Dr. Anderson summoned Albany Movement supporters back to Shiloh that morning to prepare for what he called a “now or never effort” to break segregation. His speech met with little enthusiasm. The emotions of the previous year’s marches had cooled over months of waiting, and perhaps his listeners were numbed by the harsh realization that the city had dared to jail a celebrity like King on charges which still hung over some seven hundred of them too. In any case, only thirty-two people stepped forward, and they came only upon exhortation by King’s friend and colleague C. K. Steele, who had led a bus boycott in Tallahassee parallel to King’s in Montgomery. The diminutive Reverend Steele offered a final prayer in the church:
We feel much akin
To those who went out
Two by two
In the days of old.
We will march around
Those jail house walls
That symbolize segregation.
We will walk around them
Like unto Joshua
Until the walls
Come tumblin’ down.
Take care of us
Take care of the policemen
Take care of Chief Pritchett
Take care of the mayor
And the city council.
We pray that as they see
A prayerful and peaceful people
Their hearts will be moved.
Consecrate, dear God,
This whole community.
At 10:53 A.M., they marched out behind Steele toward the city jail, where King and Abernathy were on cell-scrubbing detail, and while they were being arrested under the gaze of reporters and bystanders they sang “We Shall Overcome,” in the hope that the prisoners already inside would take heart.
In Washington, reporters were questioning White House press secretary Pierre Salinger at the morning briefing about what the President would do on King’s behalf. The news angle was obvious: would Kennedy do more or less as President than he had done as a candidate in 1960? By the end of the day, Salinger announced that President Kennedy had asked the Attorney General to prepare a full report on the King situation. Privately, the President called Burke Marshall at his vacation fishing pond in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. For Marshall, this rare contact with the President was bracing, but Kennedy was worried. In several calls that day, he instructed Marshall to speak with Coretta in Atlanta and with public officials in Albany. Essentially, the strategy was for Marshall to assume the sympathetic campaign posture of 1960, leaving the Kennedys themselves in reserve.
President Kennedy also took a phone call from James Gray, his old college acquaintance who was now chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party. Gray said he was calling with Mayor Kelley standing there in his office. “Jack, we’ve got Martin Luther King in jail,” he said, stating the obvious. “The damn media is having a field day. We don’t want him in jail, but what can we do? He violated our law. I’ll tell you. It would be very nice if you sent somebody down here to pick him up.”
The President agreed that it was very bad to have King in jail, but he did not embrace the idea of having him released for some presidential purpose. They faced an impasse that was politically delicate. King refused to compromise with segregation. Albany refused to compromise with integration. And the Administration was determined to maintain an image of masterful control without intervening forcefully on either side. These constraints called for trust and stealthy maneuver. President Kennedy promised to send someone to Albany, and he advised Gray to consult immediately with the Attorney General. By midday, a hastily recruited Gray emissary was on a flight to Washington.
B. C. Gardner, a senior partner in Mayor Kelley’s three-man law firm, represented nearby Baker County, the Ichuaway plantation, and most major interests not represented by his partners. His father was a judge. In his office he kept a picture of himself shaking Senator John F. Kennedy’s hand at Gray’s private party in 1958. As the city’s unofficial ambassador, Gardner brought a message that Robert Kennedy heartily seconded. King’s jailing, they agreed, was an embarrassment to everybody—to Albany, to the Kennedys, to Georgia, and to the entire United States in the court of world opinion. Therefore, it must be terminated by any means necessary. Gardner flew home that same night with a plan.
There was a mass meeting at Shiloh. A crowd of six hundred began to recapture the emotion of the December meetings, and now in the summer heat the people waved hand fans painted with Bible scenes and mopped their brows with handkerchiefs. Outside, a smaller crowd of juke-joint Negroes and early-evening drinkers took it upon themselves to drive the police observers out of the Harlem section of town. They lofted bricks and bottles at the squad cars. The first loud noises of dented metal attracted a sizable crowd from the surrounding neighborhood. By unspoken rules, the authorities had allowed the city’s Negroes certain license inside Harlem—King and other marchers had been arrested only when they reached the boundary of white Albany—but now spontaneous hostilities erupted against the very presence of the police on Negro territory. Heavily armed but also heavily outnumbered, officers sought shelter against random bombardment. The shouts and thuds of the violence pulled people out of Shiloh in droves, with the church people shouting at the others for calm.
Chief Pritchett huddled with his besieged men, who were in a war mood. Ordering them to refrain from retaliation, he asked his most trusted officer, Captain Ed Friend, to follow him into the hostile Negro crowd. “If you get hit, don’t stop,” Pritchett told Friend, then pushed his way to the closed front door of the church and shouted, “Bo, I’m coming in.” Emmanuel “Bo” Jackson, the unofficial sergeant-at-arms for the Albany Movement, shouted back, “Come on in!” and the two policemen entered the sanctum of the opposition in full uniform, with guns on their hips. Slater King called out over the commotion, “I notice we have in our presence Chief Pritchett!” When he offered the chief Shiloh’s pulpit, the crowd fell into a dead silence. Then, as Pritchett made his way forward to speak, someone shouted, “Let’s give him a hand!” and an ovation rolled on for fully half a minute. Those outside who had expected to hear angry words, perhaps even gunshots, could only stare at each other in wonder.
Pritchett reached the pulpit with his neck, face, and ears flushed deep red. “I appreciate the opportunity to be here,” he said, half smiling. “I have often been told I would be welcome. I didn’t know whether I would or not.” Reporter Pat Watters, while marveling at the chief’s bravery, perceived a rich mixture of tone in his voice. There was some gratitude and respect, even some fellowship, he thought, combined with an edge of half-humorous sarcasm that Watters saw as the protective coating for Pritchett’s racial authority. “I never have interrupted your peaceful assemblies,” Pritchett told the crowd. “…Many people misunderstand your philosophy of nonviolence, but we respect your policy. I ask your cooperation in keeping Albany peaceful. This business of throwing rocks is not good.” The crowd applauded again. Pritchett contained his relief until he reached the police huddle outside. Captain Friend confessed to wobbly legs. “Don’t take me back in there, Chief,” he said, trying to grin. “Nobody but the laundry man will know how scared I was.”
Once the rock throwers had melted away, Slater King returned to the Shiloh pulpit to lay bare a conflicted appraisal. On the one hand, he praised the congregation for welcoming Chief Pritchett in the charitable spirit of nonviolence, and for proving that the movement people inside were not like the hoodlums outside. On the other hand, he lamented the signs of sycophantic admiration for Pritchett. These were deep roots of segregation, he said. After all, the very purpose of their meeting had been to exhort people to challenge Pritchett’s authority by offering up their bodies to his jail. “We want to give him respect,” said Slater King, “but not like he’s some kind of God. Maybe I am guilty of this myself. It’s the system we’ve been conditioned by—like we’ve been brainwashed.”
Later that night, Pritchett and Albany’s leading white citizens did some soul-searching of their own.
B. C. Gardner was back from Washington with a stark proposal: they should pay Martin Luther King’s fine surreptitiously and then expel him from the jail. There was no other way, he explained, and they must be prepared to lie about it. If it became known that the city fathers of Albany had imprisoned King and then paid to free him, they would become a laughingstock. For men who prided themselves on their Southern code of honor, the lying part was a sour requirement indeed—all the more so because it was a Negro who forced the awful choice upon them. Still, they could not very well pressure the Kennedys to spring King, as it would look like a defeat for Albany at federal hands. Besides, the Kennedys were doing all they could. They had refrained from intervening or speaking out on King’s behalf; they had tacitly endorsed the scheme, and promised not to expose it. Robert Kennedy had impressed on them that the national security and prestige of the United States suffered every day that King was in jail. This provided a patriotic salve, making their hoax certainly bearable and almost noble. Chief Pritchett consulted Mayor Kelley about how to reduce the elements of outright falsehood in the scheme. Then he summoned his desk sergeant to give him stern instructions on how Martin Luther King was to be released from jail.
At dawn the next morning, July 12, B. C. Gardner appeared at the deserted jail desk with $356 in cash. “Here’s Martin Luther King’s fine,” he said “Turn him out.” By prearrangement, the desk sergeant made out the receipt not to Gardner but to King and Abernathy. Gardner then disappeared, his part completed. At 7:30 A.M., Pritchett sent to the cell-block for King and Abernathy, instructing them to change into their own clothes for a meeting in his office. When they arrived there, thinking the clothes were for the benefit of some important intermediary, Pritchett informed them that their fines had been paid and they were free to go. In fact, they had to go.
The two stunned preachers demanded an explanation, whereupon Pritchett gave them what was to be his stock response through the ensuing publicity storm. All he knew, he said, was that the jailer had told him that “an unidentified, well-dressed Negro male” had paid the fines, asking not to be identified, and Pritchett did not want to question the jailer further about it, for fear of subjecting him to reprisal. Two of Pritchett’s detectives drove King and Abernathy to Dr. Anderson’s house, where Wyatt Walker slammed the door against the reporters who came just behind. The reporters overheard spirited arguments about what had happened. Was it possible that the Albany whites had an accomplice among the city’s professional Negroes? If Pritchett was lying, how could they prove it?
King emerged to hold a news conference at Shiloh late that morning. “This is one time I’m out of jail that I’m not happy to be out,” he declared. He denounced the “subtle and conniving tactics” used to engineer his release. He did say, by way of consolation, that Chief Pritchett had all but assured them that the cases against the other seven hundred demonstrators from the previous December would be dropped, and that a biracial commission would be appointed to settle the larger disputes. Across town, however, Pritchett was telling his own news conference that “there has been nothing of a settlement in reference to anything.” Mayor Kelley said he did not know who paid the fines. Then, possibly to make himself more comfortable, he modified his position to say he had “no communicable information on that subject.” Kelley held tenaciously to the pact of silence for decades thereafter.
In Washington, Robert Kennedy told reporters that “Dr. King’s release should make it possible for the citizens of Albany to resolve their differences in this situation in a less tense atmosphere. Therefore, I am very glad that Dr. King has been released.” His phrasing subtly endorsed the perspective of leading Albany whites, who saw segregation as a local matter. Ed Guthman, Kennedy’s press spokesman, assured reporters that Robert Kennedy had not paid King’s fine—nor had President Kennedy, nor any other official of the federal government. To stress the parallel with the Kennedy performance after King’s 1960 jailing, Guthman did disclose that Burke Marshall had made phone calls to Mrs. King and others, which he said might have facilitated the outcome.
In Albany, King’s release surprised all but the most cynical observers. The Herald declared that rumors of an impending negotiated settlement were false (“City Will Not Back Down on Negro Issue”). To dispel suspicions of collusion with Washington, Mayor Kelley publicly denounced the Justice Department for “collaborating and conspiring with the leaders of the Albany Movement…to violate existing ordinances of the City of Albany.” His accusations produced a flurry of denials from the Justice Department. Privately, Justice officials were consumed by bureaucratic spats with the FBI over appearances and lines of command.
Out of jail, King swiftly lost his leverage. He appeared to be a stranger to the Kennedy Administration and, having been snookered, became fair game for barbs long stored by his critics. The New York Times published a profile suggesting that King was out of his league in politics. He was “woefully inadequate in organizational ability,” stated a Times source, and the correspondent added that King’s “chief problem” was his determination to establish the SCLC as an organization independent of the NAACP. The nation’s news outlets made sport of the mystery of King’s anonymous benefactor. Newsweek called the case a “Georgia Whodunit.” The Albany Herald chortled over the rascally maneuver behind headlines such as “Mayor Stays Mum” and “Who Got King Out?” Most newspapers accepted the official version of the transaction itself and then proceeded to speculate about possible accomplices of the “well-dressed Negro male.” No one bothered to scrutinize the official stories. B. C. Gardner’s name never surfaced, and Chief Pritchett’s account survived as the working draft of the truth.
It took King two weeks to get back into jail. He regarded it as imperative that he return, not least because most of the thirty-two who had marched with him were still locked up. It appeared that he had led them into a trap and then escaped himself. But he did not seek jail immediately, as his Albany supporters were too numb to follow. A six-month lull in demonstrations had been followed by a sharp defeat, and local whites seemed tougher and less compromising than ever. The Albany Movement, James Gray declared, had done nothing more than to bankrupt the city bus system, cancel the Christmas parade, “cost Negroes jobs and money,” and cause “the jailing of nearly 800 persons, many of them children of long-established and honorable citizens of the Negro community…. They now have criminal records. Is this the way to teach the young about their America?” Some Albany Negroes, in the grip of discouragement or fear, were swayed by Gray’s argument that King himself was the problem.
To recover lost momentum, the leaders of the Albany Movement first issued a document called the “Albany Manifesto,” declaring that during the past six months the Albany officials had dealt with them in bad faith. By day, the Albany Movement leaders sent small groups to test segregation at the city library and parks. All of them met a police blockade, and many were arrested. Each incident demonstrated to wavering Negroes that race relations were not as sweet as Gray and his colleagues claimed. The nighttime crowds grew toward the overflow numbers of the previous December.
King flew to Washington on July 19 to address the National Press Club. Reporters recorded the exact moment—12:35 P.M.—at which he entered the fifty-four-year-old press club to become its first Negro American speaker. The capacity audience rose a second time, and then a third, in spontaneous ovations. Many of the members were proud to have broken the race barrier, and although King gave them a rather stiff speech on the merits of nonviolence, they were proud, too, to sponsor such lofty oratory. This was King’s ironic trap up close: he could bring inspiration even to the National Press Club, but he could force his movement into the news columns only by bloodshed or political miracle. News accounts of the speech were spare, as there was little news in King’s message itself. One story noted that not a single press club member had resigned in protest of King’s appearance.
Cutting short a Northern fund-raising tour, King found Albany in a tense chess game, com
mingled of silliness and hate. A white man dressed as an exterminator had sprayed pesticide on Negroes testing the segregation of city picnic tables. Charles Jones had outwitted the police patrols who were trying to keep Negroes out of the whites’ restrooms in city parks. And the air thickened with rumors that city officials aimed to stifle the movement with a court order. “I understand that the city attorney has gone to Atlanta to get an injunction to get the undesirables out,” King declared at the mass meeting on July 20. “Now I assume by the undesirables he’s speaking of Ralph Abernathy, James Bevel, Bernard Lee, Andrew Young, Wyatt Tee Walker, Charles Jones, Sherrod, and I could name many others.” He told the crowd that the obstructions did not matter—not the courts, nor the mayor, nor the governor, nor even the federal government. None of these mattered, said King, if the people of Albany acted upon rights that were theirs: “The salvation of the Negro in Albany, Georgia, is within the hands and the soul of the Negro himself.” He told his favorite story from India: Gandhi’s Salt March, of Gandhi beginning alone but ending with a million people by the sea, and how he changed history by the simple act of holding aloft a pinch of free, untaxed sea salt. “And the minute that happened,” cried King, “it seemed I could hear the boys at Number Ten Downing Street in London, England, say, ‘It’s all over now’!” This run of oratory put the church into pandemonium. King joined to these emotions memories of another famous march to the sea, by Union General W. T. Sherman, whose fiery swath through Georgia had emancipated the direct ancestors of many in King’s audience. “And so let’s get our marchin’ shoes ready,” King told them. “…For we are goin’ to Albany’s March to the Sea.”
They planned a march for the next afternoon, a Saturday, but that morning deputy U.S. marshals began knocking on doors with court papers signed by U.S. District Court judge J. Robert Elliott, a strident segregationist recently appointed by President Kennedy. Accepting the novel—critical lawyers said fantastical—arguments of Albany officials, Judge Elliott turned upside down the civil rights movement’s cherished stand on the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead of ruling that segregation was a denial of Negroes’ rights to equal protection under the law, Elliott ruled that Negro protest marches denied Albany’s white people equal protection by draining police manpower and other public resources out of white neighborhoods. Therefore, pending a hearing on the city’s request for a permanent injunction, the judge ordered Albany’s protest leaders to desist from further marches.
Parting the Waters Page 86
