Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  IN WASHINGTON, President Johnson gathered 150 leading ministers from the Southern Baptist Convention for a brief reception in the White House Rose Garden on Wednesday, March 25. He permitted no reporters, recorders, or cameras, and began his informal remarks with a string of jokes about Baptists baptizing each other in the White House pool (“I wish you could have seen Billy Graham and Bill Moyers in that pool together the other day”). To underscore his own Baptist heritage, Johnson read to the ministers a yellowed 1857 letter he kept on his office wall in which the patriarch of Texas, General Sam Houston, had commiserated with his pastor, Johnson’s own great-grandfather Baines, over the miserly church contributions of most members. (“They ought to know that paper currency will not pass in heaven,” Houston wrote.) Johnson told his audience that his frontier ancestor, Rev. George Washington Baines, Sr., had been selected to deliver the annual sermon to the Southern Baptist Convention of his day. “If that doesn’t make him orthodox,” he added with a twinkle, “nothing will.”

  The President allowed that since the trauma of the Kennedy assassination he had caught himself reciting forgotten childhood prayers learned on his mother’s knee. “The occupant of the world’s most powerful office, like the most private citizen, has nowhere to go for help but up,” he said. He professed humility in their realm (“I am not a theologian. I am not a philosopher”), and ventured the opinion of “just a public servant” that there was hope for the nation “only if the separation of church and state does not mean the divorce of spiritual values from secular affairs.” Johnson defined that political line with an eloquence pleasing to his guests. “The principle, the identity of private morality and public conscience, is as deeply rooted in our tradition and Constitution as the principle of legal separation,” he declared. “Washington in his first inaugural said that the roots of national policy lay in private morality. Lincoln proclaimed as a national faith that right makes might. Surely this is so.”

  Then abruptly Johnson dropped the folksy banter and supplication. Saying “no group of Christians has a greater responsibility in civil rights than Southern Baptists,” he cut through the usual bromides like a brimstone preacher grasping sinners by the throat. “Your people are part of the power structure in many communities of our land,” he said. “The leaders of states and cities and towns are in your congregations, and they sit on your boards. Their attitudes are confirmed or changed by the sermons you preach and by the lessons you write and by the examples that you set.”

  Johnson challenged the South’s leading white ministers to become suffering prophets in keeping with the Baptist struggle for religious liberty, guided by compassion, not conformity, and “unafraid of the consequences.” Warning against “voices crying peace, peace, peace, when there is no peace,” he summoned them to answer “with truth and with action. Help us pass this civil rights bill…. Let the acts of everyone, in government and out, let all that we do proclaim that righteousness does exalt the nation. Thank you.”

  Word spread so rapidly that Martin Luther King issued a statement that evening, before the next day’s newspapers, praising Johnson’s “eloquent and passionate” plea to white Baptists. King was in Washington to attend a climactic session of the Senate debate, and on Thursday he looked down from the visitors’ gallery on Senator Russell’s racial relocation map, still standing on exhibit. Southerners, breaking off their warmup filibuster, yielded at last for the procedural vote to take up the bill, after which Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon stirred the chamber by moving to send it back to committee for hearings, as required by Senate practice. Well aware that Judiciary chairman James Eastland of Mississippi had killed all but one of 121 civil rights measures over the past decade, Morse foresaw still greater peril in cutting corners. To shut off debate by the required two-thirds vote—and thereby gain final passage over the real, mortal filibuster looming ahead—he declared that supporters must court senators who opposed cloture on principle, plus powerful chairmen with their own reasons not to bypass any committee, and also with Senate traditionalists who were loath to base historic legislation on the reports or hasty amendments of the House. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who had favored Morse’s course as painful but prudent, now rose to announce that he had changed his mind. Even if Chairman Eastland did not manage to suffocate or disfigure the bill in committee, Mansfield pointed out that the ordeal of calling it up as pending business would start all over again. He moved to table Morse’s motion and keep the bill before the Senate. After a dramatic afternoon debate, in which Republican leader Everett Dirksen joined Morse and the Southern senators in opposition, Mansfield prevailed by a vote of 50-34, and the Senate adjourned for a brief Easter recess.

  “We shall now begin to fight the war,” vowed Richard Russell. Off the Senate floor, he and other senators fielded questions about whether supporters could find the seventeen additional votes necessary for cloture. A small cloud of reporters gathered around Martin Luther King as he moved from the visitors’ gallery to a nearby conference room, where, on a sofa off toward the rear, the unmistakable figure of Malcolm X took a seat.

  No one, including the two leaders, acknowledged the bizarre joint presence. Although thoughts of Malcolm X had been gnawing at King of late—not so much over philosophical differences as public jibes about “my being soft* and my talking about love and the white man all the time and…my being a sort of polished Uncle Tom”—the press conference ostensibly proceeded as though Malcolm were not there. King announced that he had discussed the bill’s prospects with sponsors including Senator Hubert Humphrey, and had met with movement colleagues about contingency plans for demonstrations. “If there is a prolonged filibuster, it will be necessary to engage in a creative direct action program to dramatize the blatant injustice to Negroes,” he said, predicting a “dark night of social disruption” if the bill failed. He answered the usual range of questions about whether nonviolence contributed to violence, and whether Negroes would stop agitating if they got the bill. “Oh, no, we will not be content,” he replied, “…until we have absolute and full freedom.” Even in the best case, there would be summer demonstrations to test compliance with the new law.

  When King finished and made his way from the conference room in the midst of reporters, Malcolm left by a separate door. Guided by Benjamin 2X, he placed himself directly in King’s path along the corridor.

  “Well, Malcolm, good to see you,” said King as he grasped the outstretched hand.

  “Good to see you,” Malcolm replied.

  Wire service photographers called for them to hold their clasp. With his tourist camera, Benjamin 2X excitedly snapped a full roll of film as Malcolm chatted with King in the halls of the U.S. Senate, hinting that he might join an integration march.

  “Now you’re going to get investigated,” quipped Malcolm in a parting jest. He assumed incorrectly that federal investigators had gone easier on King as a respectable Christian.

  News portraits of Malcolm towering over King appeared the following day in a number of second-tier newspapers. Both men smiled jovially in the Associated Press version, or looked sober for UPI. One white paper warned that King’s pose “could wave the red flag of Black Muslimism in front of those opposing or uncertain about the civil rights bill.” King stood firm to rebukes for association with an anti-white, anti-integrationist symbol. “I would go so far as to say that I would gladly shake hands with Governors Wallace and Barnett and greet them with a kind smile,” he replied to a critic from Savannah. “This would in no way be indicative of my sharing their segregationist views.”

  The meaning of the handshake was more complicated on Malcolm’s side. He told some reporters that the Senate debate was a useless “con game,” but to others he called on the Senate to pass the House bill “exactly as it is, with no changes.” In a striking echo of King after the bus boycott, he went so far as to model his role on Billy Graham’s independent crusades, saying he hoped to spread the gospel of black nationalism without offending any political
or religious organization.

  Unlike King in the 1950s, Malcolm did not have several years to resolve his approach, and he could not wait for an equivalent of the student sit-in movement to demonstrate the value of public sacrifice beyond rhetoric. On the day he sought out King for a handshake in the Senate, his brother held a press conference in Chicago by order of Elijah Muhammad. In trembling but dutiful submission, Minister Philbert X of Lansing read a statement drafted for him by national secretary John Ali, denouncing Malcolm as a devious schemer, hypocrite to Islam, and a traitor comparable to Judas, Brutus, and Benedict Arnold. “My brother Malcolm will do anything and say anything to gain mention and his picture in news coverage,” warned Philbert.

  Malcolm said privately that Philbert wept over the emotional cost of blind submission to the Messenger, but he knew better than to appeal for reconsideration. Instead, he ridiculed Philbert as the only minister in the Nation of Islam “with no congregation,” called him “dumb enough to allow someone to put a script in his hand,” and dismissed him as beneath reply. “My brother was unknown, you know,” Malcolm said on Chicago television. “Until he allowed himself to be used in this attack against me, you never heard of him.”

  A third brother, Minister Wilfred X of Temple No. 1 in Detroit, concurred in Philbert’s anathema after Elijah Muhammad himself telephoned to declare that he would not tolerate “what happened in 1935”—meaning the family schism that had paralyzed the Nation after Elijah’s own brother opposed his divine claims. This time Muhammad wielded allegiance sharp enough to slice away family ties. At his order, officers from Temple No. 7 served court papers on March 31, seeking Malcolm’s eviction from his house. The senior minister of the Nation told readers of Muhammad Speaks that Malcolm could not believe in Islam—“If he did, he would be afraid for his future.” Minister Louis X of Boston, billed as the “Minister Who Knew Him Best,” prepared a three-part series on “Malcolm’s Treachery, Defection.” Most graphically, at the suggestion of Captain Joseph, the cartoonist for Muhammad Speaks illustrated the April 10 story about Philbert’s denunciation with a drawing of Malcolm’s severed head growing devil’s horns as it bounced toward a gravestone reserved for traitors.

  With money borrowed hastily from his half-sister in Boston, Malcolm took flight three days later on a one-way ticket to Cairo, saying he hoped to “get spiritual strength” in Mecca. He left his lawyer, Percy Sutton, to arrange postponement of the eviction hearing until his unspecified return. James 67X and Benjamin 2X remained behind as caretakers among a loose assortment of Muslim rebels, clamoring ideologues, and untutored new fans who thrilled or shuddered over Malcolm X.

  FROM HEBRON, ILLINOIS, Rev. Robert Beech rode the Spirit of New Orleans southward on his own uncharted journey. Although he had rejected the emotional appeals of several returning Presbyterian ministers to join the revolving picket line in Hattiesburg, Beech was haunted during preparations for Easter by their argument that white ministers in clerical collars dampened the likelihood of violence against Mississippi Negroes. His eight-member board of sessions had divided sharply over his sudden request to attend a trial extension of the Hattiesburg Freedom Day in Greenwood on March 25. Some lay elders grumbled that it was irresponsible to ask leave on such short notice, especially during Holy Week, others that a Northern Presbyterian had no business in the South. Supporters reflected more positively that their young minister had a teddy bear quality that indeed might soothe racial passions. Since Beech admitted that he could not fully explain his impulse even to himself, but felt strongly enough to leave behind a newborn third son, the session deferred to him.

  Traveling alone, Beech stepped mistakenly off the Illinois Central in Grenada instead of Greenwood. When he managed to reach the Greenwood SNCC office on Avenue N, movement workers scarcely took notice of him in the crush of Freedom Day alarms. A policeman had kicked Miss Dorothy Huggins on the picket line, and the owner of Short Tire and Oil Co. had informed George Davis that he could no longer drive a truck there because police photographs of him on the picket line had been displayed at a meeting of the White Citizens Council. Someone handed newcomer Beech a sheaf of leaflets promoting the evening mass meeting, and his anticipation gave way to shock—first when Negroes turned him away from their doors without accepting his leaflet, then when police arrested him on a dusty street less than two hours after he arrived in Greenwood.

  At the station, Beech endured fingerprinting, minor manhandling, and menacing talk of littering and other charges before he heard himself snap: “Hey you! I want a receipt for every single item you just got from my pockets.” This outburst led to discussion with the police chief himself, and soon, at the whispered urging of a brassy Greenwood girl from a nearby cell, to Beech’s suggestion that his new friend the chief might as well release the others, too. He left with ten Negroes arrested earlier that day, including SNCC veteran Willie Peacock, but what he remembered most vividly on the train back to Illinois were the eyes of the Negroes afraid to look at him, much less take a leaflet—images of faces and bodies turning away from his friendliest pastoral smile. When Beech called New York to volunteer for what he called a “long-term commitment to this stuff,” Rev. Gayraud Wilmore of the Presbyterian Commission on Religion and Race offered the only available position, as the first resident coordinator of the Hattiesburg Ministers Project. Picket lines would be in the eighteenth continuous week around the Forrest County courthouse by the time Beech could disengage from his two pulpits and move south in May.

  ON MARCH 29, seven white theology professors and two Mississippi Negroes approached Capitol Street Methodist Church of Jackson for the Easter morning service. “That’s far enough—no end runs,” announced the spokesman for a line of ushers interposed on the front steps. A standoff ensued. “I guess you’ll have to arrest us,” concluded Rev. Van Bogard Dunn, dean of Methodist Theological School in Ohio. While being led away toward a sentence of six months’ jail and a $500 fine, Dunn got the commanding officer to say that police would have taken no action without the explicit request of the church ushers. The reply was legal grist for Jack Pratt of the National Council of Churches, who planned to argue on appeal from paragraph 2026 of the Methodist Church Discipline that no Methodist church could ban interracial worship on legitimate religious grounds.

  Outside Galloway Methodist Church, ten blocks away from Capitol Street, two bishops in distinctive clerical garb drew a sizable crowd. Leaving ushers to hold them at bay, the church’s board chairman hurried off to seek the counsel of pastor W.J. Cunningham, who recommended that the segregation policy be relaxed on his authority. When Cunningham explained that Methodists could not dream of refusing worship to sitting bishops of their own denomination, even if one was a Negro, Galloway leaders melted away in sullen disagreement. They held fast against the bishops—James K. Mathews of Boston and Charles Golden* of Nashville—who left behind the gloomier of two prepared statements. (“Easter is an occasion for entirely new attitudes and fresh beginnings…. If we are not admitted, we shall feel no ill will toward those who may feel compelled to turn us away.”)

  Over the next several months, the Easter incident consolidated resentment against Cunningham and bishops of the national church. “They were wrong to come here,” the board chairman aggressively complained. Some five hundred members withdrew to form independent Methodist churches free of integrationist doctrine, and those left behind voted to rescind Galloway’s entire World Service budget of $6,700 in order to shut off the tiny portion that passed through the National Council of Churches. Edwin King, in a one-paragraph addendum to his FCC petition against segregationist television, swore that although the networks reported Jackson’s Easter demonstrations as national news, “WLBT made no mention of these events.”

  IN ATLANTA, Al Lowenstein spent much of Easter Sunday talking impatiently on one pay telephone while guarding another, anticipating go-ahead instructions that never came. An enthusiastic mediator, fresh from consultations with his NAACP contacts in Mississippi, he
had flown in at the request of Bob Moses to exhort the SNCC Executive Committee to set aside recurrent misgivings about the Mississippi summer project. Moses, on learning that SNCC Executive Director James Forman nursed an overriding suspicion of Lowenstein from old political battles inside the National Student Association, had parked Lowenstein at the airport until he could smooth over the invitation privately. He told Forman that SNCC owed an audience to the Mississippi movement’s chief outside catalyst and recruiter of college volunteers, but Forman opposed hearing Lowenstein with unexpected vehemence, warning that he and others would strenuously object if the invitation were pressed openly in the meeting. Embarrassed, Moses backed down to avoid poisonous new divisions over a planned unity speech. He was swept into the contentious session for hours, stranding Lowenstein at his airport phone station.

  Lowenstein was becoming a branded prototype of the isolated white liberal. His name acquired in movement circles a volatile symbolism that would eclipse biographical fact, somewhat like Malcolm X for the larger society. From the tangle of cultural and ideological resentments ahead came preview struggles over control. In February, three weeks before Moses publicly announced any plans for Freedom Summer, a Lowenstein protégé told the Harvard Crimson that he would be moving south to assume personal command of “more than a thousand” student volunteers in Mississippi. (“I apologize in advance if this story is premature or in any way embarrassing,” he wrote Lowenstein.) By then, Lowenstein’s Stanford group already had pushed ahead with fund-raising committees, campus-wide meetings, faculty advisers (theologian Robert McAfee Brown, historian Otis Pease), and even a “secretariat.” The energetic student editor wrote Lowenstein that “on Monday we will break the whole thing in the Daily,” and, in spite of their best intentions, the Stanford students bruised sensibilities in Mississippi by organizing publicity on Western campuses around an April speaking tour by Martin Luther King—reasoning that King would interest college students who knew nothing of SNCC or COFO.