Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  For Hayling, the prospect of student pilgrims was an enormous letdown from dreams of rescue by Dr. King, let alone from his hopes for FBI protection. He derided the scheme as futile, but his NAACP remnant asked Vivian to recognize them as a new SCLC chapter. On March 11, before they could get their SCLC stationery printed, Hayling composed a letter to King’s only affiliate in the North. “Spring Vacation is a time when college students from all over the nation head south to the sunny beaches of Florida,” he began, then exhorted students to stop short of Daytona Beach at the end of March and join the “struggle for human rights in St. Augustine.”

  Hayling’s letter and a host of phone calls placed the plight of St. Augustine before the small network of clergy and theologians running the Massachusetts SCLC chapter. Its president, Rev. Virgil Wood, had served until recently on the SCLC board from his home church in Lynchburg, Virginia. Of all his campaigns, the violent police repressions in Danville the previous June still haunted Wood, who had survived one terrifying march when nearly fifty of his cohorts were hospitalized, he believed, only by maintaining a desperate contact with his captor. (“I got his eyes and wouldn’t let his eyes go,” he told movement veterans.) Shortly afterward, Wood had proposed that he relocate his family to establish new SCLC chapters in the North. He sensed in his colleagues a suspicion that he was shell-shocked and battle-weary, deserting them for self-preservation, which he knew to be partly true, and therefore he was supremely grateful to Daddy King for declaring gruffly that he thought Wood’s Northern expansion was a fine move for SCLC, whether it offended Roy Wilkins or not.

  Wood had obtained employment as director of the Blue Hill Christian Center, an experimental parish in the Negro slums of Boston sponsored by his former seminary, the prestigious Andover-Newton. Blue Hill ran a tutoring center, a shelter, a “mothers’ club” nursery for working parents, and a street ministry featuring a radio worship hour at noon on Saturdays. After the March on Washington, Wood and former classmates had recruited fifteen Boston clergy to go south in the first of several waves supporting Golden Frinks and his Spontaneous Movement Youth Choir in Williamston, North Carolina. Now, three weeks before Easter, the staff and volunteers of Massachusetts SCLC solicited a second line of recruits for Hayling in St. Augustine. “This is not a vacation,” they stressed in the application form mailed to seminaries and college chaplains in New England. “…Students should previously secure a source of bail….” Professor Harvey Cox of Andover-Newton wrote a capsule history of the struggle to end segregation in St. Augustine before its Quadricentennial.

  With James Breeden, Paul Chapman, and other core clergy from Wood’s SCLC chapter, Cox approached three prominent Episcopal bishops about escorting the student demonstrators to Florida. The bishops declined to go when they could not coax a courtesy invitation from their counterpart bishop in Florida. Their deference to church protocol produced grumbling within their own households, and the wives of the SCLC clergy obtained substitute commitments from the wives of all three bishops. “If you never see me again, look out for your father,” said Esther Burgess, wife of the first elected Negro bishop in the history of mainstream American churches, to her children. One of her companions, Mary Peabody—a Boston Brahmin of highest pedigree, daughter-in-law of the founder of Groton School, wife of Bishop Malcolm Peabody, mother of Massachusetts Governor Endicott Peabody—caused a small stir from the moment she made her way down to the Blue Hill Christian storefront for hurry-up training as a nonviolent witness.

  AS IN FLORIDA, white vigilantes of Mississippi mobilized in shadows cast by their political leaders. To preserve a unified white vote, Governor Paul Johnson sponsored bills to bar electoral machinery and political opportunity from the negligible Republican party of Mississippi. The legislature authorized two hundred new state troopers with special powers to control racial disturbance, and in February, seeking to deter any summer “invasion” by Northern students, Jackson’s Mayor Allen Thompson gathered his heavily reinforced police battalion—including a riot squad in gas masks, with a fresh arsenal of two hundred shotguns and a new, custom-built armored wagon called “Thompson’s Tank”—to pose in parade-ground formation for news cameras. “There will be no unlawful marching and peaceful picketing,” he told Newsweek as he described the city’s emergency preparations to hold as many as 25,000 prisoners.

  Almost simultaneously, on February 15, two hundred men met secretly in Brookhaven to create the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan as a more disciplined, commando-style splinter group from the parent Klan. With theological language that protested earthly corruption (“Selfishness is the festive queen among humankind, and multitudes forget honor, justice, love and Almighty God, and every Christian principle in order to do homage to her”), Samuel Bowers of Laurel summoned Klan converts to a purifying war against Satanism as manifested in the Communist yoke of civil rights. “We are men who humbly submit to the Will of Almighty God, and who beseech Him for Guidance in our works,” each new member pledged at initiation, “but who will not under any circumstances see the Nation and its Constitution destroyed without violent, Physical resistance….”

  Bowers, a charismatic with a knack for clandestine warfare, orchestrated random night attacks that quickly frightened the Negro movment. (“We are being deluged,” Bob Moses wrote Al Lowenstein. “There have been five killings in S.W. Miss. in the last 3 months. Klan activity—3 whippings, scattered shootings, 180 cross burnings.”) In April, the Mississippi White Knights were strong enough to send a statewide recruiting message by burning crosses in more than sixty counties on a single night, and secret membership mushroomed toward ten thousand by the end of May.

  The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission worked an intermediate ground between press conferences and cross burnings. A state agency, funded by the legislature to defend white supremacy after the Brown decision, the commission responded in February to a complaint from the mayor of Ruleville that Fannie Lou Hamer was distributing food and clothing on condition that destitute families try to register to vote. Commission operatives consulted the state attorney general about bringing bribery charges against her. They determined that the donated relief supplies came from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and traced the names of freight companies and suppliers. From the Sunflower County registrar at Indianola, they obtained descriptions and license plate numbers of those escorting Hamer’s applicants. Because few of the applicants were successful, and no more truckloads from Cambridge were expected through the winter, the commission decided with the Ruleville mayor “not to give this group of agitators any type of publicity for the time being; however, their activities are going to be under close surveillance.”

  Sovereignty Commission investigators also moved steadfastly to curtail Tougaloo College, which was one of the state’s few havens for integrationists. From faculty and student informants, commission director Erle Johnston compiled “a list of the trustees and sources of revenue for the school,” and then, with Governor Johnson and legislative chairmen, presented a blunt proposal to institutional supporters as far away as New York. If Tougaloo president Daniel Beittel and Chaplain Edwin King were fired summarily, Johnston informed Wesley Hotchkiss of the United Church of Christ, “we are in a position to guarantee…that no punitive action will be taken by the Mississippi Legislature….” Otherwise, he added, the state would revoke the Tougaloo charter or remove accreditation for its graduates to teach in public schools. Tougaloo held out for Chaplain King’s faculty status, but President Beittel submitted to forced resignation in April. Johnston expressed optimism that carefully applied threats could stamp out agitation elsewhere. “We have put into action a plan for Rust College similar to the plan we used at Tougaloo College,” he advised Governor Johnson.

  A SLOW TIDE of crisis spread pressures and counterpressures to odd places at great remove. The Sovereignty Commission expanded from Mississippi into Washington, D.C., to underwrite the principal lobby against civil rights legislation in partnership with newspaper publisher W
illiam Loeb of New Hampshire. As chairman of the Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms, Inc., Loeb opposed the “Socialists’ omnibus bill” through paid advertisements in two hundred newspapers, while in his home state he trumpeted two parallel crusades. Determined to keep New Hampshire free of statewide income or sales taxes, Loeb sought to create by ballot initiative the first legal state gambling lottery of the twentieth century. “Don’t Forget to Vote FOR the Sweepstakes,” he urged voters from the front page of his Manchester Union Leader. He also campaigned tirelessly for Senator Barry Goldwater in the nation’s first presidential primary, warning New Hampshire voters of a nefarious plot by civil rights forces to make sure that “the Negro will gain the upper hand and be strong enough to take over every government office in this country.” On a claim to have discovered Negro-authored hate leaflets “rolling into the Granite State,” the Union Leader reprinted dubious texts that rallied the minuscule Negro population of New Hampshire (about three people per thousand) against Goldwater as “the choice and champion of the white man.”

  On Thursday, March 5, Loeb hosted a Goldwater rally at the Manchester armory. “ROAR APPROVAL OF BARRY,” the Union Leader proclaimed. Senator Goldwater denounced Washington’s “failure of leadership,” and actor Ronald Reagan, presented as “The Gipper,” appeared on a film screen. “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government,” said Reagan, who told the Manchester crowd that he was citing the eighteenth-century historian Fraser Tydler. “It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves favors out of the public treasury,” Reagan declared. “From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result, the democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship.” While the film likeness of Reagan recommended Goldwater as America’s best chance to avert such a calamity, Reagan remained at home in California, pondering a career move to politics. He supported a statewide ballot initiative called Proposition 14, which sought to repeal California’s Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963.

  Although Proposition 14 would become a harbinger of national backlash against civil rights, and of California as a bellwether in citizen politics, it was overlooked at the time as a subplot of the election year. The success of the civil rights movement swept nearly all perception of race into the framework of Southern segregation, whose fate was hanging on a threatened filibuster in the U.S. Senate. When King urged California audiences to protect their fair housing law from Proposition 14—“Every citizen must rise up and save it!” he told a rally at the Los Angeles Palladium—his alarms were confined to the Negro press. Supporters of Proposition 14 defined their initiative as a matter of homeowners’ freedom rather than the right to exclude Negroes in real estate, as King described it.

  In Northern campaigns, early signs of white resentment were dismissed as illusion. Until he verified the flattering reports by personal inspection on March 6, George Wallace doubted that a political novice from Oshkosh had on her own initiative recruited a slate of pledged delegates and collected enough signatures to enter him—the arch-segregationist governor of Alabama—as a candidate for president in the liberal state of Wisconsin. When Wallace announced his challenge to President Johnson in Wisconsin’s April 7 Democratic primary, reporters downplayed the story.

  Leading thinkers did not know what to make of civil rights protests close at hand, where there was no legal segregation. “The Negroes are starting a boycott in NYC this morning,” theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote privately on the February day when nearly half a million children stayed home from New York public schools as unfit for learning. “I think they are overplaying their hands. The poor things have wretched schools in Harlem…. They think that a massive desegregation will raise the level of their schools, but that will require transportation of negro and white children…. Human nature is not that good….” Socialist leader Norman Thomas, who had risked his own safety during the Mississippi Freedom Vote, complained that public disturbance in the North “alienates the friends we have got to win and hold.”

  When a wiretap alerted the FBI that Bayard Rustin, an adviser to the one-day boycott, planned to attend a U.N. reception honoring a Soviet writer, Vadim Sobko, who had been invited to America by pacifists, FBI headquarters moved swiftly. From Washington, Assistant Director DeLoach planted a story on the front page of the New York Daily News:“Boycott Chief Soviets’ Guest.” The ambushed Rustin gamely predicted that “the Negro people will pay no more attention to this than they do when Adlai Stevenson has lunch at the Soviet Mission,” but FBI officials boasted that “Rustin is now at the very least a controversial figure.” Not only were puzzled readers—many wondering why New York Negroes would punish their own children—susceptible to suggestion that the school boycott might be a Soviet Communist plot, but private recriminations among Negro leaders opened ground for follow-up operations. Privy to the telephone backbiting over Rustin’s conduct, FBI wiretappers detected “a tremendous opportunity to cause Roy Wilkins and the NAACP to attack Rustin.”

  Like the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the FBI’s clandestine political arm (called COINTELPRO, for “counter-intelligence program”) adopted the premise that the civil rights movement was a disguised arm of Communist conspiracy. COINTELPRO grew into active use just as the actual threat of Cold War subversion diminished, expanding into new territory against the connective alliances of the civil rights movement. As Northern clergy mobilized against Mississippi segregation, the Bureau carefully combed security files for “Communist Party domination or control” of the twenty-one incoming officers at the National Council of Churches, including the Hattiesburg Freedom Day marcher, John Coventry Smith.

  COINTELPRO specialists intervened to weaken some racial forces to which the Bureau itself assigned no pretext of Communist influence. To “widen the rift between [Elijah] Muhammad and [Malcolm X] Little and possibly result in Little’s expulsion from the NOI [Nation of Islam],” FBI headquarters drafted an anonymous news story about “war within the ranks of the Muslims’ empire,” based on the infighting gleaned from wiretaps. In February, DeLoach and his assistants fed directly into the Chicago Defender, the nation’s largest Negro newspaper, a provocative text that described Malcolm’s suspension after his Kennedy assassination statement as a public cover for a factional battle in which Malcolm, attacked by his colleagues as a “religious fanatic and a hard-to-control true revolutionary,” countercharged that luxury had corrupted the Muhammad family from the Nation’s strict moral code. The story was close enough to the truth to give FBI authors the satisfaction of learning by wiretap that Elijah Muhammad’s advisers considered it a leak by Malcolm X. “All the papers have it,” they fumed.

  FROM THE FBI point of view, harassment of Malcolm X or Bayard Rustin was routine background business compared with the political warfare against Martin Luther King, who played an unwitting central role in the triangular struggles among Hoover, President Johnson, and Robert Kennedy. In a state of political crisis on the evening of February 17, Johnson’s chief of staff, Walter Jenkins, and his young assistant, Bill Moyers, summoned Assistant Director DeLoach. He arrived at the White House just ahead of a night courier who delivered the Justice Department’s voluminous King file. Burke Marshall, Jenkins explained gravely to DeLoach, had dispatched the file to them with a warning that the FBI was trying to leak derogatory stories about King, which could destroy the civil rights bill in Congress. Marshall said he wanted the White House to know the full extent of the FBI’s intelligence effort against King, but Jenkins suspected that Robert Kennedy had put Marshall up to it for an ulterior motive. He confided to DeLoach his theory that the Attorney General, “who desperately wants to become Vice President,” aimed to establish a record that he had notified Johnson fully “about King’s communistic background.” Moyers, as DeLoach later told Hoover, expressed a more sinister interpretation: Kennedy himself planned to leak anti-King
stories, framed with the accusing suggestion that President Johnson kept up “political footsie” with King even after learning of his flawed character.

  This was intrigue of Shakespearean dimensions. It played on the fears, jealousies, and clashing ambitions of Johnson and Kennedy after the assassination, with the White House itself teetering over control of explosive racial secrets. The very fact that Jenkins consulted DeLoach signaled that the Johnson White House favored the FBI on such treacherous ground, leaning toward alliance with Hoover against Kennedy rather than vice versa. DeLoach pressed the Bureau’s advantage by arguing to Jenkins and Moyers that Robert Kennedy—not Johnson—was politically vulnerable over the King files. Kennedy had “shielded King for a long time,” he said, and had also signed the secret wiretap order. DeLoach persuaded Jenkins to reject the King files as a political land mine and ship them overnight back to the Justice Department.