This was Wednesday, April 3, when nervous volunteers were moving off for the first sit-ins at Birmingham’s lunch counters. In Greenwood, the fire department tried to help the police quell that day’s registration march by putting a fire truck across the route to the courthouse. Fear of being injured by high-powered fire hoses paralyzed the march line until James Bevel walked boldly to the fire chief and said, “There’s a fire going on inside of us, baby, but you can’t put it out.” In New York, a large photograph of Dick Gregory appeared on the front page of the morning Times, his arms twisted behind his back by Greenwood policemen. In Washington, the Greenwood story surfaced at President Kennedy’s press conference. Asked whether the Justice Department could do more for the voter registration drive, Kennedy replied that the department already had filed a new voting rights suit in Greenwood “that’s due for a hearing very shortly—perhaps this week.” He said he hoped Doar’s action would show that “there has been a denial of rights, which seems to me evident, but which the court must decide.”
There was euphoria among the new U.S. clients inside the Greenwood jail. Having been briefed by Doar in the morning, they learned that President Kennedy himself specifically endorsed their case on national television later that day. That evening, U.S. marshals came to take them away from state authorities, which seemed another step toward victory until the marshals proceeded to manacle and chain them together at the waist. Although they were merely being transferred to federal custody for the next day’s hearing, this treatment seemed excessively harsh for the government’s allies. Several of the manacled students made sarcastic comments about how their protectors were playing to the sympathies of the Greenwood segregationists. As always, Forman’s reaction was at once less subtle and more subtle than the others. While furiously demanding to speak with the sheriff or the senior marshal, he also conspired to get a publicity photograph taken of the SNCC prisoners in the “federal chains.” Moses and several of the other students could only shake their heads in amusement at Forman as the irrepressibly scheming, imperious victim. Forman also demanded to see the sheriff about their many legitimate grievances—medical treatment, the lack of towels, and the quality of prison food. “There is no justification for not feeding prisoners a balanced diet,” he said.
The ironic twists of jailhouse politics were trivial to Moses, who, after nearly two solid years under the heel of Mississippi, finally glimpsed an opening in the larger paradox: how Negroes could obtain freedom without power and power without freedom. By the next morning, before the hearing, Moses had shed his usual reticence to rejoice out loud in his cell. He was “in rare form, standing behind the bars, singing alone,” said Forman. Urged on by the regular prisoners, Moses began a chant: “Do you want your freedom? Are you ready to go to jail?” and even the thieves and vagrants around him understood the chant to be a revelation of hope. Then, suddenly, the jailers opened their cells, and they received the miraculous news that Greenwood had caved in during the pre-trial negotiations, so that their sentences were suspended and the papers signed—they were free! Singing “This Little Light of Mine,” the eight SNCC workers walked outside the jail to a triumphant press conference. “We stood eyeball to eyeball and the other side just blinked,” one of them told reporters, echoing Secretary of State Rusk’s famous boast after the Cuban missile crisis.
The celebration went on long after Moses began falling into gloom. He learned that there would be no hearing that day on the other two objectives of Doar’s lawsuit—the federal orders to desist from harassing and to provide protection for people in the Greenwood registration lines. Doar first told reporters he needed more time to prepare his case. Then he said he thought it was more important to get Moses and the others out of jail than to proceed hastily with the lawsuit. Finally, reporters confirmed rumors that Doar’s superiors in Washington had set aside the lawsuit in exchange for release of the eight prisoners. The reporters did not find out about another bargain: to get relief assistance resumed in LeFlore County, the federal government agreed to pick up the county’s distribution costs. This part of the settlement allowed LeFlore County leaders to say that they had stood up to Washington without restoring a dime of local tax money for the distribution of food to rebellious Negroes. In effect, they were making the federal government pay them for having shut off food relief.
Doar searched for Moses in the Negro neighborhoods of Greenwood. As the official most personally torn by the brutalities of civil rights politics, he wanted to try to explain. Doar’s respect for Burke Marshall and Robert Kennedy was so strong that he had accepted their reasoning for the deal, which was that the government could not place its authority behind civil rights in voter registration without being prepared to assume far-flung police responsibilities—not just in LeFlore County but possibly across the entire South. If they won the injunction, Marshall reasoned, then local police might simply abdicate their responsibilities, which would leave the federal government no choice but to intervene in force. U.S. Border Patrol officers might find themselves directing traffic in Greenwood, answering fire alarms, and riding shotgun for a thousand endangered registration workers like Jimmy Travis.
Doar understood why Kennedy and Marshall refused to take a step in that direction, but he also knew what an effort Moses had made to cooperate with the federal government—how conscientiously he had followed the Administration’s advice to pursue registration instead of demonstrations, how meticulously he had filed detailed reports on beatings, shootings, and lesser harassments. He knew Moses would be profoundly disappointed to see Washington maneuvering to get out of, rather than into, Greenwood, but still he was not prepared for the look of depression on Moses’ face when he finally located him on a back street, isolated among Negroes still celebrating the release from jail. To Doar, it seemed as though Moses, already having intuited the strategic reasoning behind the bargain with Greenwood, was lost in despairing thoughts about the implications for the Mississippi movement. The look was so penetrating that Doar could not bring himself to present his explanations, and when Moses did not raise the subject himself, they said good-bye with numb pleasantries. Thereafter, a barrier of formality came between Doar the government man and Moses the wary supplicant.
Abundant signs indicated what Moses already knew: that the Greenwood movement was collapsing. Dick Gregory left town. The mass meetings shriveled. Heading home to Atlanta, James Forman stopped off in Birmingham with urgent ideas for invigorating the sagging movement there as a joint project of SNCC and the SCLC, only to be rudely expelled by Wyatt Walker as a pretentious, panhandling nuisance. (“If I ever cut anybody’s throat,” Walker recalled, “that was it.”) In a dramatic about-face, Greenwood’s Mayor Sampson provided a city bus to transport those Negroes who really did want to take the registration test. This gesture was the result of ceaseless prodding by federal officials, who finally convinced the politicians of LeFlore County that it was more important to maintain political control than to flaunt it. In return for putting away their police dogs, they retained their post-Reconstruction prerogative of determining who was eligible to vote. Over the next six months, the tireless workers of the LeFlore County registration project brought 1,500 Negroes to take the registration test, and of these only fifty were accepted. Although Negroes outnumbered whites, Negro registered voters tallied only 300 against 10,000. On election day they were still invisible.
Claude Sitton, for once letting his sympathies outrun his devotion to fact, told readers of The New York Times that the registration movement “has picked up momentum.” He proclaimed LeFlore County a “major battleground” of civil rights, but this was his last important dispatch from Greenwood. An evaporation of news soon forced him to leave town. In Atlanta, Wiley Branton was fuming. He blamed the sudden demise of the Greenwood movement not on tepid federal support or the resilience of Mississippi but on Martin Luther King. Complaining bitterly to his colleagues, he charged that an envious King, seeing Mississippi rise up without him as the main chance
to break segregation, had launched a quick diversion in Birmingham.
On B-Day, April 3, clairvoyance or the example of Greenwood had inspired King to proclaim, “They may set the mad dogs on us!” Six days later, preoccupied with less dramatic threats, he faced more than a hundred skeptical Negro businessmen at a special meeting. In an atmosphere that King recalled as “tense and chilly,” the men peppered him with criticisms of the movement. Some said they didn’t need outsiders to solve their problems. Some said King had not given Boutwell a fair chance. Nearly all expressed a preference for cooperation over the dangerous, distasteful business of handcuffed picketers and angry policemen. King responded with all his rhetorical powers, preaching with his career on the line. He tried to overwhelm them with descriptions of his comprehensive planning. He tried to seduce them with visions of celebrities, promising to bring Jackie Robinson and Sammy Davis, Jr., to town.
They applauded when it was over, allowing King to say that he had at least neutralized them. A. G. Gaston released a statement afterward that King’s supporters claimed as an endorsement of the movement. Segregationists also praised Gaston, however, and white newspapers published his call for “all the citizens of Birmingham to work harmoniously together in a spirit of brotherly love to solve the problems of our city, giving due recognition to the local colored leadership among us.” Gaston’s statement took no notice of King or the demonstrations. King knew that his own impact upon the businessmen would be short-lived, and that some of those who had applauded him to his face already were grumbling that he should leave town. At the mass meeting that night, he announced that he had postponed plans to go to jail himself. Having hoped that his own jailing would add a last surge of momentum to a great mass movement, he now faced jail instead as a last resort, to ward off the movement’s extinction.
King’s extinction was precisely what Alabama’s white officials were plotting with Governor Wallace that same day in Montgomery. Knowing that bail funds already were low, they drafted a bill to raise the maximum appeal bond in misdemeanor cases from $300 to $2,500, applicable only in Birmingham. They added a resolution proclaiming that Birmingham “has been invaded by foreigners who would by force and violence attempt to overthrow laws which may not be to their liking.” With these measures dispatched to the legislature, the white politicians quarreled over police tactics. Bull Connor and Governor Wallace wanted to send in a conspicuous force of one hundred tough-looking state troopers to crush or intimidate the Negro demonstrators, but the reform faction of the Birmingham establishment—the sheriff, the newspapers, the leading businessmen, and the Boutwell administration—endorsed the “velvet fist” tactics of Albany’s police chief Laurie Pritchett, with whom they had been consulting. Any step to make the conflict more violent or dramatic would backfire, they argued.
Politics saturated these backroom disputes. Both sides played to the Alabama judges who would rule on Bull Connor’s lawsuit to overturn or delay the new city charter, which would invalidate the recent city election. Connor needed racial drama if he was to be seen as the indispensable strong man, a latter-day Stonewall Jackson. The establishment needed a smothering quiet if they were to remain guarantors of civic dignity. The two sides compromised on Tuesday: no state troopers for now, but Connor would obtain an Albany-style court order banning Negro protest. Such an injunction either would cripple the movement or give a more statesmanlike purpose to Bull Connor’s mass arrests.
The impending injunction was an open secret all day Wednesday, as city attorneys scrambled to prepare affidavits. King heard it was coming. The only good news was that Connor was applying to state court instead of federal court, the better to secure a reliable judge. This was a welcome distinction to King, as now he would face the order of a segregationist state, Alabama, rather than of the United States. “Everyone in the movement must live a sacrificial life,” King told the mass meeting that night, but his predicament put him in a snappish mood. He denounced the people breaking the downtown shopping boycott as “traitors to the Negro race.” Abernathy followed with an emotional pledge to go to jail on Good Friday, and then the leaders resumed their strategy sessions late into the night, receiving minute-by-minute reports on the progress of the emergency injunction. Judge William A. Jenkins signed the papers about nine o’clock. Shortly after one o’clock the next morning, a deputy sheriff walked into the restaurant of the Gaston Motel for what amounted to a staged ceremony of war. Receiving him at a table, flanked by Abernathy and Shuttlesworth, King silently read the court order while a full contingent of reporters waited behind cameras and microphones for his response. King was the first-named object of a sweeping injunction. To preserve public order and to prevent anticipated “bloodshed and violence,” Judge Jenkins specifically ordered 133 people not to engage in or encourage a host of protest activities: “parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing and picketing,” even “conduct customarily known as ‘kneel-ins’ in churches.”
It was easy for the three Negro leaders to denounce the injunction as flagrantly unconstitutional. It was relatively easy for them to announce the next day that they “cannot in all good conscience obey such an injunction,” and that the movement would not stop. The final step was far more difficult: to envision a plan that would relieve the certain pain of defying the injunction with the promise of positive accomplishment. Their grand Birmingham campaign showed signs of terminal weakness. In eight days, they had put fewer than 150 people in jail. By comparison, nearly twice that number had gone to jail in tiny Albany on the first day of mass protest alone. Even after the supporters hanging over the Gaston balconies cheered the pledge of the three leaders to lead a Good Friday march to jail, only seven volunteers stepped forward for the demonstrations on Thursday, April 11. Less than fifty signed up for the privilege of accompanying King to jail.
By staying away from the Thursday-night mass meeting at the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church, King avoided making any more promises. In the crisis, Daddy King rushed over from Atlanta to preach in his place, just as a new development promised to keep his son out of jail after all. The city notified the movement’s bail bondsman that he had reached the limit of established credit, which amounted to a bankruptcy notice for the jail project. No longer could volunteers be assured that the movement would provide bail, and now the poorest of them might wind up in jail for six months instead of six days. Until late in the night, King and his advisers paddled around among a hundred ramifications. Could they warn potential jailgoers of this sad state without ruining what spirit remained? Was King’s first obligation to fulfill his promise of going to jail, or should he, as the SCLC’s only proven fund-raiser, tour the country to recharge the bail funds? If he took the latter course, would there be any movement left when he returned to Birmingham?
“Let’s think it through,” King kept saying, but the more kinetic Wyatt Walker often darted out of the nonstop discussion to supervise his projects. He had one group of volunteers stuffing 1,500 letters, another distributing 50,000 leaflets in support of the downtown boycott. Walker seemed to lose himself more than ever in organizational details, as though to avoid the more general impotence of the campaign. All over Birmingham, Negroes were doing their wash, sitting on porches, playing on ballfields, stubbornly in neglect of the master plan. Walker’s diagrams could not levitate an entire city. When King had sent a runner to fetch him one too many times, Walker slammed his clipboard furiously on the table. “I can’t be everywhere at one time!” he shouted at King. A shocked King tried to calm him, saying, “Wait a minute, wait a minute.”
Norman Amaker, an NAACP lawyer from New York, briefed King and some two dozen movement leaders early on Good Friday morning, April 12. Crowded into the sitting room of King’s Room 30, the only suite in the Gaston Motel, they heard Amaker say that the Jenkins injunction was probably unconstitutional, but that anyone who violated it would probably be punished regardless. Whatever King decided to do, Amaker said in closing, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund would stand behind
him in court. King himself set a gloomy tone for what followed, saying he did not want to spend the rest of his life in jail. He did not know what to do, and felt trapped between conflicting obligations. While he did not want to let the injunction make him renege on his promises to carry on the Birmingham movement, neither did he want to lead new people blindly into jail, especially since he did not know how the movement could make bond for those already there. Then he called on his friends for suggestions. After a silence, one said that King could not go to jail, because the movement would die without new money. Daddy King recommended that his son not break the injunction. A lawyer boasted implausibly that if King went to jail, he would spring him by getting the injunction quashed. Andrew Young and several others said they would support whatever King decided. Significantly, no one, including Shuttles-worth and Abernathy, suggested that other leaders go to jail in King’s place. They were in a downward spiral; King recalled that “our most dedicated and devoted leaders were overwhelmed by a feeling of hopelessness.”
He did not reply to any of the suggestions. When they died out, he simply withdrew into the bedroom and shut the door, acutely conscious that at the moment his closest associates formed an inert mass. Before him in one direction was the abyss of jail, with exaggerated martyr’s hopes that his arrest would ignite both the Kennedy White House and Birmingham’s Negroes. In the other direction were press conferences and elaborate explanations why a fund-raising detour was necessary for a sounder movement, with exaggerated hopes of a triumphant return—and silent fears that this was the end, that a leader could not duck out behind his followers. When King stepped back into the other room a few minutes later, he wore a work shirt, blue jeans that were crisply new and rolled up at the cuffs, and a new pair of “clodhopper” walking shoes. It was a startling sight, as some of those in the room had never seen King wear anything but a dark business suit.
Parting the Waters Page 103
