Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  In this letter, as in his sermons, King pulled back from an initial peroration. Almost as an aside, he mentioned the part of the Carpenter statement that expressed thanks to the Birmingham authorities for downplaying the demonstrations with muffling restraint. “I don’t believe you would so quickly commend the policemen if you would observe their ugly and inhuman treatment of Negroes here in the city jail,” King wrote. Conceding that the police had performed with professional discipline in public, King raised the question he thought should have occurred to the white preachers. “But for what purpose?” he asked them, and he answered his own question: “To preserve the evil system of segregation.” For all his nonviolent preaching about how it was wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends, King wrote, “it is just as wrong, or even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.” He quoted T. S. Eliot to that effect.

  Then he returned soulfully to his lament. “I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation,” he wrote. “One day the South will recognize its real heroes…One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers.”

  Late at night, an exhausted Willie Pearl Mackey literally fell asleep over her typewriter. Failing to revive her, Wyatt Walker lifted his secretary by the arms, placed her in another chair, and sat down at the typewriter himself. Against his sharply defined sense of executive hierarchy, only the rarest emergency could compel the descent into clerical duty, but this time Walker pecked to the end. He could not bear to leave undone so exquisite a blend of New Testament grace and Old Testament wrath. Near his closing, King groped consciously toward the mixture. “If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me,” he wrote to Bishop Carpenter and the others. “If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.”

  The “Letter from Birmingham Jail” did not spring quickly to acclaim. It remained essentially a private communication for some time, in spite of Wyatt Walker’s labors to attract the attention of the passing world. Its Gandhian themes did impress some of James Lawson’s contacts, who offered to publish the letter in the June issue of Friends, the Quaker journal, but ordinary reporters saw no news in what appeared to be an especially long-winded King sermon. Not a single mention of the letter reached white or Negro news media for a month. In hindsight, it appeared that King had rescued the beleaguered Birmingham movement with his pen, but the reverse was true: unexpected miracles of the Birmingham movement later transformed King’s letter from a silent cry of desperate hope to a famous pronouncement of moral triumph.

  Wyatt Walker sorely needed a glimpse of this future. In the absence of swelling expectations, his mechanical genius was being ground to bits. For the first time in the decade, physical persecution of King aroused no whirlwind of political pressures. The Kennedy Administration, after responding circumspectly to Coretta’s initiatives, preferred to remain silent. Its officials reacted no better than neutrally toward King if pressed, and in private criticized his movement as a nuisance. Four days after King went to jail, Walker tacitly acknowledged that King’s name had lost some of its symbolic power. In a letter to Burke Marshall he notified the Justice Department that henceforth the Birmingham campaign “would be channeling the enthusiasms built up into voter registration efforts.” Although Walker casually presented the change as “the second phase of our campaign,” it actually meant scrapping all the solemn resolve to break segregation in Birmingham by concerted direct action. Walker’s notice to Marshall anticipated an Albany-style retreat from Birmingham. It also signaled to the Kennedy people that King needed their support badly enough to adopt their preferred methods.

  Bishop Carpenter sat down in his study with a copy of King’s mammoth reply. He read the letter through to the end, then turned to his bishop coadjutor, George Murray, with a sigh of resignation. “This is what you get when you try to do something,” he said. “You get it from both sides. George, you just have to live with that.” Carpenter felt abused and misunderstood for his efforts to act as a progressive force in race relations. The clash of emotion turned him, like his great-grandfather, into a more strident Confederate.

  For the Kennedy Administration, King’s incarceration in Birmingham coincided with a climax of the intramural struggle over Mississippi. When the Civil Rights Commission submitted an advance draft of its special report, Burke Marshall rebutted selected phrases from the report in a memorandum to President Kennedy. Of the finding that Negroes in registration lines had been “set upon by vicious dogs,” Marshall reported that a single dog had bitten a single preacher in Greenwood. “The use of police dogs is not a prohibited activity,” he added. Of the finding that Mississippi Negroes had been “beaten and otherwise terrorized because they sought to vote,” Marshall told Kennedy that he did “not know what specific instances are referred to” but that one Negro registration worker indeed had been “pistol-whipped by the registrar of Walthall County.” Then, having reduced the charge of statewide voter intimidation to one incident, Marshall assured Kennedy that the Justice Department “brought a successful case in that instance.” He did not mention the bizarre limits of the success: the federal government had stopped Mississippi from prosecuting John Hardy for disturbing the peace while getting pistol-whipped. The Kafkaesque reality of Mississippi was that this was indeed a bold and notable first step from madness. The altered reality of Marshall’s memo created the impression for President Kennedy that Justice had punished the pistol-whipper and set things right for would-be Negro voters.

  At the White House, Lee White turned Marshall’s summary a few degrees into an outright attack on the Civil Rights Commission. For each “Charge” of injustice he listed an “Answer” cribbed from Marshall, leading to the conclusion that the report was wholly irresponsible. “Implicit is the suggestion that the President and the Administration have not done all that could be done for the Mississippi situation,” he wrote President Kennedy. “This, of course, is manifestly wrong.” White went on to suggest a number of “harmful effects” that the President might point out in urging the commission to withdraw or amend its report. Some of them amounted to threats: the report could “kill the bill to extend the life of the Commission,” said White, and “destroy the Commission’s reputation for reasonableness and that of its individual members.”

  President Kennedy summoned the commission’s staff director, Berl Bernhard, for a one-sided series of questions, many laced with sardonic disbelief. How in the world could various commissioners with such bad judgment have been appointed in the first place, he wanted to know, and why didn’t they understand that the report would “poison an atmosphere that is already pretty bad?” Armed with White’s memo, the President disputed the commission’s allegations of attacks on the Moses registration projects. As to a collateral finding of the commission that the federal government was subsidizing segregated programs in Mississippi, Kennedy told Bernhard that his information indicated otherwise. He said the Federal Aviation Administration had specifically denied that the new airport in Jackson would have segregated rest rooms and lunch counters.

  Bernhard feinted and dodged his way out of Kennedy’s office, not wishing to contradict the President to his face. The good news, he reported back to the commissioners, was that the President had not ordered them to withdraw the special report. Kennedy was basing his stand on the facts, where the unanimity of commissioners was most solid. Over the next few days, they gradua
lly disclosed to the Justice Department one of their secret weapons: they had the architect’s drawings for the new Jackson airport, which clearly showed a partitioned lunch room and dual sets of rest rooms for whites and Negroes. By the time Chairman John Hannah accompanied Bernhard to the White House for a final showdown over the report, Administration officials conceded that there was to be segregation in the rest rooms and lunch counters, but said there would be none in those parts of the airport subsidized by the federal government—the runways and the control tower. Therefore, the Administration would not be supporting segregation directly.

  By respectful persistence, Hannah and Bernhard won what they thought was a complete victory. President Kennedy reserved his quibbles of fact and ordered no changes. He asked only for the right to handle press announcements, but through this opening he sprang a trap that more than offset the commission’s airport blueprints. On Tuesday, April 16—while King was working feverishly on his letter in the Birmingham jail, and as Wyatt Walker was notifying Marshall of plans to fall back into voter registration—President Kennedy himself spoke privately with White House reporters upon release of the commission report. He drew attention to the final section, in which the commissioners “concluded unanimously that only further steps by the Federal Government can arrest the subversion of the Constitution in Mississippi.” One possible step was for President Kennedy to “explore his legal authority” to use federal spending as leverage against segregation. Here was the news, said the President, hinting strongly that this was a crackpot proposal, ensuring that the report came to light with emphasis on its most inflammatory ideas. “President Urged to Cut Off Funds for Mississippi,” announced The New York Times.

  White House aides fanned out among reporters to make sure they grasped the breadth of official disdain. Cutting off funds to punish racial abuses was impractical as well as unconstitutional, they said, and the very idea of singling out Mississippi implied that similar abuses were acceptable in other states. Even worse, the proposal was cruel to Mississippi Negroes, who would be the most severely punished by any curtailment of federal support. These objections took root everywhere in the press, including the outlets most supportive of civil rights. Such a public reception enabled President Kennedy safely to dismiss the commission three days later. “With regard to the incidents referred to in the Commission’s report,” he told Chairman Hannah in a public letter, “I am advised that every case, but one, has been successfully resolved.” At the Civil Rights Commission, which had submitted its grand declaration of conscience only to be hooted out of Washington, a miserable shock set in over this demonstration of the Administration’s power to control the tone of public discussion.

  When King and Abernathy bonded out that Saturday, after nearly nine days in the Birmingham jail, King appeared at an impromptu press conference wearing a heavy beard for the first and only time in his life, as there had been no shaving allowed in solitary. He explained that he had come out to confer with his lawyers about the contempt trial that was beginning on Monday. (He did not mention his long letter, but he did say he had managed to read two smuggled books, Ralph McGill’s The South and the Southerner and Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.) Three of the first four prosecution witnesses against him turned out to be news reporters, who testified that they had heard King and other defendants urging Negroes to demonstrate in defiance of the injunction. At the mass meeting that Monday night King predicted freedom in a defiant speech that concluded with a full recitation of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Practically unnoticed, he seemed to be darting through a refracted reality, like a kook.

  By eerie coincidence, a more obscure kook was on a parallel trek. As King was leaving jail on Saturday, a white postman from Baltimore was presenting himself at the White House gate with a letter notifying President Kennedy that he intended to take ten days’ vacation to walk all the way from Chattanooga to Mississippi wearing two signboards, END SEGREGATION IN AMERICA and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL MEN. “If I may deliver any letters from you to those on my line of travel, I would be most happy to do so,” offered the postman, William Moore. Rebuffed, his letter refused by the guards, Moore scribbled a handwritten P.S. to President Kennedy: “Keep up your fight against the Cuban war hawks. And read over your Senate speeches on Vietnam!” Then Moore, wearing his signs and pushing his personal effects in a two-wheeled postal cart, picketed on the White House sidewalk for a while before dropping his letter into a mailbox on his way to the bus station. He added “Mississippi or Bust” to one of his signboards.

  By Monday night, when King was reciting “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Moore was on the road, writing in his diary about his adventures thus far. He had adopted a dog and given it away to a small boy, he wrote, and a Negro in Chattanooga had ripped the word “black” out of his new signboard, EAT AT JOE’S, BOTH BLACK AND WHITE, saying angrily that the word should be “colored.”* Moore also wrote that he had drawn angry epithets and a few tossed rocks from roadside segregationists, as well as requests for interviews by feature reporters. He was indeed an odd sight as he pushed his cart down highways from Tennessee through a corner of Georgia and into Alabama. Blistered, swollen feet forced him to walk barefoot except when he went into stores to buy food.

  Moore had covered some seventy miles by Tuesday evening, when a reporter from radio station WGAD in Gadsden stopped him on the road for an interview. Asked his purpose, Moore said, “I intend to walk right up to the governor’s mansion in Mississippi and ring his doorbell. Then I’ll hand him my letter.” The letter was a civil rights plea asking Barnett to “be gracious and give more than is immediately demanded of you.” Of shouted threats that he would never make it alive, Moore said that he had grown up in Mississippi. “I don’t believe the people in the South are that way. I think a lot of this stuff is just made up.”

  The reporter left Moore on a remote stretch of U.S. Highway 11, near Attala. A passing motorist discovered the body a mile down the road, shot twice through the head at close range. A call from a farmhouse telephone brought sirens and reporters upon the murder scene. Moore lay face up in the grass, still wearing his signboards. In his pockets were $51, his letter to Governor Barnett, his diary, and postal receipts for expense money he had mailed ahead to himself at Birmingham and other towns along his route. Next to him was the postal cart containing his shoes, his extra clothes, and copies of his letter to President Kennedy.

  During Moore’s last moments on the road toward Birmingham, the nightly mass meeting there was advertising to Negroes the support of young people, especially whites. Fred Shuttlesworth dramatically introduced three white students from Birmingham Southern College, who walked sheepishly onto the platform to thunderous applause. King announced that two of the three were the children of preachers. When Shuttlesworth put his arms around the two female students, most of the audience bolted to its feet to cheer this astonishing public display of cross-racial, cross-sexual friendship. Police observers were correspondingly galled and disgusted. Two detectives met the next day with officials of Birmingham Southern, who promised swift disciplinary action against the two females for their conduct at the Negro church. Sam Shirah, they said with relief, had flunked out already.

  News of the roadside execution was flashing across the country that Wednesday. It did not take reporters long to discover that Moore, a hulking ex-Marine with a family in Binghamton, New York, had been confined for more than a year in a New York mental hospital, after which he had published a book in 1955 called The Mind in Chains. “I took my teachings literally,” he wrote of his Mississippi childhood, “and where the world was not like the ideal, I believed the world was wrong and so did not adjust my behavior to reality.” Stories told of Moore’s treatment for schizophrenia, his identification with Don Quixote, his sit-in arrest in Baltimore, his reputation among fellow postal workers as a likable screwball. They quoted from the conclusion of his book: “So the dream which led me to the State Hospital still has possession of me…. My whole future is in your
hands. I can only give my life. And you must make it or break it for me.”

  In Washington, Moore’s letter to President Kennedy had been delivered into the hands of Lee White, who made sure to brief his boss on the strange horror before that day’s televised press conference. No one asked about Moore, however. Nor did reporters ask a single question about King and the twenty-one consecutive days of demonstrations in Birmingham. Most of the questions had to do with great-power tensions over Laos and Cuba. In the only civil rights matter raised, a reporter asked if there was not some merit in the case for more federal action to establish the rights of Negroes in Mississippi. “Well,” President Kennedy replied, “in every case that the Civil Rights Commission described, the United States Government has instituted legal action in order to provide a remedy.” After several more comments in this vein, the President himself mentioned the previous night’s shooting of William Moore, perhaps to reach stronger and more truthful ground. “Now it’s very difficult,” he said. “We had an outrageous crime, from all accounts, in the State of Alabama in the shooting of the postman who was attempting, in a very traditional way, to dramatize the plight of some of our citizens. I think being assassinated on the road—” He paused in midsentence, then started again in a more official tone: “We have offered to the State of Alabama the services of the FBI…”