Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  The Bureau wasted no time describing its target as “King’s unholy alliance with the Communist Party, USA,” and King as “an unprincipled opportunistic individual.” Sullivan summoned Agent Nichols and others to Washington for a nine-hour war council, the result of which was a six-point plan to “expose King as an immoral opportunist who is not a sincere person but is exploiting the racial situation for personal gain.” All the top officials signed a ringing declaration of resolve laced with four of the usual pledges to proceed “without embarrassment to the Bureau.” The underlying hostility did not make the officials that unusual among Americans of their station. Nor was it unusual that an odd man such as Hoover would run aground in his obsession with normalcy. Race, like power, blinds before it corrupts, and Hoover saw not a shred of merit in either King or Levison. Most unforgivable was that a nation founded on Madisonian principles allowed secret police powers to accrue over forty years, until real and imagined heresies alike could be punished by methods less open to correction than the Salem witch trials. The hidden spectacle was the more grotesque because King and Levison both in fact were the rarest heroes of freedom, but the undercover state persecution would have violated democratic principles even if they had been common thieves.

  For King, the rise of American liberalism was both a gain and a loss. Many of his admirers were quick to thank the movement for bringing religious homilies to national attention, and just as quick to dismiss him now as a Baptist preacher out of his depth. He reaped recognition and condescension hard upon each other. As a result, newcomers to derivative freedom movements programmed themselves to run amok, because they grossly underestimated the complexity, the restraint, and the grounding respect for opponents that had sustained King, Moses, and countless others through the difficult years. The antiwar movement and others would be child’s play compared with the politics of lifting a despised minority from oblivion.

  SNCC’s annual conference was held in Washington in the week following the Kennedy assassination. Innocence thought lost was lost again many times over. John Lewis was among those who wanted to lead an official SNCC processional to the grave at Arlington Cemetery, but the idea was voted down. Some objected that such tribute would be hypocritical, given their differences with the late President. Others said they should pay their respects through the movement.

  More so than usual, Bob Moses spoke as though in a trance. “The white people in the country, by and large, have not as yet made up their minds whether they’re willing to grant freedom to Negroes,” he said. That month’s Freedom Vote had been designed to give Negroes a means of building the movement without threatening whites unduly—a mock vote parallel to the official election, a full-scale pretend vote with ballot boxes and live candidates, just to implant the feel of what it would be like to vote, together with a hint that the exclusionary regular election was illegitimate. Some 90,000 Mississippi Negroes had “voted.” Many of them had since expressed interest in trying to register, and national publicity about the Freedom Vote had spread the idea that Negroes would vote in great numbers if allowed. Still, said Moses, the only hope was to force a confrontation between federal and state authority, in which the states would have to give ground toward equal rights. “It is true, the Negroes are blackmailing the Federal Government,” he said in a partly confessional tone.

  One way to force the confrontation was to extend the notion of the Freedom Vote to a parallel school system, Freedom Schools, which could teach literacy skills and constitutional rights on a mass scale. Eighty Yale and Stanford students had come down as volunteers for the Freedom Vote, and if they returned for the summer in greater numbers, they could help staff the schools. This proposal nearly tore SNCC asunder. Projects outside Mississippi complained that it would drain resources from them. Most Negro Mississippians were enthusiastic about any help, including that of Northern white students, but veteran SNCC staff workers objected vehemently to the deference and attention the white students inescapably would command. Across weeks of raw debate, Moses himself refused to express a firm opinion for or against the summer project. Always opposed to fiat by leaders, he added that this idea also carried special responsibilities. White volunteers would be beaten severely or killed, he said, and their race and status would magnify the national reaction. To the extent that SNCC consciously used the students as white lambs of sacrifice, they must bear the burden of that moral and political choice.

  A messenger interrupted one of the marathon debates in Hattiesburg with news that Louis Allen had been found under his logging truck in Amite County, dead of three shotgun wounds to the head. Guilt ate at Moses even before he found the stricken widow. He had been out of touch. It had been more than a year since his last letter to John Doar, after a deputy sheriff had broken Allen’s jaw with a flashlight: “They are after him in Amite…” Allen had been a marked man ever since telling Moses he had seen the state legislator shoot Herbert Lee in cold blood. The potshots and threats had so frightened him that Louis Allen had tried repeatedly to leave the state, once saying “Thank you, Jesus” when he crossed the line into Louisiana, but he simply did not have the wherewithal to live outside Mississippi. Lost away from his family and his logging work, Allen had returned to a series of half-finished escape plans, including one that fell through when his mother got sick and died in his last week. Moses knew none of this last pathos, but he did realize that he had failed to reach Camus’ ideal of being neither a victim nor an executioner. He was both, and he was also a political leader in spite of his obsession for consensus. He had led Louis Allen to where he was now, and it would make utterly no difference unless he led others.

  Moses returned straight to Hattiesburg. “We can’t protect our own people,” he said bluntly. With that he threw his influence and reputation behind an expanded plan to bring at least a thousand Northern volunteers to Mississippi in the summer of 1964.

  Back home after the Kennedy funeral, King felt the wide range of his life’s journey. He had to cancel the SCLC’s credit cards because Abernathy and others were spending too much and the treasury was bare again. Robert Kennedy dismissed his objections to the Albany Nine prosecutions in a terse letter. From Selma, Mrs. Boynton asked him to help in the desperate case of forty elderly Negro women who had been locked out of a rest home for protesting when one of them was beaten in the registration line; Boynton wanted to buy a sewing machine so that some of the women could earn their keep in private homes. King mediated a dispute over a dentist bill for Mahalia Jackson, made more speeches, and sat alone with President Johnson for an hour in the close embrace of noble dreams as big as Texas. Back home, sick in bed, he received the first white graduate student pursuing a doctorate on King’s oratory. The children were running wild through the house. “I think we’re gonna have to let Dexter go out,” King said. “He doesn’t have the restraint, uh, the virtue of quietness…I’ll call mama downstairs.” When the student asked about the effects of Kennedy’s death, King said it was a blessing for civil rights. “Because I’m convinced that had he lived, there would have been continual delays, and attempts to evade it at every point, and water it down at every point,” he said, almost brightly. “But I think his memory and the fact that he stood up for this civil rights bill will cause many people to see the necessity for working passionately…So I do think we have some very hopeful days ahead.”

  The reaction to Kennedy’s assassination pushed deep enough and wide enough in the high ground of political emotion to enable the movement to institutionalize its major gains before receding. Legal segregation was doomed. Negroes no longer were invisible, nor those of normal capacity viewed as statistical freaks. In this sense, Kennedy’s murder marked the arrival of the freedom surge, just as King’s own death four years hence marked its demise. New interior worlds were opened, along with a means of understanding freedom movements all over the globe. King was swelling. Race had taught him hard lessons about the greater witness of sacrifice than truth, but there was more. Nonviolence had come over
him for a purpose that far transcended segregation. It touched evils beyond color and addressed needs more human than status or possessions. Having lifted him up among rulers, it would drive him back down to die among garbage workers in Memphis. King had crossed over as a patriarch like Moses into a land less bounded by race. To keep going, he became a pillar of fire.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to Alan Morrison of the Public Citizen Litigation Group and to the lead counsel in my case, Katherine Meyer, for patient, skillful pursuit of classified FBI material on Stanley Levison.

  My editor, Alice Mayhew, has lifted me through this, our third book together, with her sustaining belief in the project. I thank her, along with at least a few of the people at Simon and Schuster who I know have gone beyond professional duty to help me: Henry Ferris, George Hodgman, Tina Jordan, David Shipley, Marcia Peterson, Eileen Caughlin, Natalie Goldstein, and Lisa Petrusky. Richard Snyder and other executives have financed me generously (but not extravagantly) for more than six years, beyond expectations of commercial return. I thank the John S. Guggenheim Foundation for a grant that subsidized the better part of one year’s research. As always, I am grateful to my agent, George Diskant of Los Angeles, for his diligent encouragement of our family’s welfare.

  Our seven-year-old daughter Macy and five-year-old son Franklin have only gently inquired what their father has been doing upstairs all their lives. My heart’s response to them, to Christy, and to other family members belongs privately elsewhere, but I do want to acknowledge the advice, encouragement, and inspiration of a few special friends: Scott Armstrong, Samuel Bonds, Karen De Young, David Eaton, Mary Macy, Bettyjean Murphy, Dan and Becky Okrent, Charles Peters, John and Susan Rothchild, Michele Slung, and Nicholas von Hoffman.

  Among the employees of the libraries and archives cited in the notes, I am especially indebted to the following people, some of whom have since moved on to other positions: Louise Cook, Cynthia Lewis, and Diane Ware of the King Archives in Atlanta; Howard Gotlieb of the Mugar Library at Boston University; Martin Teasley of the Eisenhower Library in Abilene; Will Johnson and Ron Whealan of the Kennedy Library in Boston; Linda Hanson and Nancy Smith of the Johnson Library in Austin; Elinor Sinnette and Maricia Bracey from the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University; Harold Miller of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison; Sue Thrasher and Paul DeLeon of the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee; James H. Hutson of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; Joyce Lee of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York City Public Library; Joseph Ernst of the Rockefeller Archive Center in Pocantico, New York; Walter Naegle of the A. Philip Randolph Institute in New York; Emil Moschella and Helen Ann Near of the FBI’s Records Management Division; Janet Blizzard, James P. Turner, Nelson Hermilla, Curtis Goffe, and William B. Jones of the U. S. Department of Justice; Nancy Angelo of the Pacifica Radio Archive in Los Angeles; and Marvin Whiting and Donald Veasey of the Birmingham Public Library. I am grateful to Archie E. Allen, Edwin Guthman, C. B. King, and Mrs. W. E. “Pinkie” Shortridge for sharing historical materials in their personal possession. Jennifer Bard and Beth Taylor Muskat ably conducted specialized research during 1983.

  This book would not have been possible without the cooperation of several hundred people who agreed to share with me their personal knowledge. Their names are scattered throughout the notes. Some, like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, C. B. King, E. D. Nixon, and Bayard Rustin, have since died. Some remain new friends, and I respect others for persisting in our interviews through pain or disagreement. Of those who responded to several inquiries over the years, I owe special thanks to Ralph Abernathy, Harry Belafonte, James Bevel, G. Murray Branch, John Doar, Clarence Jones, Thomas Kilgore, Bernard Lee, Beatrice Levison, Burke Marshall, Robert P. Moses, Kenneth Lee Smith, Harry Wachtel, and Wyatt Tee Walker.

  Similarly, I want to pay special tribute to those writers whose work opened new regions of pleasure and investigation to me, for which I am grateful beyond the literal debts cited in the notes: Clayborne Carson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Samuel Gandy, David Garrow, Thomas Gentile, Richard Kluger, Leon Litwack, Walter Lord, Aldon Morris, Pat Watters, Carter G. Woodson, and Lamont Yeakey.

  ABBREVIATIONS USED IN SOURCE NOTES

  NOTES

  One

  FORERUNNER: VERNON JOHNS

  outdoor sheriff’s sales: E. King. Great South, p. 333.

  more dignified access: Int. Dr. Zelia Evans, June 8, 1983.

  property worth $300,000: Evans, Dexter Avenue, p. 14.

  “on American soil”: Du Bois, Souls, p. 216.

  largest Negro church: Int. Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, March 5, 1984.

  proceeds to the church: Int. William Beasley, secretary, First Baptist Church, Dec. 20, 1983.

  exchange for the property: Ibid.

  “Brick-a-Day Church”: Ibid.; program for the Centennial Celebration of the First Baptist Church, Montgomery, 1967.

  firmly unrepentant: Int. R. D. Nesbitt, Dec. 29, 1983.

  “God-blessed”: Evans, Dexter Avenue, p. 62. Trail information, int. R. D. Nesbitt, Dec. 29, 1983.

  in October 1948: Dexter’s official history states that Johns took up the pastorate in 1947, but all the Johns relatives cited below agree that Vernon Johns moved to Montgomery in October 1948, four months after his wife and two months before the rest of his family.

  the stuff of legend: Sources used below on Vernon Johns generally include Gandy, Human, and Boddie, God’s Bad. On Johns’s family background, sources include interviews with the following relatives: Robert Johns (brother), Jan. 11, 1984; Vernon Increase Johns (son), Feb. 14, 1984; Altona Johns Anderson (daughter), Jan. 31, 1984 and Feb. 7, 1984; Enid Johns (daughter), Jan. 24, 1984 and Jan. 30, 1984; Jeanne Johns Adkins (daughter), Jan. 28, 1984; William Trent (wife’s brother), Feb. 2, 1984; and Barbara Johns Powell (niece), Dec. 9, 1983. On Johns as a preacher, sources include interviews with Dr. Samuel Gandy, Oct. 19, 1983; Rev. S. S. Seay, Sr., Dec. 20, 1983; Rev. G. Murray Branch, June 7, 1983; Rev. Gardner Taylor, Oct. 25, 1983; Rev. Charles S. Morris, Feb. 3, 1984; Rev. Thomas Kilgore, Nov. 8, 1983; Rev. Vernon Dobson, Oct. 5, 1983 and Dec. 2, 1983; Rev. James L. Moore, Dec. 2, 1983; Dr. E. Evans Crawford, May 31, 1983; Rev. Melvin Watson, Feb. 25, 1983; Rev. David Briddell, Aug. 17, 1983; and Rev. Marcus G. Wood, Oct. 4, 1983. On Vernon Johns in Montgomery, sources include interviews with William Beasley, Dec. 20, 1983; Dr. Zelia Evans, June 8, 1983; Jo Ann Robinson, Nov. 14, 1983; Rufus Lewis, June 8, 1983; E. D. Nixon, Dec. 29, 1983; Richmond Smiley, Dec. 28, 1983; and R. D. Nesbitt, Dec. 29, 1983 and Feb. 16, 1984. Also specific sources as cited below.

  with a scythe: Yeakey, “Montgomery,” p. 110. Also int. Altona Johns Anderson, Jan. 31, 1984, and Jeanne Johns Adkins to author, Feb. 5, 1984.

  white man named Price: The Price story was repeated to the author in only slightly different forms by all the close relatives of Vernon Johns who gave interviews.

  “like she was a white woman”: Int. Vernon Increase Johns, Feb. 14, 1984.

  every word from memory: Gandy, Human, p. xvi.

  “or students with brains”: Ibid., p. xvii. Also int. Rev. G. Murray Branch, June 7, 1983, and Rev. Charles S. Morris, Feb. 3, 1984.

  the University of Chicago: Gandy, Human, p. xix, and Jeanne Johns Adkins to author, Feb. 5, 1984. The Oberlin stories are repeated in generally the same fashion by the scattered Johns sources cited above.

  “some mountain-top experience”: Gandy, Human, p. 51.

  who married Thurman: Int. Rev. Vernon Dobson, Dec. 2. 1983.

  selling subscriptions: Int. Rev. Charles S. Morris, Feb. 3, 1984. Morris traveled with Johns for five summers, 1936-40.

  and a semi-fresh shirt: Int. Dr. Samuel Gandy, Oct. 19, 1983.

  to change the Dexter hymnal: Int. Enid Johns, Jan. 24, 1984.

  He beckoned Edna King: Int. R. D. Nesbitt, Dec. 29, 1983.

  “not a dry eye”: Int. Rev. James L. Moore, Dec. 2,
1983.

  “spinksterinkdum Negroes”: Int. Altona Johns Anderson, Feb. 7, 1984.

  “hesitation pitch”: Tygiel, Baseball’s, p. 227.

  executive order of July 26: Donovan, Conflict, p. 411.

  silken cords that never broke: Int. William McDonald, Dec. 29, 1983.

  “Selma needs the water”: Ibid.

  one case against a storekeeper: Int. E. D. Nixon, Dec. 29, 1983. Nixon says he went to Tuskegee with Johns and the victim.

  against six white policemen: Int. Altona Johns Anderson, Feb. 7, 1984. Anderson says she went to Tuskegee with Johns and the victim.

  “should know better”: Int. Richmond Smiley, Dec. 28, 1983.

  “hell of a funeral”: Int. Rufus Lewis, June 8, 1983.

  “semi-annual visit to the church”: Int. R. D. Nesbitt, Dec. 29, 1983, and many others, as this remark to the august Trenholm was widely heard and seldom forgotten.

  “murderer in the house”: Int. Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, March 5, 1984. The Adair murder story was mentioned by many other Johns sources.

  one dentist and three doctors: Yeakey, “Montgomery,” p. 17.

  “important business activity”: Gandy, Human, p. xv.

  “some land he owns”: Boddie, God’s Bad, p. 65.