Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  King and Abernathy were “Taylor men” in the church schism whose outcome would determine their stature in the national clergy. When in January Taylor lost his last appeal for court recognition of his election in Philadelphia, J. H. Jackson had the national church board declare the Taylor preachers to be an illegitimate, secessionist group. In response, Taylor publicly denounced the resolution as a “veiled dagger” aimed at church democracy, and pledged to launch a nationwide “truth saturation program” to vindicate his claim at the next general convention that September, in Kansas City. Thomas Kilgore and several others took leave of their church duties for a full thirteen weeks to tour the country, lining up votes and money for Taylor. King did the same—quietly—at scores of church stops on his speaking schedule.

  As a member of the National Action Council of the Congress of Racial Equality, Taylor was looking for a new national director. The consensus of his selection committee was that CORE, as a pioneer of Gandhian direct action in pursuit of racial integration, should not have faded into obscurity at a time when the student sit-ins were bringing national publicity to such techniques. The CORE leaders dispatched an emissary to Atlanta to offer King the position. King replied that he was already overextended and would consider the job only if he could merge the predominantly white, Northern intellectuals of CORE with the Southern Negro preachers of the SCLC. The impracticalities of this notion were so manifest that he declined the offer almost immediately.

  With King out of consideration, the maneuverings within CORE centered on one of the founding members from 1942, James Farmer. He was a large hulking man of forty-one, nine years King’s senior, whose father had been the first Negro to earn a Ph.D. degree in the state of Texas. Young Farmer had grown up something of a prodigy, well-connected enough to have secured a White House audience with FDR as a teenager. His earliest memories were idyllic scenes of his erudite father sitting under a tree reading books in Latin, Greek, German, French, and Aramaic. Since leaving CORE in the mid-1940s, partly because of chronic bureaucratic clashes with Bayard Rustin and A. J. Muste, Farmer had lived for a time at a Gandhian ashram in Harlem and bounced around between union organizing jobs before finally settling in at the NAACP. There was a note of personal tragedy in his past—his first wife had miscarried and divorced him shortly after finding a love note from the white mistress who became Farmer’s second wife—but it was his parvenu ambition that marked him at the staid NAACP. Feeling blocked from advancement within the hierarchy there, Farmer worked eagerly with old friends to secure the opportunity at CORE, once King had declined. Gardner Taylor made the official selection.

  Roy Wilkins, with his fine ear for gossip, summoned Farmer for a conference before he had worked up the courage to resign. To Farmer’s immense relief, Wilkins did not seem to resent the defection. Farmer’s first thought was that Wilkins must consider CORE, with its tiny membership and dingy offices, too small to be a threat to the NAACP, but the more Wilkins talked nostalgically about fresh starts and small organizations, the more Farmer came to believe that even the comfortable Wilkins felt a bit hemmed in after thirty years at the NAACP. Wilkins advised him to be ruthless at the beginning of his tenure. “I should have listened to Minnie,” * said Wilkins. “She said, ‘Roy, clean house. They’re all Walter White’s people, loyal to him. Get them out and put your own people in.’” Wilkins told Farmer he had come to regret his leniency, now that he was surrounded and paralyzed by people he could not afford to fire. “The second thing is this,” Wilkins said with a wan smile. “You’re going to be riding a mustang pony, while I’m riding a dinosaur.”

  The prophecy began to come true at once. At Farmer’s first CORE staff meeting, Gordon Carey proposed that CORE undertake a second Journey of Reconciliation, similar to the bus ride taken by Bayard Rustin and others in 1947. He had more than historical commemoration in mind. The earlier ride had been conceived as a nonviolent test of a Supreme Court decision banning segregation aboard buses in interstate travel, and that ruling had just been extended in a new case† prohibiting segregation in the waiting rooms and restaurants serving interstate bus passengers. Neither Court decision was widely enforced in the South. Carey’s idea was that CORE, though unable to compete with the huge number of students in the sit-ins, could send an interracial cadre of people well trained in nonviolence on a bus ride through the entire South, testing bus facilities, and that publicity about their courage in the face of almost certain violence by segregationists would advance CORE’s principles on many fronts. Farmer endorsed Carey’s idea, then changed the name of his first project from Journey of Reconciliation to Freedom Ride.

  On February 1, 1961, a second libel trial against The New York Times and the four SCLC preachers from Alabama ended in Montgomery. The city’s mayor, Earl James, had sought damages separate from those awarded Police Commissioner Sullivan the previous November. Defense lawyers, noting that Mayor James and five members of the jury were wearing beards in preparation for centennial celebrations of the Civil War, had objected that these conspicuous Confederate symbols created an atmosphere prejudicial to the defendants. Judge Walter B. Jones, who had been chosen to administer the oath of office to a Jefferson Davis stand-in at a ceremony marking the Confederacy’s hundredth birthday, overruled the objection.* He also enforced strict segregation at the trial, ordering Bernard Lee removed from the white side of the courtroom. After rejecting various mistrial motions, Judge Jones moved the case swiftly to the jury, which assessed another $500,000 libel penalty against the defendants. Three similar suits were still pending, including one filed by Governor Patterson.

  That same day, Negro students all across the South staged demonstrations honoring the first anniversary of the Greensboro sit-in. Some of these events were purely ceremonial. Others, like the pickets raised by the Nashville nonviolence workshop outside the city’s segregated movie theaters, were opening moves of carefully planned, protracted campaigns. The anniversary sit-ins were noted here and there in the press, but what made electrifying news within the loose network of the protesters themselves came out of Rock Hill, South Carolina. Police there arrested ten students sitting in at a McCrory’s lunch counter, and when the local judge imposed sentences of $100 or thirty days’ hard labor on the road gang, nine of the ten students carried out their solemn pledge to take the hard labor. One of them had carried a toothbrush to the sit-in to be prepared for the chain gang. Another had written a letter to pained, disapproving parents: “Try to understand that what I’m doing is right. It isn’t like going to jail for a crime like stealing or killing, but we are going for the betterment of all Negroes.”

  The “Rock Hill Jail-In” was an emotional breakthrough for the civil rights movement. Its philosophical rationale—on the Gandhian notion that cheerful suffering for a principle makes effective political witness—was familiar enough to students who had read or heard the speeches of James Lawson. What made the Rock Hill action so timely, however, was that it responded to a tactical dilemma that was arising in SNCC discussions across the South: how to avoid the crippling limitations of scarce bail money. The obvious advantage of “jail, no bail” was that it reversed the financial burden of protest, costing the demonstrators no cash while obligating the white authorities to pay for jail space and food. The obvious disadvantage was that staying in jail represented a quantum leap in commitment above the old barrier of arrest, lock-up, and bail-out. There were primal fears of chain gangs, of claustrophobia, and of assault by guards or hostile inmates, not to mention the lost college credits.

  As it happened, SNCC convened a three-day meeting at the Butler Street YMCA in Atlanta two days after the jail-in began. The nine student representatives were heavily outnumbered by observers and advisers, among whom the most commanding presence was Ella Baker. The meeting was interrupted one evening by a call from the York County jail in Rock Hill. Tom Gaither used one of his allotted jail calls to make a plea for support. All nine would make it through the rest of the thirty days on the chain gang, he
promised, but he believed that the impact of their example would be dissipated unless someone reinforced them. Gaither’s call sliced through whatever contemplative distance remained for the students gathered comfortably in Atlanta. To those who had made “putting your body on the line” the trademark of their movement, the appeal was irresistible. Ideas of launching sympathetic “jail-ins” in other cities were rejected on grounds of delay and difficulty. It soon occurred to them that the best form of support was the most direct one: they could go to Rock Hill themselves and join the nine prisoners in jail. One by one, four of the nine students present in Atlanta pledged to do so immediately. Diane Nash was the first, followed by Ruby Doris Smith of Spelman, Charles Sherrod of Virginia Union Seminary, and Charles Jones of Johnson C. Smith College in North Carolina. With the others, they drafted a press release praising those already jailed in Rock Hill, ending “we feel that in good conscience we have no alternative other than to join them.”

  With Ella Baker’s blessing, the four students drove to Rock Hill, sat in at the same dime store, and told the judge they would serve their time. Their deed made them the stuff of instant legend among SNCC sympathizers. Tidbits of their stories slipped out of the jail to be highly prized—of jailhouse freedom-singing so fervent and affecting that the warden tried to stifle it by putting them all in solitary, of Jones and Sherrod, who already were preachers, proselytizing among the regular prisoners on the chain gang, of singing freedom songs down at the edge of a river bottom as they shoveled sand double time into dump trucks. The hateful guard eventually came to brag about what amazing workers they were. Their zeal overflowed so freely, it was said, that the students bent the leaden habits of jail to their own convictions. The Rock Hill jail-in was destined to be a failure by some standards, in that no stores were desegregated nor any further recruitments made. It was an unforgettable vicarious triumph for thousands of sit-in veterans, however, because the thirteen Rock Hill prisoners set a new standard of psychological commitment to be debated and matched. More important, they introduced the idea of roving jail-goers and mutual support. As students began to think of any jail in any town as potentially their own, a new kind of fellowship took hold on the notion that the entire South was a common battlefield.

  The first connection between Rock Hill and the Freedom Ride was established upon the completion of Tom Gaither’s jail term. Gaither, having joined the CORE staff the previous year, was invited to New York as a hero, and Farmer selected him to make a scouting trip by bus between Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, making plans and contacts, reconnoitering the defenders of segregation in bus terminals along the way. Gaither made sure to include Rock Hill on the route. He predicted violence at Anniston, Alabama, which he described in a report as “a very explosive trouble spot without a doubt.”

  In Atlanta, King was preoccupied with political casualties among his peers. The latest $500,000 libel judgment convinced Fred Shuttlesworth and Ralph Abernathy to think more seriously of escaping to the North. At the first Birmingham mass meeting after the seizure of his car, Shuttlesworth went so far as to announce that he had a job offer from a church in Cincinnati. This prompted his alarmed followers to take up collections to buy him a new car, which they planned to register “in the name of Jesus” for legal protection against further seizures, and King privately tried to persuade Shuttlesworth to stay in Birmingham. He was so worried about losing Abernathy to New York that he wrote a private letter to a deacon at the West Hunter Street Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the pulpit was vacant, practically begging West Hunter to make an offer to Abernathy.

  Seeing his friends so shaken, King recognized the significance of the thirteen jailed students in South Carolina all the more. On February 17, he sent a letter of tribute “to the freedom fighters,” care of the prisoners he knew best, Nash and Sherrod. “You have inspired all of us by such demonstrative courage and faith,” he wrote, adding a hopeful pronouncement on the nonviolent dynamics at work: “You transcend the judgments of evil men who decry the powerful weapon you are using. Every day that you remain behind bars sears the conscience of that immoral city. You are shaming them into decency.”

  The Nashville sit-in veterans, inspired by the sacrifice in Rock Hill of their compatriot Diane Nash, gradually escalated their protests against movie theater segregation. James Bevel sent groups marching downtown nightly to picket the theaters that refused them entry. Some white customers shied away from the scenes of potential conflict; some expressed support for the Negroes; many tried to pretend nothing unusual was happening. Anxious theater owners tried to preserve their business without appearing to give in to pressure. They wanted the pickets to leave, but they did not want to have them arrested for fear of bad publicity. Night by night, Bevel’s squads marched off not knowing whether they would be attacked or not, and if so whether it would be by the police or the hostile white teenagers, whom they called “hoods.” The hoods wore ducktail haircuts and menaced the picketers in growing numbers.

  In James Lawson’s absence, King’s friend Rev. Kelly Miller Smith served as the leading adult adviser at the strategy sessions, which were held in Smith’s First Baptist Church. By the time incipient violence had progressed to the point of near riot, with punches and flying rocks mixed in with the tomatoes, Smith had called a number of friends for assistance, including the prominent white clergyman Will Campbell. Painfully, Smith, Campbell, and the other adults recommended at one meeting that the picketing be suspended in favor of negotiations. As James Bevel and other articulate students debated the proposal, John Lewis sat stoically in a corner. Whenever asked a question, he ignored the fine points of whatever theory was being put forward and said simply, “We’re gonna march tonight.”

  Theologian Campbell, who was deeply preoccupied with the question of whether the demonstrators would bear responsibility for provoking the violence inflicted upon them, had known Lewis from the previous year’s sit-ins as an unpolished student who stuttered badly. Finally, exasperated by the deference the monosyllabic Lewis seemed to command from the other students, Campbell lost his patience. “You know there’s very apt to be violence, serious violence, tonight if there’s another demonstration,” he said sharply to Lewis. “And I can only conclude that it’s just a matter of pride with you. And bullheadedness. You’re refusing to agree with us because of your own pride and your own sin.”

  The room went silent under the sting of Campbell’s rebuke. Lewis smiled warmly at Campbell, as though taking pity on him. “Okay, I’m a sinner,” he replied softly. “We’re gonna march.”

  Campbell found no words to engage such directness. The students followed Lewis’ lead and Bevel’s tactics. They kept the pressure on the theater owners and endured the nightly shower of abuse. On February 20, the Nashville police began to make spot arrests of the demonstrators. They found Lewis in a picket circle in the snowy street outside Loew’s Theater and took him off to jail. It was his fourth arrest.

  Refusing to post bail, Lewis was unable to deliver his senior sermon at the seminary. He rescheduled it after his release, at which time he rejoined the line of theater marchers. In the March issue of the new SNCC newsletter, The Student Voice, Lewis read that theater campaigns were continuing in ten other cities from Dallas to Charlottesville, Virginia. He saw in the same issue CORE’s first advertisement seeking volunteers for “Freedom Ride, 1961.” Lewis promptly responded. Undaunted by a CORE application form emphasizing violence and prolonged incarceration as possible hazards, Lewis stated that he would willingly sacrifice his graduation from the seminary and anything else required. “This is [the] most important decision in my life,” he wrote, “to decide to give up all if necessary for the Freedom Ride, that Justice and Freedom might come to the Deep South.”

  In Atlanta, where student demonstrators still were trying to match the lunch counter victories attained in Nashville the previous year, continuing sit-ins and boycotts caused the white owners of thirteen corporations to close more than seventy of their downtown
stores for three months, through February 1961. With business paralyzed and all employees, including some five hundred Negroes, laid off, pressure for settlement built on both sides. Mayor Hartsfield, still feeling injured politically by his inability to broker an agreement after the fall elections, stepped aside when white businessmen agreed to negotiate directly with Negro leaders. In the opening round, Chamber of Commerce president Ivan Allen, Jr., received A. T. Walden, an elderly lawyer and dean of the Auburn Avenue business fraternity, at his office supply company. Walden was a fixture of the old guard, known by honorary titles such as “Colonel” and “Judge.” There was a sticky moment when Walden asked to be shown to a bathroom. Allen hesitated briefly. He knew he could not ask a man of Walden’s rank to use the unkempt separate restroom for Negroes, but he also knew that his white employees would rebel if he allowed Walden to use the restroom reserved for them. Allen, quick-witted and instinctively gracious, invited Walden to use his own private bathroom.

  Many of the students maintaining the boycott against segregated stores might have taken the bathroom episode as an allegory of Negro leadership in Atlanta. They believed that the entrenched old leaders like Walden had made a lifetime habit of being satisfied with executive treatment for themselves alone. The elders believed that the young people were trying to undercut them in public, and strains worsened dramatically on March 7, when terms of a proposed deal were revealed at a climactic meeting of the negotiating teams. A joint statement, released by the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, made front pages in the North as well as the South. Carefully written to protect the signatory white merchants from charges of capitulating to the Negroes, its central premise was that “the fine relationship which has existed between the races for a long number of years in Atlanta should be reinstated in every way.” The statement concealed the obligations of the white parties in a convoluted sentence that avoided any explicit mention of integration, promising only to adopt “the same patterns…as are finally decided upon in the public school issues in Atlanta.” No such ambiguity shielded the ten Negro signatories, who pledged immediately to “eliminate all boycotts, reprisals, picketing, and sit-ins, and to bring back a condition of complete normalcy as soon as possible.”