Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Arthur Schlesinger perked up as Martin worked through his idea. “I think Louie’s got something,” he said. They fashioned a proposal for a gala White House reception to be held on February 12—Lincoln’s Birthday. The timing would head off much of the possible white criticism from both political parties by casting the event in honor of the hallowed Republican president. Martin was confident that such a reception would redound to President Kennedy’s credit among Negroes—to whom the White House had been socially off limits except in token numbers. The presence of Negro celebrities in the White House would attract banner coverage in the Negro press—probably more than the proclamation would have. On this reasoning, Martin and the others struck a bargain with the Palm Beach White House to trade the proclamation for a reception.

  President Kennedy visited the Orange Bowl in Miami twice over the next few days. On December 29, he and Mrs. Kennedy reviewed the newly freed soldiers of the Bay of Pigs brigade there. Mrs. Kennedy saluted them in Spanish, and the President delivered an emotional promise to return their tattered battle flag to them “in a free Havana.” On New Year’s Day, the President was back at the Orange Bowl for a football game, puffing on a cigar as he watched young quarterback Joe Namath lead the University of Alabama to victory over Oklahoma.* The President granted Tom Wicker of The New York Times a long New Year’s interview in which, anticipating the overthrow of the Castro regime, he said the United States would impose no preconditions on the next government in Cuba.

  In Havana, Castro attacked Kennedy’s Orange Bowl pledge as the words of a “vulgar pirate chief.” Boasting of the Bay of Pigs ransom, he declared that “for the first time in history, imperialism paid an indemnification of war.” Che Guevara gave a much more sober speech on economic discipline, charging Cuba’s managers to run their operations more profitably. Also that New Year’s Day, North Vietnamese gunners shot down eight of fifteen U.S. helicopters in a troop transport convoy, and Nelson Rockefeller was sworn in for his second term as governor of New York. “This is an historic anniversary,” he began his address. “Just 100 years ago, on January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation became law.”

  King moved immediately after New Year’s, as there was nothing left to wait for. First he called in Wyatt Walker to ask if the blueprint for the Birmingham campaign was drafted. Assured that it was, King asked Walker to help him compile a small list for a secret planning meeting. For the first time in his career, King excluded the SCLC board, knowing that they would talk it to death. He did not invite Daddy King, nor any of the off-staff preachers except two whose Alabama experience was vital, Shuttlesworth and Joseph Lowery. Shuttlesworth was indispensable; it was his campaign as much as King’s. In addition to three top SCLC officers from Atlanta—Abernathy, Andy Young, and Dorothy Cotton—he selected only four others: Clarence Jones, Jack O’Dell, Stanley Levison, and James Lawson. That made eleven in all, counting King and Walker. King called Clarence Jones to say it was time. He wanted Jones to arrange for the three New Yorkers to come to a retreat at Dorchester on January 10. Jones did not have to be told what it was about. Unwittingly, he alerted J. Edgar Hoover with his call to Levison.

  After converging upon Atlanta, they all flew to Savannah on an early morning flight. The mood of the occasion was grimly practical, but the preachers among them appreciated that the Savannah region was a fitting site for revolutions grounded in religion. From Savannah, in 1738, the British revivalist George Whitefield had launched his first phenomenal tour of the American colonies, creating a mass intoxication—known as the Great Awakening—that swept from Georgia to New Hampshire. He drew 30,000 people to the Boston Common in 1740, when the city’s entire population was less than two-thirds that number. From Savannah, where John Wesley first landed from England with his Anglican theology shaken by Whitefield’s preaching on the voyage, Whitefield’s influence spawned Baptist congregations and later Wesleyan (Methodist) ones. The small, malaria-infested seaport in Georgia became mother to the two mass-based Protestant denominations that captured early American churchgoers. In Savannah itself, the spirit of conversion was so strong that many of the whites accepted the idea of promoting religion among the slaves. First African Baptist was established there in 1788 as one of the first Negro congregations on the North American continent. A pastor of First African led the slave preachers who parleyed with General Sherman when his March to the Sea reached Savannah. Nearly a century later, Martin Luther King welcomed the honor of preaching the Emancipation Day sermon at First African. To the history-laden congregation, he had delivered an early version of his “I Have a Dream” speech just before the Kennedy inauguration.

  The King party proceeded from Savannah to the old Congregationalist retreat at Dorchester, a town imbued with a peculiar variation on Savannah’s rich history. It had survived for many decades as the only known Puritan enclave in the slave South, transplanted in 1752 by way of Dorchester, Massachusetts, after the original Puritan flight from Dorchester, England, during the reign of the Stuart kings. The town had retained such disciplined piety that post—Civil War visitors had been amazed to find not a single mulatto among the newly freed slaves. Northern families kept ties to Dorchester even after the plantations shriveled up. Theodore Roosevelt’s mother was a native of Dorchester. The fathers of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Samuel F. B. Morse pastored the Midway Congregational Church there. Among the Southern pastors at Midway was the theologian C. C. Jones. A wealthy planter who conducted a lifelong ministry among the slaves, Jones was famous for his doctrines attempting to reconcile slavery with Christianity. He eventually became a tragic figure of American religious history. As a liberal slaveholder, he came under withering attack from Frederick Douglass. Their 1840s duel over the respectability of slavery as opposed to abolition foreshadowed the civil rights debates in both flesh and spirit. Jones’s great-grandson, the Episcopal bishop of Alabama, lay across King’s path in Birmingham.

  King presided over the business sessions at Dorchester, but the initial presentation belonged to Walker. He handed out a blueprint for a campaign in four stages. First, they would launch small-scale sit-ins to draw attention to their desegregation platform, while building strength through nightly mass meetings. Second, they would organize a generalized boycott of the downtown business section, and move to slightly larger demonstrations. Third, they would move up to mass marches—both to enforce the boycott and to fill the jails. Finally, if necessary, they would call on outsiders to descend on Birmingham from across the country, as in the Freedom Rides, to cripple the city under the combined pressure of publicity, economic boycott, and the burden of overflowing jails.

  As a general principle, Walker asserted that everything must build. If they showed strength, then outside support would grow more than proportionately. Once started, however, they could not fall back without suffering letdown and depression, which in Birmingham risked a fatal outbreak of Negro violence. In no case, said Walker, could the Birmingham campaign be smaller than Albany. That meant they must be prepared to put upwards of a thousand people in jail at one time, maybe more. They had to keep the average jailgoer inside at least five or six days at a time before bailing out. Walker projected various bail costs to the SCLC against jail costs to the city. Given the estimated value of the weekly Negro shopping power, he calculated the dollar and percentage losses to the downtown merchants from the boycott at various degrees of success. To work, the plan required extensive preparation, perfect timing, and loads of money.

  Walker had a flair for the dramatic. He called his entire blueprint Project C—for Confrontation. Assuming that Bull Connor would tap the phones, he assigned to the major leaders protective code names that reflected his aching respect for white authority. King would be “JFK,” said Walker. Abernathy would be “Dean Rusk” (which was not much to Abernathy’s liking). Walker himself would be “RFK.” John Drew, the Birmingham insurance man in whose home King would be staying, would be “Pope John.” Shuttlesworth, the movement’s war chief, would be “Mac,�
�� after Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Walker’s presentation was at once breathtaking and quixotic. It envisioned a precisely organized march into history by an organization that had taken four years to find a mimeograph machine.

  Still, it was Walker’s finest hour at the SCLC. Not a comma of the blueprint was altered when he finished. Instead, the conclave spent nearly two days talking and praying that it would work. Among their advantages was the relative vacuum of competition in Birmingham. The NAACP, still outlawed in Alabama, was not a factor, and SNCC had no projects in Birmingham. Shuttlesworth was the unquestioned master of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), which had not missed a Monday mass meeting in nearly seven years. So long as King and Shuttlesworth got along, there would be no paralyzing schisms. Another potential advantage was Birmingham’s economic structure. It remained largely a Carpetbagger city, answerable to steel interests and other corporate power in the North. Walker and O’Dell had been making lists of the companies, so that SCLC supporters could exert leverage on their home bases.

  On the other side, the ACMHR could provide only a fraction of the manpower they would need, and they acknowledged that their support was spotty at best among the bulk of Birmingham’s Negro leaders. A. G. Gaston might well oppose them. The pastor of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church had been badgering the SCLC to pay for the cost of burning the church lights for two nights during the previous September convention—hardly a sign of wholehearted support. Andrew Young said his canvass of the Birmingham preachers had not been encouraging, and Walker admitted that the conservative Negro Ministerial Association might actively oppose them. They ran through the preachers, name by name, until Shuttlesworth interrupted them. “Don’t worry, Martin,” he said. “I can handle the preachers.”

  King managed a smile. “You better be right,” he replied.

  Bull Connor loomed over the discussion. He had made Birmingham into his private fiefdom of segregation, with bareknuckled police tactics that had done nothing to discourage a tradition of vigilante violence. Negro Birmingham was dotted with bomb sites to prove it. The prospect of violence posed no ethical problems for King. “If it comes, we will surface it for the world to see,” he said. The issue was whether Project C could withstand systematic repression. Most of the eleven said they needed to move quickly, while the Birmingham reform movement had the whites divided and Connor on the defensive.

  Toward the end of the second day, King turned solemnly to O’Dell. “Jack, tell me about the money,” he said. “If we run dry again in the next few months, the press will say we went into Birmingham just to get out of debt.”

  O’Dell was ready with his projections. The SCLC had earned a net profit of $25,000 in the last quarter of 1962, he said, not counting the $12,000 realized from the Sammy Davis fund-raiser, and mass appeals from the New York office promised to double or triple the 1962 revenues. “We are mailing now in lots of 200,000,” he reported, to lists of proven return rates. Based on the mailings already out from the New York office and those in the works, O’Dell predicted confidently that direct-mail income would more than pay for the SCLC’s regular expenses through the first six months of the year.

  On O’Dell’s word, King stopped talking about postponing Birmingham for a grand fund-raising tour. Instead, he went around the table asking his colleagues for closing thoughts. Some gave chipper speeches; others passed. Stanley Levison reminded them of Bull Connor’s formative political experiences in the 1930s, when he had broken Birmingham’s labor movement as a steel company employee. Relatively speaking, he said, the labor movement of the thirties was more powerful than the civil rights movement of the present. Therefore, they could make no mistakes now. They were in for a rough fight.

  King closed the meeting somberly. “There are eleven people here assessing the type of enemy we’re going to face,” he said. “I have to tell you that in my judgment, some of the people sitting here today will not come back alive from this campaign. And I want you to think about it.”

  Shortly thereafter, FBI agents from the Savannah office filmed a deeply preoccupied group of eleven as they filed into the airport. In a bureaucracy such as the FBI, it was no casual matter to arrange this surveillance on short notice—to pull agents from other duties, to carry out the security liaison work with the airport managers, to process intelligence on the whereabouts of the subjects, to secure, place, and operate a hidden camera. All this was the product of peremptory orders from Director Hoover himself. His progress reports on the retreat already had landed on Attorney General Kennedy’s desk. A quick survey of the Bureau’s Negro informants turned up no one who knew anything about the meeting, and the Bureau had no idea what had been discussed. This very secrecy would have made the Dorchester retreat seem sinister to Hoover even if Levison and O’Dell had not been present. As it was, Hoover saw King meeting surreptitiously with two Communists, including one who was supposed to have resigned. On this point, his reports attracted the Attorney General’s suspicion. “Burke—this is not getting any better,” Kennedy wrote on one of Hoover’s memos.

  Kennedy’s attention reinforced a surge of triumphant indignation in the Bureau. They had ensnared King in a nest of spies; the Dorchester meeting might as well have occurred in Red Square. It was then that Deke DeLoach, who had made a career of reading the shifting moods within Hoover’s FBI, composed his inflamed memo on King’s failure to respond to his phone message in November. “I see no further need to contacting Rev. King inasmuch as he obviously does not desire to be given the truth,” DeLoach concluded. “The fact that he is a vicious liar is amply demonstrated by the fact he constantly associates with and takes instructions from Stanley Levison who is a hidden member of the Communist Party in New York.”

  “I concur,” Hoover scrawled at the bottom of the memo. With that, on King’s thirty-fourth birthday, the FBI officially wrote him off as unfit for mediation or negotiation. Thereafter, upon receiving intelligence that someone was trying to kill him, the Bureau would refuse to warn King as it routinely warned other potential targets, such as Shuttlesworth. The FBI assigned full enemy status to King, who had staked his life and his religion on the chance that enemy-thinking might be overcome. That an intelligence agency took such a step in the belief that King was an enemy of freedom, ignorant of the reality that King had just set in motion the greatest firestorm of domestic liberty in a hundred years, was one of the saddest ironies of American history.

  It took King three months of delay and foreboding to reach Birmingham. Early in the new year, he went to Washington for a private, unpublicized conference with Attorney General Kennedy. No record survives, but circumstances indicate that Robert Kennedy was moving deeper into his middle-man role between King and J. Edgar Hoover, accommodating each one while emphasizing the faults of the other. King came away in grudging awareness that he could not finesse the O’Dell accusations so easily as he had tried in the fall. Reluctantly, he notified O’Dell that he needed a “paper record” to show that he had taken seriously the allegations that O’Dell was a Communist agent. He asked for a written record of O’Dell’s Communist associations, along with a restatement of his commitment to nonviolence and a pledge of loyalty to the American form of government. When O’Dell complied, King asked Clarence Jones to write a letter to Attorney General Kennedy using O’Dell’s statements to justify King’s decision to retain him on the SCLC staff. Jones, reflecting fresh paranoia around King and the charged secrecy of the Kennedy officials, blanked out O’Dell’s name wherever it appeared in his draft.

  King protected O’Dell at a relatively small cost, but to him the character examination was a skulking, undignified diversion, and the Kennedy Administration’s preoccupation with it a sign of growing distance from the movement in tone and substance. President Kennedy, in a background interview with the Negro press, advanced the opinion that the country faced no “serious division” on racial matters, and that the problems of Negroes could be subsumed in the Administration’s over
all approach to education and economic growth. Lee White, his civil rights aide, told the President what he wanted to hear—that the Negro population “was pretty much at peace.” King, speaking directly to President Kennedy by phone from the Attorney General’s office, pleaded with him to include civil rights legislation in his State of the Union address, which would mark the beginning of Kennedy’s third year in the White House. Thus far, Kennedy had asked for none of the legislation promised by the Democratic platform of 1960, and once again he had decided to postpone civil rights legislation. It would never pass, said the President, who maintained that he could do more for civil rights by appointment and executive order than by the futile, costly gesture of sending unpassable bills to Congress.