EIGHTEEN
TO BIRMINGHAM
In October 1962, CIA officials obtained photographic intelligence that Soviet nuclear missiles were being shipped to Cuba. “Can they hit Oxford, Mississippi?” asked the President, facetiously suggesting that Fidel Castro and the Russians could do worse than to obliterate the site of his recent vexations. The President kept his nerve during the crisis, if not always his humor. He convened his war chiefs to debate whether to bomb, invade, or quarantine Cuba to root out the missiles, and when it came time to brief congressional leaders, the fever of emergency was so high that Air Force planes retrieved Congressman Hale Boggs from his fishing boat in the Gulf of Mexico, first dropping him an SOS in a plastic bottle.
C. B. King was in Washington, pleading unsuccessfully for federal prosecution of Sheriff Campbell for caning him in July. When President Kennedy announced the naval quarantine of Cuba, King rushed homeward, driving down the East Coast past closed businesses and deserted towns, listening to bulletins on military movements and prayer services, and on his door found a note from his wife saying she had moved the entire family to Clarence Jordan’s Koinania Farm for fear that the military bases near Albany would make prime targets for Soviet missiles. Hundreds of millions of people in scores of countries shared similar apprehensions. Certainly not since World War II, and perhaps never, had so many people experienced world politics so vividly at once.
On Sunday, October 28, Premier Khrushchev agreed that the Soviet missiles would be withdrawn from Cuba. In Birmingham, Bull Connor and the other two city commissioners were holding a secret negotiating session with leaders of the fire department. While greatly relieved that the world had not blown up, they quickly turned to gritty local politics: the city commissioners promised the firemen a million-dollar raise if they would vote against the referendum on the new city charter. Bargaining went on in blissful ignorance that a reform sympathizer among them was operating a clandestine tape recorder. The result was an extraordinary series of radio ads, in which a firefighter was heard asking, “Do we get the raise regardless of how the election comes out next Tuesday?” and the voice of Mayor Arthur Hanes replying, “Absolutely not. You don’t get your raises unless we are here to give it to you.” An announcer then came on the air urging Birmingham to “stop corruption in city hall” by voting for the new charter. The ads exposed the stuff of dirty patronage—and the inevitable higher taxes to pay for it. This civic embarrassment was exactly the sort of shock the reformers needed to bury the segregation factor in the referendum, and on election day the voters unexpectedly approved the mayor-city council proposal. The miracle seeded by the Mother’s Day beatings of the original Freedom Riders advanced another stage, as Bull Connor’s job was abolished. If he wanted to keep ruling Birmingham, he would have to run for mayor in a special election the next March. Connor was teetering in power, making the city a slightly weaker colossus of segregation against the campaign being plotted by Shuttlesworth and King.
Elsewhere, people made glowing new resolutions, as though granted a rebirth. Political analysts, while groping for the secret arrangements through which Khrushchev’s retreat had been secured, freely acknowledged that President Kennedy had faced down Armageddon. The Oval Office became even more of a hallowed shrine, and the Camelot mood returned. By lucky coincidence, a talented Kennedy mimic named Vaughn Meader taped a comedy album called The First Family on the very day Kennedy announced the quarantine of Cuba. The album quickly sold a million copies, pushing past the debut album of folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary to the top of the pop charts, alongside “He’s a Rebel” by the Crystals and “You Are My Sunshine” by Ray Charles. In the afterglow of the missile crisis, presidential humor became a national fad. Even political detractors, outside Mississippi, laughed at Meader’s parody of the Kennedy foibles: the President’s flat-palate accent, his speedreading, his chasing daughter Caroline around the Oval Office, his remarks on snuggling down in a bed full of Kennedys (“Goodnight, Jackie…Goodnight, Bobby…”). By paradox at the extreme reaches of fame, humor helped make the Kennedy legend both human and supernatural.
Spectacular success gave the President freer rein to pursue his own interests, which were decidedly international rather than domestic, and the very nature of the missile crisis underscored his point that the global contest was of paramount importance. The tonic of national relief made it easier for people to slough off the troublesome, entrenched dilemmas of race. Civil rights “no longer commanded the conscience of the nation,” wrote King, who discovered that while fickle conscience did not operate well in an atmosphere of fear or ignorance, neither did it flower on abundant zest. The white world became too happy for civil rights. Such misalignments of perspective exasperated King in his struggle to lead whites and Negroes to see the same truths. Even the bitterest Negro, he said, must study cross-racial vision. This was the “added demon” necessary to survive in a predominantly white world. Trying at once to explain whites to Negroes and Negroes to whites, King felt all the more acutely the “anxieties and sensitivities” that “make each day of life a turmoil…another emotional battle in a never-ending war.” The Negro, he said, “is shackled in his waking moments to tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and in his subconscious he wrestles with this added demon.”
On October 26, a New Orleans newspaper published a story flatly declaring that Jack O’Dell was a “Communist who has infiltrated to the top administrative post in the Rev. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” Citing “a highly authoritative source,” the unsigned article identified O’Dell as a “concealed member” of the party’s national committee who for years had been “carrying out his Communist party assignments” in civil rights work.
This surprise attack caused dissension to erupt within King’s own camp. King already knew that O’Dell had been expelled from the National Maritime Union, and that he had lost his insurance job in Montgomery after being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a suspected Communist. He wanted to make sure there was nothing deeper within O’Dell’s past, nothing violent or sinister. Wearily, O’Dell told King that he was not a party member, as the article alleged, much less a member of the party’s national committee, but he knew people who were. In the past, he had attended their meetings, and in 1956 he had written an article on Louisiana racial politics for a Communist publication. O’Dell traced his HUAC subpoena to such associations. Only four years earlier, congressional investigators had branded O’Dell a fiendish automaton, “part and parcel of the communist conspiracy,” scorning not only his professions of idealism but his Negro identity.
HUAC COUNSEL: Do you honestly feel, and are you trying to make this committee and the people of this country believe, that you, a member of the Communist conspiracy, responsive to the will of the Kremlin, are in truth and in fact, concerned with the welfare of the Negro people of this country?
O’DELL: I wouldn’t try to make you believe anything.
King did not doubt that O’Dell’s labor for the SCLC was sincere. All that was understood, but it was also irrelevant. O’Dell, by his guileless insistence that the Communist program ought to be debated like any other, as in France or Italy, ignored the savage realities of Cold War politics in a white culture, where one brand of enemy-thinking was easily hitched to another. Politically, what mattered about the newspaper article was its public impact. Where did it come from? What did it mean? King saw the story as the second “signal” in two months—first the friendly warning from Washington through Kelly Miller Smith and now a hostile attack in print. These were detailed, official-sounding charges of subversion. The embattled SCLC could scarcely hope to survive a sustained barrage of such propaganda. King told O’Dell the entire SCLC board was upset. “What can I do?” he asked.
O’Dell analyzed the article as a likely plant by police or HUAC investigators in New Orleans. It mentioned the fact that his home in New Orleans had been raided. His recommendation to King wa
s to ignore the attack. Only one small paper seemed to have picked up the story, and the matter would probably die out. To accept the challenge of satisfying segregationists of the purity of one’s ideology was to lose in advance, O’Dell warned. If King felt compelled to answer the article, O’Dell would swear that he did not owe allegiance to any foreign power, nor advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government by force, but otherwise he would refuse all interrogations about his political beliefs. He would refuse to renounce the Communist Party or his Communist friends, even so far as the facts allowed. “I have nothing to apologize for,” he said.
Although King agreed with O’Dell that a free society betrayed itself by policing beliefs, he could not bring himself to leave the article unanswered. To break the chain of public suspicion, he decided that he must refute the connection between O’Dell and the SCLC rather than the one between O’Dell and the Communists. On November 1, without seeking to publicize it, he made available on request a statement of defense. “It is totally inaccurate and false to state that Mr. O’Dell is Southeastern Director of the SCLC,” he declared. “He has not only never been director but was never considered for the position.” From there, King minimized his association with O’Dell to the point of falsehood, stating that O’Dell “has functioned purely as a technician with 90 percent of his work taking place in the north, where he resides, and involving the mechanization of our mailing procedures. He was briefly and temporarily filling in in some areas of voter registration, but ceased functioning there long before this publicity appeared.” O’Dell had resigned “to avoid embarrassment to SCLC,” the statement went on, and King had “accepted it pending further inquiry and clarification.”
Privately, King assured O’Dell that all this was only for public consumption, that the “further inquiry” was already over and O’Dell was back on the staff. He never left for a moment, in fact. O’Dell submitted as gracefully as he could, but he was a proud and independent sort. It only weakened King to allow himself to be drawn into the game of denial and half-truth, he grumbled, and it hurt to be the one denied. Between the New York mail-room staff and the people processing VEP paperwork, O’Dell figured he had more people reporting to him than did Wyatt Walker. Yet King pretended barely to know him.
The New Orleans article was an extremely unpleasant distraction for King, who hoped fervently that the issue would fade away. Political fears caused him to dissemble and equivocate. Indeed, his behavior paralleled President Kennedy’s course on civil rights. Painful as it was for King to hurt his own colleague, more than a few of his allies wished he had treated O’Dell more severely. When a lawyer in New Orleans sent the news clipping to Lotte Kunstler in New York, for instance, Kunstler’s immediate reaction was to fear that this one charge of Communist infiltration might ruin her Sammy Davis fund-raiser for the SCLC on December 11. She did not consider such apprehensions farfetched or paranoid. On the contrary, she had seen two Scarsdale women wreck a benefit for the Freedom Riders earlier that same year on far weaker allegations. The women, wives of stockbrokers affiliated with the American Legion, had filed suit to stop the benefit as subversive, and failing in that, had recruited pickets with signs saying “Turn Left for Scarsdale” and “Doing the Moscow Twist.”
Her worries built steadily in early November, as O’Dell continued to handle many of the financial preparations for the Sammy Davis benefit. He signed rental agreements and insurance bonds in behalf of the SCLC and kept track of advance ticket sales. When Kunstler heard that O’Dell was supposed to have resigned from the SCLC, she demanded an explanation. Stanley Levison kept telling her that the story was a distortion of O’Dell’s past, and was unlikely to surface, but Kunstler insisted that “this thing might bounce back on us,” and that rich people “would tell me to go fly a kite” if they suspected Communist involvement in the SCLC. When Levison suggested that she simply stop referring to O’Dell as the man in charge, she objected that “up to this point there has been no reason for us to use subterfuge, if you want to call it that.” She said her own integrity was at stake, because “many people may come back to me and say that I pulled the wool over their eyes.” They were dealing in mysteries of character and imagination, she told Levison: “Some people would laugh at this, but others might be terribly hurt…That spotlight is a powerful thing.”
FBI wiretappers intercepted these emotional exchanges over Levison’s office lines in New York and forwarded transcripts to headquarters, where Levison’s defense of O’Dell doubtless made perfect sense as one Communist vouching for another. The internal strife at the SCLC also was ample proof that the Bureau’s first active blow against King had landed with telling effect. FBI agents had planted the unsigned New Orleans article, along with virtually identical ones in four other newspapers scattered from St. Louis to Long Island.
Hoover launched a full-scale investigation of King at the same time. While it may have seemed illogical for the Bureau to punish King even before gathering evidence of alleged misdeeds, Hoover shrewdly seized his chance to give both orders during the week when the whole country was huddling in fear of extinction by Soviet missiles. The missile crisis inspired and justified emergency measures such as the newspaper attacks on King for employing O’Dell. Because such activities were forbidden within the United States, Bureau officials undertook the operation in the utmost secrecy, knowing they could rely on the discreet collaboration of trusted press contacts. To carry out the first secret strike against King, ironically, they called in the Washington representatives of five American newspapers.
Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, who supervised the dissemination of the five articles, was at the same time lobbying to fend off Robert Kennedy’s latest proposal for a government “white paper” on the U.S. Communist Party, which would reveal that the American Communists posed at most a minuscule threat of subversion. The Attorney General wanted to issue the document as a first step toward reducing the FBI’s domestic security apparatus—the background checkers, wiretap transcribers, subversive thought specialists, Red squad handlers, and the like—which he considered a gigantic misapplication of manpower. On November 7, however, DeLoach flatly refused Kennedy’s latest demand for a white paper. There was a “grave danger,” he wrote, that any such description of the Communist network “would compromise FBI informants.” Kennedy was caught in a classic spy trap: he could not reduce the mission of the informants without endangering them; therefore he must maintain the mission.
The running battle between Hoover and Kennedy defined the larger political context for the escalation of activity against King, as FBI officials were protecting their anti-Communist intelligence apparatus. Enmity toward King was a driving force. O’Dell was a fresh rationale. The missile crisis was a spur and an opportunity. Finally, the original Levison wiretap was up for six-month renewal, which generated bureaucratic pressures to justify past surveillance by extending it. Whatever the mix of these originating factors, the first King operations were highly satisfying from the Bureau’s point of view. Not only did its clandestine newspaper attacks cause reverberating psychological distress, as documented by the wiretaps, but the taps also showed that King had no idea who was behind them. Neither King nor anyone else at the SCLC realized that the New Orleans story was merely one of five. Their suspicions of foul play centered on local police forces. King, like everyone else in the civil rights movement, thought of the FBI as an ally—a most reluctant one at times, and certainly the conservative wing of the federal presence, but nevertheless a force that made segregationists nervous. King sought a more active FBI intervention in the South.
That November, Robert Kennedy signed a request from J. Edgar Hoover authorizing the Bureau to add a fourth wiretap on Stanley Levison. This one covered Levison’s home, and fulfilled the agents’ hopes of intercepting conversations with King late at night. Such blanket eavesdropping was beyond the reach of King’s vision. Even at “tip-toe stance,” he would not have been prepared for it. What he saw was a very different document signe
d that same day by a different Kennedy: President Kennedy issued his long-delayed executive order on racial discrimination in housing. King knew very well that it had been whittled down so that it barely resembled Kennedy’s “stroke of a pen” promise from the 1960 campaign. The anti-discrimination order excluded all existing housing, and all new housing except that owned or financed directly by the federal government. King also knew that the order was issued as quietly as possible on the eve of Thanksgiving—“deliberately sandwiched,” as Ted Sorensen later wrote, between dramatic presidential announcements on Soviet bombers and the China-India border war. The White House excluded reporters from the signing ceremony, and restricted the event to civil rights staff people. Still, for all these drawbacks, King saw that Kennedy was more of a potential ally than enemy. Publicly, King praised the new order as a step that “carries the whole nation forward to the realization of the American dream.”
Parting the Waters Page 96
