Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  THE MARCH ITSELF reduced Malcolm X and Hollis Watkins to faceless dots in the crowd. Like other formative experiences of the mass communications era—the coronation of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth in 1953, the presidential conventions, the dramas of astronauts rocketing from launchpad to splashdown—the Freedom March commanded national attention by preempting regularly scheduled television programs. Broadcast networks voluntarily surrendered their revenues, and gathered their most important news correspondents to preside over a transcendent ritual of American identity. As the first ceremony of such magnitude ever initiated and dominated by Negroes, the march also was the first to have its nature wholly misperceived in advance.

  Dominant expectations ran from paternal apprehension to dread. On Meet the Press, television reporters grilled Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King about widespread foreboding that “it would be impossible to bring more than 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incidents and possibly rioting.” In a preview article, Life magazine declared that the capital was suffering “its worst case of invasion jitters since the First Battle of Bull Run.” President Kennedy’s advance man, Jerry Bruno, positioned himself to cut the power to the public address system if rally speeches proved incendiary. The Pentagon readied nineteen thousand troops in the suburbs; the city banned all sales of alcoholic beverages; hospitals made room for riot casualties by postponing elective surgery. More than 80 percent of the day’s business revenue would be lost to closed and empty stores. Although D.C. Stadium stood nearly four miles from the Lincoln Memorial rally site, Major League Baseball* canceled in advance two night games between the Minnesota Twins and the last-place Senators. With nearly 1,700 extra correspondents supplementing the Washington press corps, the march drew a media assembly bigger than the Kennedy inauguration two years earlier. By way of advance scorn, a U.S. representative submitted for the Congressional Record the testimonial letter of a satisfied Virginia Negro who shunned the march † altogether.

  Not all the apprehension was racial in origin. Washington was an insular city, slow to accept a new communications fact that the natural audience for political rallies was public opinion back home. Many Washingtonians, including politicians who supported civil disobedience in the South, assumed that the purpose of any demonstration must be some sort of mob coercion against them, like the Bonus Marchers of 1932. The Senate, with no pending business, stayed in session primarily to put on an unperturbed face of normalcy. Representatives ordered a quorum call at the exact moment the rally began at the Lincoln Memorial, so as to publish the names of some 340 members who were dutifully attending to the Railroad Arbitration Bill and the formalities of Save Your Vision Week.

  The March on Washington earned the capital letters of a landmark event by the end of the afternoon. Beyond the record-breaking numbers—upward of a quarter million—and the stunning good order that turned all the riot troops and plasma reserves into stockpiles of paranoia, the march made history with dignified high spirits. News outlets gushed over scenes of harmony—“White legs and Negro legs dangle together in the reflecting pool”—and Roy Wilkins congratulated Negroes for passing what amounted to a character test: “I’m so proud of my people.” Police recorded only four march-related arrests, all of white people: one Nazi, two violent hecklers, and a health insurance computer‡ who drove to work with a loaded shotgun. The outcome so embarrassed predictions that march organizer Bayard Rustin gained credit as a fresh wizard of social engineering, whose command of scheduling and portable toilets had worked a miracle on the races. Overnight, Rustin became if not a household name at least a quotable and respectable source for racial journalism, his former defects as a vagabond ex-Communist homosexual henceforth overlooked or forgiven.

  A sense of relief raised the goodwill of the march into heights of inspiration, as millions of television viewers, including President Kennedy, heard a complete King speech for the first and last time that day. The occasion introduced King’s everyday pulpit rhetoric as a national hymn. Despair wrestled deep in his voice against belief in democratic justice, producing his distinctive orator’s passion, but the passion itself went to the core of the American heritage. From his reassurance of a common political ideal, the address spilled over into fresh cultural optimism. Although King’s peroration invited polyglot America—“all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics”—to join in a spiritual song of African origin, most observers pictured integration in reverse as a journey made comfortable by the ability of Negroes to behave like white people. Life’s review issue on the march, with Bayard Rustin on the cover and a text evoking “beatific calm” instead of Bull Run, presented a signature couple marching in crisp matching overalls, captioned “Negro Gothic…reminiscent of famous Grant Wood painting.”

  TELEVISION STILL was a youthful medium, transmitting black-and-white programs except for the few such as Bonanza and Johnny Carson’s new Tonight Show—specially marked in newspaper listings with a “(c)” for color—and some executives expressed moral misgivings about the generalized projection of sensate luxury. “Beer drinkers especially seem to live in a world of huge delight…flashing smiles, toothy grins, and eyes popping with pleasure,” observed an advertising director who warned colleagues that “fun, status symbolism, and sex in their current usage are suspect, and should be watched.” Against lingering inhibition, a strong faction of network management believed that the industry was poised for an explosion of revenue in the maturing postwar economy. The key to competitive domination lay in network news programs—or so ran working theory since tandem hosts David Brinkley and Chet Huntley achieved a national popularity at the 1956 political conventions that carried over from their nightly news show to NBC’s prime-time programs.

  On the Monday following the march, rival CBS launched a calculated comeback by doubling regular news coverage with television’s first half-hour newscast, featuring news-anchor Walter Cronkite. Two years in the making, the plan aimed to build the prestige of the Cronkite program toward the political conventions in the 1964 presidential election year. For the premiere, President Kennedy granted Cronkite an exclusive interview that opened with the President’s concession that civil rights had cost him heavily in a number of states crucial to reelection, especially in the South,* and ended with a discussion of what President Kennedy called “a very important struggle” against a Communist-led insurgency in Vietnam, where forty-seven American soldiers had been killed. Reviewers called the Kennedy interview “leisurely.” While some critics welcomed the extra time for thoughtful or amusing “soft” stories (and complimented in particular Cronkite’s segment on Japanese singers trying to master the English diction of “With a Little Bit of Luck” in the Tokyo production of My Fair Lady), others doubted that CBS could fill a thirty-minute report every night.

  NBC waited a week to match Cronkite† with an expanded version of the Huntley-Brinkley news. The network gambled heavily against the President Kennedy and Cronkite debut with a three-hour special on the race issue, entitled American Revolution ’63. The entire program aired without commercial interruption, as regular sponsors declined to be associated with controversy, and the network itself showed signs of reluctance. Producers allowed no mention of segregated churches, or church activity on either side, for instance, and, to avoid hazarding any structural concept, they adopted the odd contrivance of segments presented alphabetically by the names of cities. An opening on protests in Albany, Georgia, gave way to a flashback on pre-Civil War abolitionists in Amherst, Massachusetts.

  In rare lapses from professional aloofness, NBC narrators revealed the tension of a great personal leap, like trembling knees at a wedding. “There comes a time, there even comes a moment, in the affairs of men when they sense that their lives are being altered forever,” began correspondent Frank McGee. “…We are experiencing a revolution.” McGee told viewers that he had first sensed it years earlier as a local news director during the Montgomery bus boycott,‡ and other voic
es cited the culminating impact of televised violence against children: “The outrage in Birmingham, the sparks from this fell on every state in the Union.”

  Among numerous segregationists filmed expressly for the special, Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi argued that the national turmoil was a sinister illusion created by television itself. “You are witnessing one more chapter in what has been termed the television revolution,” Barnett declared. On the NBC screen, he introduced a pregnant new ideology rooted in the assertion that the news media were driven by a secret racial agenda, saying that the past year’s coverage “publicized and dramatized the race issue far beyond its relative importance,” and that this deliberate media bias served as “a smoke screen to hide the biggest power grab in American history.” Barnett concluded that “the real goal of the conspiracy is the concentration of all effective power in the central government in Washington.”

  The NBC documentary answered Barnett indirectly with a segment on Madison Avenue. “Outside this building there were pickets last week,” a correspondent soberly disclosed over previously unused footage in which NAACP pickets complained that Negroes were excluded not only from television and radio ads, and thus from consumer fantasy, but also from news and entertainment programs. Each of the three networks had hired its first Negro correspondent within the past year; most major newspapers had no Negro reporters at all; even the educational broadcast channels, which favored civil rights by reputation, employed less than 1 percent Negro talent; the first and only televised entertainment shows featuring Negroes had been the stereotype comedies Beulah and Amos ’n’ Andy, both canceled at the end of the Korean War.

  When the alphabet came to Montana, Chet Huntley told viewers that the schools in his home state had been integrated with the few Montanans of color. Half of NBC’s dominant news team, Huntley was a formidable presence as a Western, conservative balance to the more urbane David Brinkley—a kind of real-life model for the rugged “Marlboro Man” of cigarette advertising. His stoic delivery accented a startling departure into reflection. “We were a frontier people,” he said, “or at least our fathers were, and the tradition of judging each man by his merits had by no means died out. Still, in an odd kind of way, the Negro was outside our tradition, a thing apart. In a sense we never really saw him, not the way we saw our friends. We never looked with honesty at Negroes the way we examined the anatomy of a grasshopper, say, or speculated on the after-hours life of our teacher. We looked, but we had been told what to see.” Over old footage of lynchings, Negroes eating watermelons, cross burnings by the Klan, and black faces conniving in minstrel shows, Huntley’s voice recalled images of separation. “What we were really showing, of course, was ourselves,” he said.

  Newsweek magazine published “The Negro in America,” a special issue before the March on Washington. “Who are these revolutionaries? What do they want?” asked the editors, adding that the answers “lie in a world as remote and as unfamiliar to most white Americans as the far side of the moon—the dark side.” An ambitious Newsweek poll showed Martin Luther King with a favorable national rating of 88 percent among Negroes, above 68 percent for Roy Wilkins, 51 percent for Adam Clayton Powell, and 15 percent for Elijah Muhammad. More than 40 percent said they did not recognize Malcolm X or the Muslims by name. A majority of Negroes would fight violently before giving up, said the report, but a larger majority preferred moderate, nonviolent methods “to join the white man,” and were determined to gain “dishwashers and clothes driers as well as human rights.” Newsweek concluded that Negroes “are playing to win. They think they can.”

  An avalanche of mail led to a second special issue, “What the White Man Thinks of the Negro Revolt,” in which editors asked, “How much equality is the white man willing to grant the Negro?” About 80 percent of whites, including 60 percent of Southerners, said they believed Negroes were unfairly treated and deserved equal rights, but most preferred things to be put right without personal contact on their part. “We don’t hate niggers,” a California woman told the poll-taker. “We just don’t want them near us.” According to the poll, 85 percent of whites believed Negroes laughed a lot, 70 percent that Negroes had loose morals and a different smell, half that Negroes possessed inferior intelligence. In a special section, “What Science Says,” experts evaluated claims that a smaller Negro cranium meant less intelligence. Some anthropologists pointed out that such specious logic would make Eskimos smarter than white people, given the relative sizes of the average brain pan. A psychiatrist explained the allegedly large Negro sex drive as a bittersweet function of poverty. “When Negroes start moving up into the middle class,” he said, “they begin to experience the same kind of impairments of potency.” Overall, Newsweek found that “the 1964 election would be a Kennedy landslide except for the racial problem.” The largest disparity in the combined polls concerned the pace of integration: 3 percent of Negroes but 74 percent of whites said, “Negroes are moving too fast.”

  RUNNING STORIES lasted months in the back pages, such as the Americus, Georgia, death case. For refusing a police order to stop singing at a street corner freedom rally in August, four SNCC workers had been charged under a dusty racial insurrection law that provided for a death sentence upon conviction. Just as important to the local prosecutors, who said they were fed up with demonstrations, the capital offense allowed indefinite pretrial incarceration without bail. The transcript of a telephone conversation about prison conditions in Americus was read to “a shocked and silent audience” at the annual convention of the National Student Association in Indiana, where Al Lowenstein was recruiting student help for the Mississippi freedom vote. Georgia officials tenaciously held the four in jail from August until November, when successive legal forays by lawyers, including the new church troubleshooter, Jack Pratt, finally won their freedom on bond.

  In mid-July, Robert Hayling had deployed his NAACP Youth Council on small picket lines outside segregated lunch counters in St. Augustine. A local judge, Charles Mathis, ordered seven demonstrators younger than seventeen held at the county jail, there being no youth detention facilities in the area. After five days, during which Hayling rallied outside the jail to protest cruel treatment, Judge Mathis offered to release the seven prisoners if their parents signed a probationary guarantee of nonparticipation in racial protest until the juveniles reached the age of twenty-one. Four families refused, whereupon Judge Mathis bound two boys and two girls over to jail indefinitely, pending transfer to state reform schools. In desperate attempts to draw attention to the case, Hayling placed calls to reporters, NAACP superiors, the Justice Department, and to the FBI office in Jacksonville, which reported that he “seemed emotionally upset, rambled, and on occasions talked incoherently.” According to the wire from Jacksonville to headquarters, Hayling was “admonished vehemently” for suggesting on the phone that local FBI agents were lax in protecting the rights of the four juveniles.

  A small newspaper in nearby Daytona Beach expressed outrage over the “totalitarian” conduct of Judge Mathis, likening his order to Fidel Castro’s practice of sending children to Moscow for indoctrination. “Florida is going to get a black eye over this case,” predicted the Morning Journal, but most newspapers took the disappearance more calmly. A correspondent for the New York Times passed through a week later and reported that St. Augustine “drowses today under the hot Florida sun, unstirred by the marching feet of the Negroes….” The Times found the summer tourist season in full swing—“horses drawing old-fashioned carriages clop down the street”—and a prevailing view that “the whole racial problem” was manageable and best left ignored. “The townspeople…do not regard it as anything serious,” said the Times dispatch, which mentioned the disposal of the four Negro teenagers as something new under Florida law.

  The St. Augustine students were destined to remain locked up until December, their appeals sometimes lost as the criminal and child welfare systems tried to unload jurisdiction on each other. Among local Negroes, howeve
r, the high reputations of the four families lifted controversy over responsibility for their suffering. As with the children of Birmingham, blame first fell on adult movement leaders for ruining the records of model students, but the callousness of white authorities slowly converted many who realized that four teenagers were about to lose their fall school term as well as their freedom. Resentment and inspiration welled up on Labor Day into St. Augustine’s first large-scale demonstration, with more than a hundred adults carrying integration placards to the Old Slave Market. Police cut short the imitation March on Washington by sweeping in to arrest twenty-seven protesters, including Hayling.

  Two Sundays later, on September 15, dynamite obliterated the exterior stone staircase and tore a large hole in the eastern face of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, freezing the sanctuary clock at 10:22. A concussion of flying bricks and glass destroyed a bathroom inside the staircase wall, where four adolescent girls were preparing to lead the annual Youth Day worship service at eleven, wearing white for the special occasion. Seconds later, a dazed man emerged clutching a dress shoe from the foot of his eleven-year-old granddaughter, one of four mangled corpses in the rubble. His sobbing hysteria spread around the world before nightfall. The Communist oracle Izvestia of Moscow raised a common cry with the Vatican newspaper in Rome, which bemoaned a “massacre of the innocents.”

  A New York Times reporter kept busy that day making a list of twenty previous bombings in “Bombingham” since the destruction of Fred Shuttlesworth’s home in December of 1956—all unsolved and all against movement homes or sanctuaries, including three at Shuttlesworth’s former church. Those farther from the scene made numb gestures with Birmingham in mind. Mercer University of Macon became the first Southern Baptist college to admit Negroes.* In New York, the American Civil Liberties Union announced plans to intervene on the side of Shuttlesworth and the New York Times in the Sullivan libel case, which the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review in the fall term of 1963; at stake, said the lawyers, was Alabama’s claim to repressive power “even more drastic than that imposed by the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798.” In Nashville, white Baptist leaders drafted a resolution of sympathy for the stricken congregation at Sixteenth Street—saying “we join you in mourning your dead” and “encourage our people to contribute toward restoration of your building”—but the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention rejected the expression and managed for thirty years to seal records of its fitful consideration.