Jones dismissed the clergy statement as a predictable sleight of no consequence. At first, he tried to understand King’s preoccupation as a semantic catfight peculiar to theologians, or as a distracted form of therapy for the strains of prison. Over several days, however, as King consumed precious visiting minutes demanding more blank paper to be sneaked in, and giving detailed instructions for stitching together the piecemeal letter—all the while brushing aside desperate practicalities from the outside—Jones began to worry that King was mentally unstable, or worse, that his endless letter amounted to a eulogy for a doomed movement.
King himself regarded his letter as partly cathartic, a venting of emotion “when the cup of endurance runs over.” More freely than at the Chicago conference in January, he thundered against anyone “who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom,” and raged against inert spirits of mannered goodness. “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will,” he wrote. He addressed the eight Birmingham clergy in dozens of voices—begged, scolded, explained, even cooed to them, and conspired icily with them as fellow experts. He showered them with pathos over unmerited sufferings as grand as the martyrdoms of Saint Paul and Socrates and as personal as his own young daughter’s tears on learning that colored girls were barred from the Funtown amusement park. On through memorized quotations from Martin Buber, Saint Augustine, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others, his focus sometimes wandered from the Birmingham clergymen altogether as King seemed to plumb within himself for the core reason he submitted to jail.
Invariably, he pulled up hope in paired phrases of secular and religious faith. “We will win our freedom,” he wrote, “because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.” No fewer than five times, he called upon variants of “Constitutional and God-given rights” as the twin footing that grounded his outlook. There was something characteristically American about the notion of divine sanction for democratic values, but King’s own struggle against despair pushed beliefs back to the earliest prophets of monotheism. Centuries before Plato, they introduced a deity that shockingly held kings and peasants to the same moral laws and rejected the forceful authority of state violence as evil. Their concept of equal souls anticipated and lifted up the democratic principle of universally equal votes.
To hold the belief in justice among equal souls as the key to religious as well as political conviction seemed at once crazy and noble, wildly improbable and starkly human. In his letter, King called it a daring “extreme.” He hailed luminous extremists in a paired roll call that included Jesus on the pure refusal to hate, Jefferson on equal standing in creation, Amos on the rolling waters of justice, and Lincoln on the crucible of democratic commitment: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” In warning of new black nationalists—“the best-known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement”—King made sure to point out that the Muslims repudiated not only Christianity and white people but also democratic values. They had “lost faith in America.” There was no democracy in the Nation of Islam, just as Elijah Muhammad neither found nor expected any in America. In effect, King offered two convergent paths to understand why he had sought out the Birmingham jail, each in the language of justice. If indeed the long arc of the universe bent toward justice, and the universe proved friendly, history’s slow triumph over slaughterhouse evil would be a compelling sign not only of benevolent design behind the cosmos but of a democratic bond in human nature. In King’s tradition there were no proofs, only witnesses.
To Americans grown weary of singsong slogans and campaign speeches, it was strange or even blasphemous to put the humdrum workings of democracy on a par with belief in God, but from the slave side of history they were comparable wonders. In the Civil War, when both sides claimed divine blessing, Lincoln’s distinctive purpose was to uphold the democratic intuition. From his cell, King did not hesitate to stress the political side of conviction to the Birmingham clergy, or to transcend race as a prophet of redemption to his own persecutors. “One day the South will know,” he concluded, “that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy….”
Outside the jail, the finished letter was typed neatly at a length of twenty pages, then copied and distributed widely by hand and post. Wherever he could, Wyatt Walker added press tips about the daily jail marches in Birmingham, plus human interest details about how King had worked under surveillance and duress in solitary, allowed no personal comforts and certainly no reference materials. Nevertheless, the power of the appeal lay dormant. None of the eight addressees replied. A Quaker journal alone expressed interest in publishing the letter, and no reporter found news in what amounted to a dense sermon on familiar King themes.
Less than three years after journalists absorbed the amazing conclusion that John Kennedy may have won the 1960 presidential election by minor attentions to King’s confinement in a Georgia jail, most national news organizations stressed nonpartisan calm as the essential condition for racial progress—much like the clergymen who criticized King. Time magazine and the New York Times, for instance, blamed King in Birmingham for creating “inflamed tensions” and “tensions that have grown alarmingly.” In Birmingham itself, city fathers openly called upon citizens to “ignore what is being attempted.” On April 24, with nonviolent veterans crowded around Birmingham television sets in the desperate hope of encouragement, President Kennedy’s press conference dwelled upon grand subjects such as nuclear tests and the prospects for war upon Cuba. No one asked about the ongoing jail marches or King’s eight days of imprisonment—let alone his letter.
By then Wyatt Walker was preparing ground for retreat, hinting to Burke Marshall that the Birmingham campaign would soon shift to less confrontational voter registration, which Kennedy officials had favored all along. Coverage of King’s trial and conviction fell to the back pages, leaving Jones and various teams of lawyers still another landmark Supreme Court case to go with Sullivan and Powell, testing whether plainly unconstitutional injunctions must be obeyed until vacated by the courts. Historic favor opened and then closed again to King before late 1967, when the Supreme Court in Walker v. City of Birmingham would send the author of a world-famous letter back to the Birmingham jail.
5
To Vote in Mississippi: Advance by Retreat
MISSISSIPPI STARTED at the bottom. At least four stages of prior retreat made the active frustrations of Birmingham and St. Augustine comparatively advanced—even enviable. A year earlier, when Bob Moses appealed for refuge at a statewide meeting of NAACP chapter presidents, he brought with him only two teenage recruits and a record of anguish. Moses was not from Mississippi, nor an NAACP member. He was a twenty-seven-year-old New Yorker with a Harvard master’s degree in philosophy, who had become an object of wonder since venturing into the southwest timber region around McComb on a solo mission for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a youth organization that had grown out of the sit-ins. For trying to escort would-be voters to register, he had been arrested more than once, pummeled by a courthouse mob, and beaten severely near a town square in open daylight by a cousin of the Amite County sheriff. Still bleeding, he walked into the courthouse to file criminal charges, then testified against the cousin, and, until the local prosecutor advised him to flee for his life before a jury brought in the customary verdict of acquittal, continued doggedly to behave as though he possessed the natural rights of a white person. This presumption shocked Mississippi people more than the blood and terror.
John Doar sought out Moses to learn of the violence in Amite County, just as he had introduced himself to Medgar Evers and Vernon Dahmer on a previous clandestine tour of Mississippi—traveling incognito in k
hakis and boots, knowing enough to be fearful himself even as a high-ranking official of the Justice Department. A Republican from Wisconsin, Doar had been asked to stay on in the Kennedy Justice Department partly because he had pioneered a go-out-and-poke-around-for-yourself approach to civil rights lawsuits, which made him unusual among deskbound Washington lawyers. With Moses, Doar visited Negro farmers who were afraid to come to registration meetings because of the intangible reality of rural life—ominous messages maids and sharecroppers were hearing—and several were particularly worried about signs of anger on the part of E. H. Hurst, a state representative of local influence, against Herbert Lee, an NAACP farmer who attended Moses’ registration meetings. Doar promised to drive out to Lee’s farm on his next trip, but he found waiting at his office the next day a message from Moses that Hurst had just shot Lee to death in full public view outside the Liberty cotton gin.
In nearby McComb, while Moses pressed in vain for arrest in the Lee murder, his youthful admirers went to jail from a sit-in that quickly inspired a spontaneous march of more than one hundred high school students. Failing to dissuade them, Moses and other in-gathered SNCC leaders went along as protective support until McComb police plucked them from the line, ran some through gantlets of enraged citizens, and eventually crammed Moses and seventeen others—virtually the entire national leadership of SNCC—into the drunk tank of the Magnolia, Mississippi, jail. They obtained release more than a month later on appeal bonds financed by Harry Belafonte, and Moses soon asked the NAACP county leaders to sponsor a second foray anywhere apart from the skittering violence around McComb. “We had, to put it mildly, got our feet wet,” he wrote. “We now knew something of what it took to run a voter registration campaign in Mississippi.”
Many NAACP officials saw Moses differently, as a young mystical amateur—he had studied Zen Buddhism on a college sabbatical in Japan—who produced deplorable net results: no new registered Negroes, one NAACP corpse, needless beatings, some legal bills handed to NAACP adults, and an unruly class of damaged children expelled from school. Field Secretary Medgar Evers already had written a relentlessly critical assessment of SNCC’s entry into Mississippi, which the national NAACP office circulated in urgent warning against the “continuing problem” of rival civil rights groups. Moses retained a foothold only because of one hardheaded practical farmer. Vernon Dahmer, obsessed by the sufferings of his friend Clyde Kennard, responded to a kindred grit in Moses.
At an NAACP banquet late in 1961, while Moses was in McComb, Medgar Evers broke down during his report on the condition of Kennard—a former paratrooper, both in Germany and Korea—who had been called home from his last year at the University of Chicago to run the farm he bought for his ailing mother outside Hattiesburg. Carefully, Kennard had applied to finish his degree at Southern Mississippi, the only college in the area, but neither sterling character nor extenuating family circumstances excused his effort to become the first Negro openly to attend a white college in Mississippi. Disasters ensued, culminating in his arrest when five bags of stolen chicken feed were discovered one morning in his barn. On the shaky testimony of a single witness that Kennard masterminded the pointless, untimely heist—a transparent frame-up, said Evers—Kennard drew a felony conviction that made him ineligible by law to attend any state college even if he finished seven years’ hard labor at Parchman Penitentiary.
This was doubtful, Evers announced, because cancer had invaded Kennard’s colon in prison. Evers wept again, then reproached himself furiously for the weakness. Since the Emmett Till lynching of 1955, he had weathered these occasions with the taciturn formality of a man who insisted that his own wife call him “Mr. Evers” at the office, but Evers could not stop saying that hate and fate cut down in Kennard an unassuming peer who outdid him on both flanks—more disciplined and accomplished militarily, warmer and more forgiving in spirit. He gave way a third time. “That’s all right, son,” called out a woman from the crowd. “We all feel the same way.”
None of this was news to Vernon Dahmer (pronounced “Day-mer”), the barrel-chested, fifty-three-year-old farmer whose sons had been collecting the eggs from Kennard’s chickens every morning in his absence, taking them to Bourne’s grocery for sale. The Kennard place was only two miles from Dahmer’s farm, and in recent years Dahmer had recruited his neighbor Clyde to run the Youth Council of the Forrest County NAACP chapter. Now Dahmer was left with grim realities. Without Kennard to work the land, eventually his farm and chickens must be put up for sale and someone found to take in Kennard’s mother, who would be left without even the egg money.
Dahmer told the Hattiesburg NAACP chapter of his resolve to honor Kennard’s sacrifice with a special voter registration meeting. He volunteered to secure his own church, Shady Grove Baptist, but members shrank from public assembly on that issue. The current registrar—Theron Lynd, a hulking young man with thick horn-rimmed glasses, weighing over three hundred pounds—had not allowed a single Negro to register since assuming office in 1959, the year of the Mack Charles Parker lynching at nearby Poplarville. Less than a hundred of Forrest County’s eight thousand voting-age Negroes could vote, and intimidation so thoroughly saturated the county that no Negro church or club had opened its doors to the NAACP for years. Dahmer lost his bank credit and all his insurance, after which he survived on his independent financial strength as no other local Negro could do. The moribund local chapter was reduced to one secretary and a handful of old men who met secretly in the Dahmer living room.
Still, Dahmer rose one Sunday from his family pew to argue that Shady Grove should take the risk for Kennard now that federal men were suing registrar Lynd to put national power behind Negro voting rights. Everybody knew that Justice Department lawyers visited the Dahmer farm more than once to identify potential witnesses—collecting names of qualified Negroes who were rejected and unqualified, even illiterate, whites who routinely voted. Even rejected Negro voters could help the cause now as living evidence, said Dahmer, but to become citizens they must act like citizens.
It was a simple speech, and Dahmer enjoyed considerable respect as a church trustee and by far its largest contributor. His message seemed to sway the congregation until Rev. Ralph Willard, Sr., dean of Forrest County’s Negro preachers, declared from the pulpit that politics had no business in God’s house. Willard preached forcefully on the wages of sin, then offered a substitute motion that Dahmer be expelled from Shady Grove along with his three closest supporters and all their immediate families. He prevailed in a tally marked by moans and outbursts, whereupon Dahmer led a doleful recessional from a lifelong church home that stood upon land donated by his family. For seeking the right to vote in public elections, he and his supporters lost with their church memberships the only franchise they exercised freely.
This schism at Shady Grove fell within days of the bonded release of SNCC prisoners in Magnolia, some sixty miles west of Hattiesburg. When Moses pleaded for relocation sponsors toward spring of 1962, at a meeting of NAACP chapter presidents, Dahmer came forward to ask about the alleged transformation of the two rough-cut kids, Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes. They had been ordinary teenagers—out of high school, out of work, on the edge of trouble—until Watkins, the tenth surviving child of sharecroppers, had peeked boldly into a room to investigate a rumor that Martin Luther King was in McComb, and, coming upon Moses instead, followed his curiosity from long conversations swiftly into classes on voting, nonviolence, and the surge of freedom in the world. On first leaving the farm for likely arrest, Watkins said he was spending the night with a friend lest he shame or enrage his parents, but word came to his cell that his father stood in church to praise his son’s courage. From the Magnolia jail, having telescoped generations of unimagined experience into six months, Watkins and his friend Curtis Hayes yearned to restart the cycle by going out alone into new areas, just as Moses had come with nothing to McComb.
Dahmer made up his mind sight unseen. “I’ll take them both,” he told Moses. “You
can send them to Hattiesburg.”
NORTH OF HATTIESBURG, meanwhile, Moses fell into uneasy, recuperative alliance with a trio of student leaders from the Nashville movement: Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, and James Bevel. From experimental workshops on nonviolence taught since the late 1950s by James Lawson—a Korean War pacifist who studied Gandhian techniques in India—Nashville students became shock troops of the sit-ins and the earliest legends within SNCC. After the original Freedom Riders of May 1961 were so bloodied in Birmingham that they were urged to quit even by Fred Shuttlesworth, it was Diane Nash who sent a fresh wave down from Nashville and then straw-bossed a summer-long procession of witnesses into Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary.
When the last of some three hundred Freedom Riders obtained release, the Nashville trio stayed on in Mississippi. Stung by observation that local Negroes shunned the Freedom Rides, and had slinked obediently into the colored waiting rooms even as new arrivals were being hauled off to prison, Nash and her two friends brought Martin Luther King into Jackson for a rally and trolled the streets for recruits. They organized the earliest mass demonstrations against segregation in Mississippi—until state authorities shrewdly prosecuted Nash and Bevel for contributing to the delinquency of minors. Convicted, sentenced to two years apiece, they groped for a new start from a tough place, like Moses.
In transition, the three Nashville students released ordinary ambitions for a floating, expanding identity as movement people. Lafayette was the most scholarly of them—slightly built, with just enough of an Asian cast to justify his movement nickname, “Little Gandhi.” Lafayette saw himself as a spiritual explorer. After surviving his forty days at Parchman, he accosted idle young Negroes on the streets of the state capital of Jackson with an abrupt question, “Do you want to go downtown and fight some white people?” Of every fifty takers, he hoped to interest two or three in nonviolence.
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