Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  In Los Angeles, Charles X Zeno testified that same Friday about how he had left his sons in the car while he went into the temple to find his wife, Mabel, and how Officer Reynolds crashed through the door into him so that they tumbled pell-mell into the water cooler in the next room. Like other Muslim witnesses, Zeno identified the shreds of the suit he had worn. By the time Earl Broady gave up the witness for cross-examination, deputy DA Howard Kippen was eager to remove the torn coat and trousers from view. “Well, let’s take these away so we can see each other,” he told Zeno, and then paused. Instead of contesting detailed testimony about vengeful police hysteria, Kippen abruptly reversed course to make use of it. “Now the night of April 27, 1962, at any time did you get angry?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” Zeno testified.

  “You didn’t get angry?” Kippen asked, underscoring surprise.

  “No, sir.”

  “You were struck from the back?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You were punched in the mouth?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your gums were bleeding, your teeth were bleeding and loose?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your clothes were ripped?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You were hit in the groin?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You didn’t get angry?”

  “No, sir.”

  Broady jumped up to object that Kippen was not allowing the defendant to explain himself—perhaps Zeno meant he was too frightened at the time to be angry—but Kippen had his answer. In summation, he argued that no human being could endure such abuse without getting angry, suggesting that the police deserved the benefit of doubt if the Muslims joined in the violence—or alternatively that the Muslims were inhuman. Either way, they deserved what they got. Only one defendant ever admitted feeling resentment of the rawest humiliation and pain, he scoffed. Prosecutors said the Muslims were too good to be true. By their formulation, the defendants were guilty unless the jury could find them as innocent as the youngest child in Birmingham jail.

  BERNARD LAFAYETTE drove to Birmingham to help Bevel and Diane Nash drill young people for the climactic jail marches, but he seldom stayed over. The thunderous breakthrough in Birmingham made him uncomfortable away from his new post some hundred miles to the south, and Lafayette returned to Selma most evenings that week to sit in vigil at tiny, segregated Berwell Infirmary, where a last debilitating stroke did not keep Sam Boynton from proselytizing whenever conscious. “Are you a registered voter?” he called out to strangers walking down his corridor. “I want you to go down and register. A voteless people is a hopeless people.”

  Boynton expired within hours of the jubilee news from Birmingham, and the coincidence loosed a flood of emotion so powerful that Lafayette canvassed ministers about the fleeting chance to hold Selma’s first mass meeting. He half concealed his political purpose by calling it a “Memorial Service for Mr. Boynton and Voter Registration,” but no one was fooled. Boynton’s own pastor declined to have such a service at First Baptist of Selma, which had shunned controversy since driving off its pastor, Fred Shuttlesworth, a decade earlier, and other pastors refused for fear of having their churches bombed. “They don’t feel disposed to build another church,” advised Rev. L. L. Anderson of Tabernacle Baptist. “Most of them have their churches paid for.” Anderson himself admitted that he could not offer Tabernacle on his own, even as a last resort. “That’s too big a thing for one man,” he said, but he did preach an impromptu eulogy for Boynton at a business meeting, asking who could deny tribute to such a man. When no deacon objected, Anderson quickly spread word of his commitment. Within hours, a local Negro printer on his own wits refused Lafayette’s order for high-quality leaflets. “I understand you call yourself a printer,” Anderson thundered at the balky shopowner. “When people bring things to you, your job is just to print them. You are a printer.”

  Lafayette got his leaflets, but by nightfall the Tabernacle deacons caucused on their own in the boardroom of Selma University. Anderson rushed there with foreboding, knowing the deacons considered Selma University their turf. Many were on the faculty, and D. V. Jemison had doubled as president of the college when he was alive. To Anderson’s dismay, the spokesman for the rebellious deacons was the redoubtable Dr. William H. Dinkins, a history professor of pioneering degrees from Brown University among other schools, with a puckish sense of theater to lighten his pomposity. Anderson liked Dinkins and often called upon him spontaneously from the pulpit for a scriptural reference or historical fact, which Dinkins invariably supplied. Father of the woman Anderson hoped to marry, Dinkins had supported him through the schism of 1956, tormenting the Walker faction with learned expositions on the difference between “misfeasance” and “malfeasance.” These ties made it painful on both sides for Dinkins to say the deacons canceled any use of Tabernacle for a Boynton memorial. “You are forsaking your friends, pastor,” he said. “You are going with strangers.” He meant the young Freedom Rider Lafayette, whom Dinkins called “this rabble-rouser who says he’s a preacher.”

  Almost nose to nose, Anderson and Dinkins debated which sin most profaned a house of worship: a purpose tinged with secular politics, or a spirit corrupted by worldly fear. Each man cited the story of Jesus driving money changers from the Temple, drawing opposite lessons on the propriety of the Boynton memorial. The clash of emotions caused a number of deacons to wail and intercede clumsily for peace. One confessed that he had always avoided his friend Boynton in public view downtown, for fear of association with a voting zealot. When religious arguments were exhausted, Anderson pretended to concede. “You built the church,” he told the deacons. “You carried the mortar. You stacked the bricks. I don’t have a dime in the building, and as a matter of fact I wasn’t even born. So I’m not going to take this church.” While confident that the members would support him if he went ahead by fiat, Anderson declared, he would defer instead and move the Boynton service outdoors to a strip of land just off church property. He described the boundaries with precise detail and rising excitement. “I’m going to wire it up with loudspeakers,” he shouted. “And I’m going to tell the folks that they can’t come into Tabernacle because the deacons are afraid! Afraid of the white folks!”

  “No, no, brother pastor, don’t do that,” Dinkins replied. Ambushed, the deacons tried to gauge the mix of bluff and determination in Anderson’s face.

  None of this internal anguish showed when the crowd of 350 gathered at Tabernacle Baptist on Tuesday evening, May 14. For them, soft organ music and the calming presence of Reverend Anderson in his robes preserved the repose of the sanctuary against a tension that was shockingly external. Glaring red and blue police lights flashed through the stained glass windows. On their car radios, many in attendance had been listening to the angry voice of Governor George Wallace denouncing the presence of U.S. Army troops in Birmingham as “an open invitation to resumption of street rioting by lawless Negro mobs, under the assumption that they will be protected by the federal military forces.” For three days, since bombs detonated outside Martin Luther King’s motel room, tremors of race spread from Birmingham to Selma and far beyond, rattling bones in Tabernacle.

  Sheriff Jim Clark entered the sanctuary with a brace of deputies. The sudden appearance of any white person would have hushed the church, but these armed men, led by the widely feared enforcer of the white supremacy laws, drew an instant crowd of nervous Tabernacle deacons. Clark showed them a court order giving him access to the church to guard against insurrection, explaining it as something like a search warrant. Waving off a humble request that the guns not be displayed in the church, Clark posted his men all around the rear of the curved walnut pews beneath Tabernacle’s imposing central dome. One deputy transmitted Clark’s orders by walkie-talkie to some fifty reinforcements posted outside among flashing lights. Angry shouts and the sounds of breaking glass filtered through the walls. Those seated in the pews could not be sure whether
the damage to their parked cars came from white bystanders or the law enforcement officers themselves, or both. The threat was as ambiguous as Clark’s court order, which could be stretched to mean that the officers were protecting the church against the insurrectionary violence of white segregationists.

  For three hours, the gathered Negroes expressed their own double meanings on the edge between heavenly and earthly reward. When hymns and testimonials to Boynton had lifted spirits, Lafayette introduced as featured speaker the man who had assigned him to Selma, SNCC Executive Director James Forman. Although Forman at thirty-four was a few months older than Martin Luther King, he remained a student leader in title and function, and his measured audacity often bowled over audiences who expected the tentative suggestions of youth. Preaching a sermon called “The High Cost of Freedom,” Forman said it was good that the white officers were there to deprive them of cheap courage. If they wanted to shout amen to the mission of Sam Boynton, they should do so in front of the sheriff who stood in its way. “Someday they will have to open up that ballot box,” said Forman. A crescendo of enthusiasm made a number of elders cringe for the reaction of Sheriff Clark. Among them was the senior minister, who hastened to deliver the closing prayer. “You shouldn’t put all of the blame on the white man,” he said. “…We’ve got a lot to do in our own homes and own community before we talk about these other things.”

  Upon dismissal near midnight, the buzzing crowd exited no further than Tabernacle’s front steps before clumping hesitantly at the sight of angry whites strewn along Broad Street, Selma’s main thoroughfare. Most prominent were teenagers wielding freshly lathed table legs from a nearby furniture company. Sheriff Clark surprised some of the Negro leaders by shouting for everyone to disperse, but nothing happened. His special deputies mingled among the whites, who stood their ground. As Negroes huddled in panic, fearing arrest if they stayed and attack if they moved, decisive peacemaking authority arrived in the person of the football coach from Selma High School, who jumped from his car and pointed out his current and former players, telling them to go home.

  NEITHER THE SELMA mass meeting nor the Muslim trial in Los Angeles competed with the avalanche of movement stories breaking out in city after city. Government statisticians counted 758 racial demonstrations and 14,733 arrests in 186 American muncipalities over the ten weeks following the May 10 Birmingham settlement. Sites quivered separately, unaware of one another or of the converging potential to lift up the right to vote and the raw alienations of cities outside the South. Less than two years later, Malcolm X would speak from a Selma pulpit alongside James Bevel and Fred Shuttlesworth, with Martin Luther King in jail, in a voting movement that made Selma an American landmark.

  7

  Marx in the White House

  THE BLOW LANDED with strange subliminal force. Nearly everyone reacted to the riveting images of dogs biting children, but public commentaries were loath to analyze the phenomenon, and retrospectives on the decisive political tactic were nowhere to be found. Insofar as public figures did comment specifically on children’s jail marches, they were critical. “I cannot condone, and you cannot condone, the use of children to these ends,” said the mayor of Birmingham, and the Atlanta Journal denounced King for “extreme and extremely dangerous tactics.” “School children participating in street demonstrations is a dangerous business,” Attorney General Kennedy declared more guardedly. “An injured, maimed or dead child is a price that none of us can afford to pay.”

  Within the civil rights movement itself, there were cascades of thanksgiving but no calls to imitate the winning formula. For the minority voice of the Nation of Islam, a scornful Elijah Muhammad told the Los Angeles Times that King was “making a fool of himself,” and Malcolm X declared on television “any man who puts his women and children on the front lines is a chump, not a champ.” To a radio audience in Washington, Malcolm X brushed aside nonviolent methods. “You can’t call it results when someone has bitten your babies and your women and your children,” said Malcolm, “and you are to sit down and compromise with them…and drink some coffee with some crackers in a cracker restaurant, desegregated lunch counters. Now what kind of advancement is that?”

  Still, beneath the silence and disparagement alike, there were signs of a rare, deeper tribute in the form of dumbstruck attachment. More than a month after the first children’s march—while ridiculing every premise of nonviolent strategy—Elijah Muhammad devoted the entire front page of his own national newspaper to the photograph of a police dog biting the midriff of a Birmingham youth, paired with an equally large photograph of a white policeman holding a shotgun over the prostrate, handcuffed corpse of Ronald Stokes in Los Angeles. “Grievances of the Two Are the Same,” proclaimed a joint headline in Muhammad Speaks. President Kennedy saw the Birmingham photograph in the New York Times and said it made him sick.

  Leaders of every rank groped for responses to a coming flood. Race, so long conceived as a distant element of nature, slow-moving as a bank of rain clouds, suddenly bubbled up everywhere to sweep away the prevailing notion that passion was the enemy rather than the friend of racial goodwill. Where reason had twaddled, a tide of emotion swept forward conviction that segregation was fragile and that human nature contained untapped reserves for improvement. From the first children’s march on May 2, the New York Times published more stories about race in the next two weeks than during the previous year. Attention spilled from the news to the editorial and features pages, and from there to a rash of projects on racial subjects that within a year published new and reprinted books at the rate of nine per week.

  Race issues, declared U.S. News & World Report, “have moved out in front in people’s thoughts,” displacing a lengthy obsession with nuclear arms and the Cold War. The conservative journal National Review—while predicting without remorse that Negro hopes for integration were “doomed to founder on the shoals of existing human attitudes”—found “a serious idea” in Elijah Muhammad’s doctrines of racial separation and sexual purity. Although notice of Malcolm X had been growing independently from his college lectures and the reverberations of Muslim rallies, the children of Birmingham soon raised him to mainstream recognition as a news counterpoint to Martin Luther King.

  Within the federal government, an instant proposal for King to tour Africa as a symbol of peaceful change charged through the new, relatively limber Peace Corps bureaucracy on the weekend of the Birmingham settlement, only to be ambushed two days later by a counterevaluation from Bill Moyers, a deputy to Director Sargent Shriver. “The Peace Corps has won acceptance on its merits and not because it has resorted to political stunts,” Moyers wrote confidentially to Shriver. “I even suspect the Africans, at least some of them, will be suspicious, too.” Moyers argued that a King trip to Africa represented not only something artificial and dishonest—“political trickery and hypocrisy”—but a breach of faith with the leading Southerners in Congress, who, Moyers said, would be forced by the “political facts of life” to eviscerate the Peace Corps in retaliation. “You have me reeling,” replied Shriver, whose travels in Africa convinced him that King was almost universally admired there. Still, he deferred to Moyers on the political costs in Congress, and the plan died in its first week.

  President Kennedy himself wobbled above unstable new currents of politics. No sooner did he praise the Birmingham settlement to the world as a local initiative than Governor Wallace tried to invoke local segregation laws to nullify it, and local white bombers delivered warning samples of terror. With the historic agreement in danger of being scuttled, President Kennedy met privately in the White House day after day with Army Chief of Staff Earle Wheeler and others, listening to plans to execute troop movements into Alabama for Operation Oak Tree. If he did not use the troops to secure the agreement, President Kennedy told his advisers, defiant segregationists would be emboldened to counterattack behind Wallace, which in turn would spawn more Negro demonstrations and more extraordinary outbursts of sympathy in N
orthern states. (Two white men chained themselves to the railing of the Ohio legislature, vowing to stay until segregation was abolished.) If he did use the troops, however, Kennedy would let loose the passions of organized force in a charged racial standoff. One likely consequence, he announced gravely to the advisers, was that the leaders of Birmingham “might tear up that paper agreement they made” with the Negro movement. These embattled Southerners, who represented Kennedy’s remaining white support in the region, warned that they could not bear to stand with invading Yankee soldiers.

  Still another drawback to the use of troops was the prospect of having to do so over and over again in countless segregated jurisdictions, each of which was racially charged, politically tangled, and legally murky in its own distinct mix. Successful or not, integration by bayonet in Alabama would have no legal bearing upon Durham, North Carolina, where a thousand student demonstrators went to jail within a week of the Birmingham settlement. President Kennedy realized that it made no sense to slide toward federally enforced integration agreements without a national standard of law. A bill to outlaw segregation by federal statute promised to resolve a hundred potential Birminghams from El Paso to Baltimore, and the clarity of inescapable tensions drew President Kennedy toward the relief of that single, huge gamble. Yet he hesitated over complications of sovereign appearance. For years, civil rights leaders had been urging just this step. Now that King in particular was buffeted by the unmistakable signs of crossover stardom, and within a week of Birmingham was greeted by motorcades and huge rallies in Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Chicago, hailed before crowds by bellwether politicians such as Chicago mayor Richard Daley, President Kennedy fretted privately that “it will look like he got me to do it.” He resolved to cushion the public impact by first receiving delegations of Southern governors and businessmen. “We ought to have him well surrounded,” the President told his closest aides in a secretly recorded meeting. “…King is so hot these days that it’s like having [Karl] Marx coming to the White House.”