Five days later, King presided over the annual business meeting of his Dexter congregation. The occasion marked the third anniversary of the bold coup by which he had first centralized and commanded the proud congregation. In spite of the renown he had brought upon the church since then, he spoke in a tone of apology. Confessing that he had “fallen behind in my church responsibilities,” he reported that only a handful of new members had been added to the congregation. He spoke retrospectively for the most part, recommended no new programs, and established only two new church committees. Amid painful descriptions of “this almost unbearable schedule under which I am forced to live,” he struck a note of pathos as he thanked the congregation for its uncritical, consoling support. “When my critics, both white and Negro, sought to cut me down and lessen my influence,” he said, “you always came to me with the encouraging words: ‘We are with you to the end.’” During his report, a courier brought exciting news from the hospital: Coretta had given birth to their second child, Martin Luther King III. King announced the tidings but cut short the spontaneous celebration to resume the business meeting. A group of the church’s most influential women huddled in disapproval. They believed it was unseemly for their pastor not to have gone to the hospital long before, but they could not bring themselves to interrupt. Finally, one of the women called the hospital to say that Dr. King was detained.

  King’s oratory indicated that he was passing through a spell of melancholy. His sermons were more poignant than usual—personal to the point of self-pity, and yet stubborn, refusing to give in. Early in December, at the Montgomery Improvement Association’s second annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change, King reminisced about the classless spirit of unity that had strengthened the boycott, and then turned to the greatest obstacle to racial unity—the universal stigma of being branded a Negro. Whites had relied for centuries on a perversion of “Aristotle’s logic,” he said. “They would say, now, all men are made in the image of God. That’s the major premise. Then comes the minor premise: God, as everyone knows, is not a Negro. Then comes the conclusion: therefore, the Negro is not a man.” King dismissed the syllogism along with the “curse of Ham” argument, pointing out that Noah was drunk when he pronounced the curse, and moved on to what he called the more modern defense of segregation: that the “temporary” inferiority of Negroes was an established fact, from which followed the judgment that commingling of the races would retard the progress of whites. This argument bothered King. While he rejected the notion of justifying future segregation on the basis of its past pernicious effects upon Negroes, he called upon Negroes to improve their conduct. They may not be able to buy perfume in Paris, he said, but they could all afford a nickel bar of soap. He recited statistics on Negro crime, welfare, and illegitimacy. Oppression was no excuse for these, he declared, because “the first thing about lif
e is that any man can be good and honest and ethical in morals, and have character.”

  He followed a tirade against the flaws of the Negro underclass with an attack upon the professionals. “I have met more school teachers recently who…wouldn’t know a verb if it was as big as that table,” he said. “…For a college graduate to be standing up talking about ‘you is,’ there is no excuse for it! And some of these people are teaching our children, and crippling our children.” Shedding all reserve, he shouted, “I’m gonna be a Negro tonight!” and directed a vituperative tongue at his own peers. He told the audience of having attended a convention of his fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, at which it was boastfully announced that the members spent $500,000 for liquor. “A handful of Negroes,” King said acidly, “…spent more money in one week for whiskey than all of the 16 million Negroes spent that whole year for the United Negro College Fund and for the NAACP. Now that was a tragedy. That was a tragedy…. I know this is stinging…”

  It was an unsettling, almost unhinged speech, in which the sharp realities that dominated his private struggles for once overwhelmed the diplomacy of his public speech. The war-torn nostalgia of the Institute itself may have dragged down his mood. Historian L. D. Reddick, King’s friend and intellectual companion in Montgomery, described the week unsparingly as a “flop” that left King “distraught.” Immediately afterward, the results of his leadership recruitment drive for the Crusade for Citizenship did nothing to improve his state of mind. In carefully drafted letters pointing out that the registration drive was not in conflict with the goals of the NAACP, King invited Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche, J. H. Jackson, and other nationally prominent Negroes to lend their names to the Crusade’s national advisory committee. Most of them refused. Bunche told King he did not want to cause any “misunderstanding in the public mind” about his wholehearted support for the NAACP. The Urban League’s Lester Granger declined King’s invitation with a transparently disingenuous remark about the need to draw the line in giving out his signature—“one more drink pushes the inebriate over the edge.” Roy Wilkins warned King that he planned his own national drive a few days before King’s in February, and advised that he had just ordered the NAACP’s Southern field secretaries to make voter registration the “number one activity for 1958.” Lacking a ready response to these daunting, disheartening letters, King told a secretary to write Wilkins that he would reply later. On that evasive note, he ended what a college friend called his “year of disagreement.”