Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  King fired Tilley because he was impatient. Nothing—not his near martyrdom, or his White House audience, or his thousand speeches—had rekindled the movement spirit of the boycott. King returned home determined to make a fresh start with the lessons of India. In April, he wrote William Stuart Nelson,* one of his mentors among Negro theologians, expressing the belief that the SCLC “had failed to get the philosophy over to many persons in the South because we had not taken the time to give serious study to it.” He proposed convening a three-day Institute on Nonviolence that summer in Atlanta. King wanted to organize an American Salt March. To do that, he decided it would be well to move the annual Institute out of Montgomery. “Since returning from India,” he wrote Nelson, “I am even more keyed up over this idea.”

  The Institute on Nonviolent Resistance to Segregation gathered at Spelman College in July. There was disappointment in the registered attendance of fewer than a hundred people, and particularly in the virtual absence of representatives from Atlanta itself, but the speakers included nearly every one of the small band of nonviolence leaders. Bayard Rustin, James Lawson, and Glenn Smiley all led workshops, as did King and Abernathy. Gandhian author Richard Gregg led a group discussion. L. D. Reddick reported on the Gandhian campaign against the caste system in India. Melvin Watson, King’s Morehouse adviser on subjects ranging from pulpit-hunting to Stalinism, led a prayer service. Dr. C. O. Simpkins of Shreveport presided over one session, and Wyatt Tee Walker, a quotable newcomer since his enormous New Year’s Day march in Richmond, presided over another. Ella Baker shared a panel with Will Campbell, a liberal white Southerner of some stature both as a preacher and author.

  They were seeking a new instrument, a breakthrough. Experience in civil rights had taught them that Christianity needed to be modified for politics, and Gandhism modified for American culture. The two systems had to be synthesized, molded, and adjusted—but exactly how, no one knew. The problems were as plain as the word “nigger” and the solutions as vague as “Americanized nonviolence.” A hundred semantic distinctions emerged. The speakers turned nonviolence into a social science, speaking of it as an attitude that had complex effects on practitioners and targets alike. There was much talk of how human beings respond to violence, and how Gandhians had prepared themselves to absorb beatings. Rustin, Smiley, and others told of some of the disarming nonviolent tricks they had discovered in the past twenty years. In attacking what he called some common myths of nonviolence, Lawson stated that most violent segregationists were only made more angry by the sight of passive demonstrators curled in the fetal position. This was a way to get livers kicked in and backs broken, he said, recommending that resisters try to maintain eye contact with those beating them.

  Lawson believed that the theoretical discussions needed to be “balanced with practical application to concrete situations.” Since moving from Ohio to Nashville at King’s beckoning, he had been testing his ideas about nonviolence with student volunteers. He called his Nashville seminars “workshops” instead of classes, and made it a point always to be working on a “project.” It could be a demonstration, a march, a picket line, or some combination of the three against a segregated theater or recalcitrant voting registrar. Lawson was planning test demonstrations against some of the segregated department stores in Nashville for that fall. CORE’s Gordon Carey, who had helped Wyatt Tee Walker organize his Richmond march, was planning sit-down demonstrations in Miami.

  Lawson and the other new American Gandhians approached their projects with the care of a chemist. Each step was meticulously planned, executed, and evaluated, with an eye toward isolating behavior and controlling response. The precision of the training developed confidence, but it also made nonviolence an esoteric specialty. Only the tiniest fraction of those who opposed segregation could be expected to spend months preparing themselves for demonstrations, and that tiny fraction would be drawn from people considered kooks even by their own supporters. Much of the nonviolent activity in the state of North Carolina was traceable to the influence of Douglas Moore, the radical from whom King himself had kept his distance at Boston University. In North Carolina, Moore had been leading a sit-in campaign and legal battle against a segregated ice cream parlor. Amazed by King’s performance during the bus boycott, he had written King a wrenching letter about “the things that are on my heart,” proposing that King organize a cadre of Gandhian shock troops. “I have maintained for years that one hundred well-disciplined persons could break the backbone of segregated travel in North Carolina in less than a year,” Moore wrote. He had received only a token reply from King’s secretary. Now, less than two years later, Moore was the North Carolina representative on King’s SCLC board. No other preacher from that state cared enough to make the long lonely drives to conferences on nonviolence.

  King, moving inevitably into alliance with people like Douglas Moore, confronted the paradox of nonviolence. How could the new Gandhians hope to assemble an army of nonviolent kooks and visionaries, and how could such a painstaking discipline be transmitted efficiently to masses of recruits even if they could be found? By seeking those with the gumption to specialize in taking beatings and the patience to do so in a protracted campaign, nonviolence seemed to be a self-limiting doctrine.

  One clue to the solution appeared in Montgomery one day that summer, when Abernathy asked King to stop by First Baptist right away. King soon walked into a meeting of Abernathy, Fred Gray, and a young boy of eighteen who was introduced as John Lewis. The boy, Abernathy advised, was a seminary student in Nashville and had become a devoted member of Lawson’s nonviolence workshops. Determined to become the first Negro student to enroll at a white college in Alabama, Lewis wanted to sue for the right to enter Troy State College, in his home county. The sincerity of his letters and phone calls had impressed Abernathy and Gray enough to pay Lewis’ bus fare from Nashville, so that they could measure him in person against his hazardous ambition.

  King encountered a young man somewhat like himself in appearance—small, sturdy, dark-skinned, with a rounded face built for warmth more than looks—but completely lacking in refinement. Lewis spoke with a stammer, and could barely complete a full sentence even when the stammer gave him peace. He said he had “come up” so far back in the country that he could not remember even seeing a white person in his youth. This made him decidedly not the type the NAACP lawyers had been choosing for integration test cases, because he appeared to be a Negro whom no amount of education could polish. Yet there was an incandescence in Lewis that shone through all his shortcomings. He said he was ready to die to go to Troy State but that he could probably avoid such fate if he followed nonviolent principles. The meeting ended with the two preachers agreeing to find the money somehow to finance a lawsuit. Gray agreed to take the case provided that Lewis, still a minor, obtained his parents’ consent.

  On the return bus to Nashville, a starstruck Lewis kept telling himself that he had met and talked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Lewis was proud of the fact that he had discovered King before the bus boycott made him famous. By chance, he had listened in 1955 to a radio sermon entitled “Paul’s Letter to the American Christians,” in which King assumed the style and theology of St. Paul to criticize Christians for selfishness and failures of brotherhood. Lewis still remembered being heartshaken in front of the radio. Within the space of an hour, his dreams of becoming a preacher had focused upon a new idol.

  Lewis’ fantasy life had marked him early as a peculiar child. Growing up on a small farm without plumbing or electricity, he had vexed his parents by ducking out of work in the fields. He said he disapproved of farm work because it was like gambling with nature. The parents at first considered this a bizarre excuse for laziness, but when they learned the intensity of his will they could only wish that laziness was the cause. Young Lewis lived in a world of his own. He had no feeling whatsoever for hogs, dogs, or most farm animals, but endless hours of study convinced him that chickens were worthy of adoption as the world’s
innocent creatures. Whenever a chicken was killed for dinner, Lewis cried hysterically and boycotted meals. He refused for days to speak to anyone in his family. Instead of growing out of his chicken fixation, he grafted it to the religious fervor that came over him about the age of eight.

  Soon young Lewis was preaching to his chickens, sneaking out to the henhouse whenever he could to holler and pray for them in long incoherent sermons, loosening the stammer from his tongue. Bedtime became a religious ritual in the henhouse, with Lewis in contemplation of his clucking congregation as he preached them to a peaceful roost. He developed a full ministry by the age of ten. If a small chicken died, Lewis buried it in a lard can and made sure flowers grew on the site. He also baptized the new chicks. Once he got carried away in his prayers and baptized one too long, which became one of his worst childhood memories. The horror of pulling the lifeless chick from the water gave him lasting nightmares.

  Lewis’ preaching remained a farm boy’s dream until 1957, when he became the first member of his family ever to finish high school. Hoping to follow Dr. King to Morehouse, he had sent off for a catalog, only to discover at a glance that its tuition was far beyond the family’s means. Lewis wound up at the only school he could find that charged no tuition, Nashville’s American Baptist Theological Seminary. For a country boy whose outstanding memory from his only city visit was the miracle of an elevator ride, independent college life in Nashville was a mixed assault of intimidation and adventure. Somehow it made perfect sense to hear in church that a man was offering classes on Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolence. James Lawson had arrived in Nashville the same time as Lewis. By the fall of 1958, while traveling as a field secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Lawson was leading classes in nonviolence on a weekly basis. If he happened to be out of town, his colleague Glenn Smiley often filled in. No one attended these unique classes more faithfully than Lewis, who found them far more engaging than his regular seminary work. He drank in knowledge of Gandhi, Thoreau, and the pioneers of American religious freedom before he finished remedial work in English and math. Seasoned by two years in Nashville, inspired by King and trained by Lawson, Lewis rode the bus home from Montgomery all aglow, ready to take risks for the Social Gospel.

  Lawson sent a busload of Nashville students to the Highlander Folk School that fall. Lewis made sure to drag along James Bevel, one of his hallmates at the seminary dorm. Bevel had refused to attend Lawson’s workshops for more than a year, but he consented to visit Highlander because it sounded more like a vacation. Bevel was recognized as the natural leader of the seminary. He had grown up in a split family, shuttling between a mother in the Mississippi Delta and a father in Cleveland, where Bevel worked as a teenager in the steel mills. Brash, quick-tongued, and sociable, he had just signed a rock-and-roll recording contract with his brothers when a sudden religious conversion propelled him to the Nashville seminary instead. One rumor held that he was fleeing an unwanted new son. Regardless, he became a preacher of budding genius, famous on the hallway for nonstop shower preaching at the top of his voice, trying out wild theories and bizarre improvisations, telling dazzling stories and working himself into such a frenzy that, as the joke went, Bevel needed a shower after his shower. He had no interest in the Social Gospel or in Lewis’ nonviolent theories. Lewis, the tireless proselytizer, lured him to Highlander in hope of support.

  Of the Highlander speakers, it was Myles Horton who first cracked Bevel’s sense of mastery. Horton questioned the claims of students who said they had separated themselves from segregation’s assertion that they were inferior. He made them doubt who they were, what they were saying. Bevel had never heard a white man speak so bluntly and yet so deftly. He seemed like Socrates, always challenging assumptions, boring deeper toward the core. The effect put Bevel on edge. He began to feel an oppressive weight. At a later session, he sizzled when another speaker berated the students for cowardice. “Just look at the Polish students,” said the speaker. “They are busy helping to get the government of their country straightened out, and you are all here winding around the maypole, and going up the side steps to see a movie, and playing bridge. How do you feel?” Bevel’s temper snapped. He walked out on the heavy-handed speech and slammed the door.

  Lewis stayed behind for classes with Septima Clark. She was another of King’s improbable hopes, percolating out of sight at Highlander. Clark was sixty years old, daughter of a slave owned by South Carolina’s Poinsette family (from whom a species of winter flower took its name). She specialized in teaching illiterate adults to read and barely literate ones to become teachers. Her extraordinary gifts in that field inspired Myles Horton to put her in charge of an experimental “citizenship school” at Highlander. In a compressed week’s workshop, Clark promised to turn sharecroppers and other unschooled Negroes into potential voters, armed with basic literacy and a grasp of democratic rights. There was even hope that she might design a system of geometric growth whereby gifted illiterates could be quickly trained as teachers in the field. Her character was a miraculous balance between leathery zeal and infinite patience. Clark was a saint even to many of the learned critics who predicted she would fail. A professor visiting Highlander complained that John Lewis was not a suitable leader—he stuttered, split his infinitives, had poor reading patterns. “What difference does that make?” she asked. All that would come, she said. Besides, the people he needed to lead already understood him, and so did Bevel. She predicted Bevel would be back. Clark counseled patience. As always, she worked both sides of the gaping class divide without letting the friction ruin her spirits.

  That fall, Ella Baker made a special trip to Highlander to explore the idea of coupling Clark’s citizenship-school program with the SCLC’s faltering Crusade for Citizenship. She had heard that Clark was drawing her teachers almost entirely from a group that Baker considered the most promising human resource in the South—Negro women—and also that her program was aimed at plain unlettered Negroes, who made up the overwhelming bulk of the population that needed registering. Baker knew, however, that these very factors would raise instinctive doubts among the SCLC preachers. Literacy schools involved tedious work, outside the daily interest or control of the clergy. Also, being openly predicated upon widespread Negro ignorance, they presented image problems to leaders still struggling to build public recognition of a “new Negro” of proper manners. For these reasons, Baker downplayed her enthusiasm for the schools when she got back to Atlanta. She asked only that she be “authorized to explore this field further.”

  King himself was discouraged after the Institute on Nonviolence. At the SCLC’s annual convention, he went before his board with a straightforward admission that the Crusade for Citizenship had failed. Fund-raising and registration totals fell dismally short of the goals announced at the outset, eighteen months earlier. “Honesty impels us to admit that we have not really scratched the surface in this area,” said King. His diagnosis was that the SCLC and the NAACP had paralyzed each other; his remedy was to call a regional meeting in the hope of reaching cooperative agreements with the South’s NAACP chapters and other local groups in voter registration. In effect, he wanted to bypass the NAACP national office, but realists at the meeting pointed out that the plan would never escape Wilkins’ attention.

  In desperation, King looked to public relations. Complaining that “the SCLC has not been publicized through the press or otherwise,” he recommended hiring a professional publicist for a minimum period of six months. The person he had in mind was Bayard Rustin, but he did not mention Rustin’s name at first, for fear of rekindling the sort of controversy that had driven Rustin out of Montgomery during the boycott. King knew well that it would be difficult to sell a homosexual ex-Communist to a group of Baptist preachers, and he wanted first to win approval of the idea itself. The assembled ministers voted to begin the search for a publicity assistant, and otherwise they respectfully discussed King’s ideas into limbo. Not long afterward, Jet magazine published an un
signed gossip item saying that “the clergy-based Dixie vote campaign has almost come to a halt.” It mentioned the departure of Tilley, the pitiful registration totals as measured against the SCLC’s announced goals, and other signs of failure that King himself had just acknowledged to his colleagues. “Meanwhile,” concluded Jet, “the NAACP quietly has expanded its southern vote registration force and is marking up gains in many states. The moral: headlines won’t do it.”

  Here was the Wilkins line on King in concentrated form, made public. The words stung King so sharply that he called Jet’s Washington bureau chief to register a strong protest. A week later, he steamed into an SCLC meeting with a list of proposals designed to “counteract some false ideas that have been disseminated.” Nearly all of them looked to the field of public relations. He called for a press release stating that the SCLC was “expanding its activities,” a newsletter “mailed to at least five thousand persons” that would say the same thing and appeal for funds, and, “after prayerful and serious consideration,” he recommended Bayard Rustin by name for the public relations job. The crisis at the SCLC was so pressing that King dispensed with the usual politesse and bluntly urged his colleagues to take “the risk.” Recognizing the “possible perils involved,” he assured them that Rustin would “quietly resign” in the event of embarrassing public reaction.