Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Roscoe Halyard raised a grievance about the meeting itself, saying the NAACP delegation had been assured of a talk with the city commissioners “and not with a tape recorder.” This opened the wound of immediate disappointment. “We stay too far apart and never come to any understanding,” Halyard told the recorder, “because we never come face to face.” Others expressed sorrow that Senator Smathers and even Vice President Johnson had been deceived with false promises about the meeting. One man said that if the city commissioners were not concerned, “they should have the fortitude to say so.” Otherwise, they should take note of the pleadings, preferably by discussing them in person.

  Two months later, Fannie Fulwood would advise President Kennedy by letter that still there was no response to the tape recording, nor fulfillment of the promise to Johnson. “Since St. Augustine is the nation’s oldest city,” she wrote, “we feel that democracy should have had its inception here, but it isn’t even practiced here as late as 1963.” President Kennedy did not reply. Not until the pressure of events later in the year did Mayor Shelley respond at all, with the novel objection that biracial dialogue “defeats the very purpose for which it is formed. It polarizes the White race and the Negro race and begins with the assumption there is a difference.” By then, Shelley and other white leaders were riding a backwash of resentment against concessions such as the tape-recorded meeting and the integrated banquet. “People on the scene state that the City will not take any further steps,” concluded a federal intelligence report circulated in Washington, “and that City officials feel that they went even further than they should have gone to accommodate the Vice President when he was there….”

  4

  Gamblers in Law

  IN THE PIVOTAL MONTH of April 1963, Martin Luther King’s lawyer Clarence Jones worked simultaneously on three defining disputes headed for numerous trips to the U.S. Supreme Court: James v. Powell, Jr., New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, and Walker v. City of Birmingham. A unique background prepared him for the multiple roles. As a son of servants to the Lippincott family of New Jersey, Jones had grown up around his father’s chauffeur’s uniform, imitating manners of the wellborn. Circumstances forced him as a boy into a series of Catholic foster homes, where he responded to lectures on Demosthenes and the transforming powers of oratory, practicing diction in front of a mirror for endless hours—so long that the words “acronym” and “felicitous” forever bubbled up randomly in his trained ear. By 1956, he acquired a law degree and enough polish to marry a publishing heiress in an interracial wedding of storybook ceremony for New York society, with the bride providing guests from the financial aristocracy and Jones supplying a number of the kitchen workers and musicians from his own family.

  On the morning of April 3—as the first nonviolent volunteers were stepping off toward arrest in Birmingham—Jones and lead counsel Charles McKinney put Harleston “Cool Breeze” Patterson on the witness stand in New York. Aside from sporting-life philosophy—“When a gambler gets into trouble, he always loses girlfriends”—Patterson presented testimony on his sullen but faithful protection payments to Esther James from the late 1940s until somebody tried to gun her down from a passing car in 1958. According to Patterson, the police had hauled him in on the assumption that if he hadn’t shot at James himself, he must know which gangsters were violently angry over her arbitrary adjustments in the “pad,” and while his denials satisfied the detectives, Esther James herself had been certain enough of his complicity to pronounce street judgment on him in Harlem, shouting, “Cool Breeze, you can’t take no more numbers in this neighborhood. You are through. You are through. Don’t nobody do nothing to Miss James and take numbers!” Since then, Patterson testified, troubles made a wreck of him.

  His account did help Jones and McKinney discredit the public image of plaintiff Esther James as a churchly matron. They brought out her prior convictions on such charges as striking neighbors in the head with a hammer, and on cross-examination she dropped her professed innocence about the daily mechanics of the rackets. (“Do I look like a fool to you?” she snapped, when asked how she knew that numbers writers reconvened in hallways after turning in bet slips on each morning’s “lead” number.) Still, Cool Breeze Patterson did not testify that he actually saw James pass on the pad money to police. In fact, he shied away from earlier affidavits on this critical link out of the fear that made him a lonely witness: for a racketeer to accuse police officers of accepting his bribes was to bare his own neck, not only to underworld retribution but to the crooked police themselves, who could ruin him by pretending to be honest.

  The lawyers were trying to mask the gaps in Patterson’s testimony when a secretary slipped into the courtroom with a whispered message that Adam Clayton Powell abruptly had decided not to attend his own trial. This news visibly staggered McKinney and Jones at the defense table; neither they nor Powell’s closest aides ever settled on a convincing explanation. Their best guess was that some sort of status phobia kept the grand titan of Congress from appearing in the dock. After the opposing lawyer summoned Powell as his witness for effect—just to have the bailiff bellow out the name of the skulking, no-show defendant—jurors needed only four hours to find him guilty of libel damages totaling $211,500. An overjoyed Esther James announced that she would donate an unspecified portion of Powell’s restitution to the care of crippled Jewish children.

  This judgment put a tenacious clamp of doom on Powell, destined to gnaw its way up his leg in collateral Supreme Court suits over contempt and congressional expulsion while he struggled to avoid paying. Even so, the verdict was scarcely more galling to Powell than the contrasting public acclaim for Martin Luther King’s libel case as opposed to his. Like star-crossed twins, Powell and King were being filtered through the courts as well as the press. For three years, the libel cases marched together on the calendar while their reputations split by polar refraction.

  King’s case rose from a 1960 New York Times advertisement placed by friends, including Harry Belafonte and Bayard Rustin. The ad appealed for money to defend King against Alabama’s latest indictment, which the text denounced as a transparent effort by “Southern violators of the Constitution” to crush nonviolent dissent against segregation. Alabama officials promptly counterattacked with lawsuits of bizarre contrivance in at least three respects. None of the Alabama plaintiffs was mentioned by name in the ad, and each one—beginning with Montgomery police commissioner L. B. Sullivan—claimed to be dishonored by generic inference. Because there was no accountable “author” of the ad copy, as in normal libel actions, the plaintiffs sued the Times itself and four of King’s Alabama colleagues whose names appeared in small print at the bottom along with Eleanor Roosevelt, Langston Hughes, Shelley Winters, and some sixty others who “warmly endorse this appeal.” Finally, the facts at issue were trivial. Plaintiffs alleged that Negro students actually sang “The Star Spangled Banner” during one demonstration, not “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Under Alabama law, which gave juries full discretion to decide whether a factual mistake of any kind was defamatory, the first jury granted Sullivan damages of $500,000—the full amount sought and the largest libel judgment in Alabama history. A second jury matched this award, and three suits demanding an additional $2 million were held in abeyance pending outcome of the Sullivan appeal.

  Powell’s case grew from a ten-speech kamikaze crusade in which he exposed on the floor of the U.S. House what amounted to a phone directory of the Harlem underworld. “I hold in my hand photostatic copies” of the regular police protection pad, he announced. “Louis the Gimp [Avitabile], who operates in front of my church, has five drops in Harlem….” Listing names, addresses, and “drop” collection centers for more than a hundred syndicate figures in “both numbers and narcotics,” Powell charged that organized crime was “pauperizing Harlem.” Because all 212 New York police captains and fifty-nine of sixty inspectors were white, he argued, graft was exported along with crime profits from the Negro districts, which, being poo
r to begin with, were pinioned, corrupted, and systematically fleeced. He quoted his gun-carrying, addict-gathering assistant at Abyssinian Baptist, Rev. Oberia Dempsey, on the social implications for America’s pioneer urban center of migrating Negroes: “We have in our hands the wreck of a generation…. My people will not overcome this evil for 50 years.”

  When the first salvos drew little interest, Powell outlined the accounting practices on the police side of the rackets. “All pads are due on the first of the month,” he told the House. From a typical crime banker’s monthly pad of roughly $2,700, he explained the shares apportioned—“borough headquarters, $275…. 23 precinct sergeants at $10”—and named those in charge of distributing payoffs in Harlem. This extreme accusation produced only the quiet resignation of one sergeant (“who lives luxuriously in New Jersey”), whereupon frustration or mad vertigo drove Powell to reiterate the “bag” system of graft intermediaries on New York television—arguably forfeiting libel immunity for congressional speech. Lawyers materialized to file suit on behalf of Esther James, one of those Powell named as a “bag woman,” and trapdoors of public scandal finally opened—under Powell himself.

  THE U.S. SUPREME COURT agreed to review the Sullivan case just before Powell’s 1963 trial. Sensitivity and high-stakes conflict had stripped both controversies almost entirely of racial content, but otherwise their public images sharply diverged. Powell’s original alarm about crime, corruption, and urban decay sank to an unseemly quarrel in which a powerful member of Congress gratuitously insulted the lowly widow Esther James—described by the Times as “a 66-year-old domestic who lives on earnings as a servant and her late husband’s railroad pension.” By contrast, the Alabama Sullivan case refined away its raw origins as a concerted segregationist vendetta (“If you dance, you must pay the fiddler,” joked Governor John Patterson, who himself filed one of the libel suits) toward purified legal theory as the century’s foremost First Amendment case.

  Clarence Jones, Harry Wachtel, and other King lawyers on the Sullivan appeal concurred in the suppression of racial aspects. Because the blatant realities were so thoroughly soaked with Alabama’s intent to punish Negro protest, they knew that the Justices of the Supreme Court could not grant relief on any argument derived from them without impugning the integrity of Alabama’s courts and executive officers from top to bottom, plus those of a dozen other Southern states more or less aligned with Alabama. Strategic realism demanded that the essence of the conflict be finessed entirely, with no racial issues pressed upon the Court. Moreover, the King lawyers welcomed the Times as controlling defendant even though the newspaper entered the Alabama cases wholly by commercial accident. (No news reporter created, approved, or even saw the contested appeal as it passed through the Times advertising department.) Ironically, this inadvertence helped strip away factual performance and framed the Sullivan verdict as a generalized threat to public debate through the nation’s premier news journal. Among King’s advisers, Stanley Levison especially hailed the approach, saying it fostered emergency coalitions with precisely those groups most needed for the civil rights movement: labor unions, religious groups, press outlets, large corporations—anyone who could imagine being victimized by parochial politics or a runaway jury.

  Lawyers for the New York Times scarcely associated with counsel for the Negro co-defendants during trial in Alabama, and managed to split off the newspaper for independent appeal. This separation, together with a hostile procedural ruling, gave the State of Alabama a legal opening to seize the property of the four preachers during the litigation. Under court order, sheriffs impounded and sold automobiles belonging to Revs. Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, and Joseph Lowery. They auctioned off land belonging to Rev. S. S. Seay, Sr., of Montgomery, placed a lien against farmland that Abernathy had inherited jointly with his siblings, and filed motions to discover other assets that might be confiscated to satisfy Sullivan’s judgment. (Shuttlesworth and Abernathy moved out of Alabama, in part to escape further expropriations.) When Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger privately asked his chief counsel at Lord, Day & Lord whether this procedural trampling could be stopped, the lawyer regretfully replied that the Times could not help without compromising the immense tactical advantage of separation from the preachers’ case.

  Unlike the King side, Adam Clayton Powell exercised neither strategic forbearance nor journalistic appreciation for the Times, which he described as “the unfriendliest newspaper in the United States to me.” Powell thought the Times, as a defendant in the Alabama suit, ought to have granted a fellow libel target at least some high ground of purpose and prerogative. Objectively, both test cases threatened to squelch discussion on vital public issues, and Powell felt deserving of extra motivational credit for taking deliberate, pioneer risk. Subjectively, the stakes were widely perceived as nothing less than freedom in the Times case, nothing more than Powell’s scoundrelhood in his. When a congressman made a speech castigating him as a spendthrift playboy, the Times published a detailed account on the front page, but the paper never addressed the substance of his manifesto on New York corruption—not then or later, after a gambler named Arthur Powers was shot in the head one noon on a Harlem corner before a dozen witnesses, falling a body length from Esther James. Safely but ineffectually back on the House floor, Powell named three assassins and declared that there would be no arrests because the killing was too balled up in the corruption, with Esther James acting as “finger woman” against an intruder “moving into her territory.” Racketeers “have all the protection they want,” Powell told the House, which helped explain “why half the dope in the United States comes into Harlem.”

  Powell confounded Machiavellians and idealists alike with his stage-crafted rascalism. “I am against numbers in any form,” he cried out at Abyssinian, “but until the day when numbers is wiped out in Harlem—I hate to say this from the pulpit!—I am going to fight for the Negro having the same chance as an Italian!” His defiance of the sober downtown Times played well to Harlem voters, just as his entertainments—showgirl wives, smoke rings from trademark cheroots, and explicit, earthy remarks about Jewish gangs, Irish police brass, and paramount loyalty among Negroes—offended editors who denounced him for many shortcomings including “his notably racist attitudes.”

  Powell’s warning was beyond assimilation, in part because no one was ready to hear from a freebooting gadfly that racial callousness could fasten pervasive corruption on sophisticated cities in the North. He was an irritant too far advanced, anticipating elements of Mario Puzo on Mafia culture and Malcolm X on the structural exploitation of Northern Negroes. A decade later, when the image of cities had turned and a New York commission confirmed Detective Frank Serpico’s wrenching allegations on the rackets and the pad, the late Powell was a lost casualty of a forerunner’s crusade that never registered.

  FOR CLARENCE JONES, it was a short trip over vast emotional distance from the Powell trial to Birmingham jail. In the April 5 edition whose front page announced the triumph of Esther James, the Times reported on page sixteen that the “Integration Drive Slows/Sit-ins and a Demonstration Plan Fail to Materialize—Dr. King Takes Lead.” Four picketers reached jail on a day when the schedule called for a crescendo of hundreds. To stave off collapse, Fred Shuttlesworth submitted to arrest on April 6, and King personally persuaded three other preachers including his own brother to join him. Since Shuttlesworth miraculously survived the dynamite destruction of his home in 1956, he had marked himself as a possessed soul through a score of arrests and convictions that left trial dates following him in a multilayered jumble; the next Supreme Court session would review among them a criminal conviction from the 1961 Freedom Rides (absurdly, for conspiring to gather a white mob) along with his civil conviction in the Sullivan libel case. Shuttlesworth used his apartness as a weapon. He commuted sporadically to Birmingham from his new home in Cincinnati, and when more than three quarters of Birmingham’s four hundred Negro preachers voted to discourage any nonviolent sh
owdown in their city, Shuttlesworth had assured King that he alone could head off any backward stampede.

  Shuttlesworth was out of jail and back again within six days. Of the maelstrom in Birmingham—lost jobs, court hearings, injunctions, freedom songs and sermons, rumors of political maneuver and abuse in the jail—what reached Clarence Jones in New York was that January’s Savannah plan was battered to such weakness that even the master coordinator, Wyatt Walker, felt obliged to put down his clipboard to join Shuttlesworth in jail. Ralph Abernathy went, too, after a running tactical argument on Good Friday, April 12, that was so full of venom and tears that Martin Luther King could not bring himself to render a decision in words and silently reentered the jammed motel wearing crisp denim “jail clothes,” resolved to commit a “faith act” over the anguished objections of his father. For Jones, King’s arrest meant a month’s frenzy crammed into a single weekend of emergency petitions, dragnet searches for bail money, and finally a rare plane flight into the heart of segregated territory.

  Alone in the jail corridors, Jones made an extra show of his professional status for hostile guards. Nerves made him concentrate on a long checklist of urgent questions, but King displayed little interest. “I’m writing this letter,” he said. Furtively through the bars—because the jail rules allowed no material possessions to prisoners in solitary—King showed Jones a copy of the Birmingham News that had been smuggled in on a previous legal visit. All around the margins, meandering from page to page, he was scribbling a passionate response to a small story headlined “White Clergymen Urge Local Negroes to Withdraw from Demonstrations.” Led by C. C. J. Carpenter, the Episcopal bishop of Alabama, an ecumenical group of eight religious leaders—all at least mild critics of segregation—had issued a statement calling King’s Birmingham campaign “unwise and untimely.” They were precisely the sort of clergy who had attended the Chicago conference on the religious demands of race, and yet in crisis they found it prudent to address King’s constituents as their own, speaking of him only obliquely as an irritant.