Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  The Easter meeting launched the SNCC leaders into new conflict between conventional and movement politics. Moses frankly sought power alliances in a letter to twenty supporters ranging from Ella Baker to actor Marlon Brando: “It is our conviction that only a massive effort by the country backed by the full power of the President can offer some hope for even minimal change in Mississippi.” SNCC leaders vacillated over how to obtain an audience to tell President Johnson that “responsibility rests with him, and him alone.” If they petitioned jointly with the titular leaders of COFO—King, Farmer, Roy Wilkins—they might be ignored among national figures more congenial to Johnson. One alternative—asking unaffiliated dignitaries to sponsor their request—proved ineffective and awkward when James Baldwin and Reinhold Niebuhr thought they were being asked to join a White House meeting themselves. To finesse hard rules of political access, SNCC leaders reluctantly asked King as a favor to let Mississippi Negroes do the talking once he got them into Johnson’s presence.

  In Lowenstein’s absence, SNCC leaders debated poaching charges against other civil rights groups. CORE had issued a press statement making the entire summer project sound like a CORE initiative, and traditional Negro newspapers blithely advertised the summer showdown as an NAACP registration drive. In response, Moses gently reprimanded CORE’s James Farmer, and aggressive student voices pushed “to project SNCC’s image or else we’ll be continually overridden.” In Atlanta, they resolved to fight back by quietly seeking the organizational allegiance of individual summer volunteers as “SNCC people,” beyond the COFO cause. Having disdained the promotional emphasis of other civil rights groups, they sought targeted publicity as the key to fund-raising at the volume necessary to float the summer project. Proposals to hire fund-raisers met opposition on the ground that professionals “don’t think the same way we do and get money in a different way.” The trick was to gain the benefit of commercial skill without losing the moral identity of SNCC’s experience in Mississippi.

  Holding fast on one controversial issue, SNCC leaders confirmed in Atlanta that the summer project would accept help from anyone willing to brave movement service in Mississippi. They welcomed the National Lawyers Guild, a venerable leftist society that did not exclude Communists and former Communists, even though every one of SNCC’s allies vehemently objected. On King’s behalf, Andrew Young promptly advised that it was a losing game to fight the “red issue” and segregation at once, especially in Mississippi. Gloster Current of the NAACP called SNCC “naive” to think the guild was acceptable. CORE’s chief counsel took his worries to the FBI in Washington, reporting that the students were too young to remember from the 1930s and 1940s that the slightest Communist presence was invisibly corrupting. Jack Greenberg of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund threatened to pull his lawyers out of Mississippi rather than work with the guild. Jack Pratt seconded Greenberg for the National Council of Churches, and his boss, Robert Spike, warned Moses against SNCC’s “deliberate link” with guild lawyers. The church objection weighed heavily on Moses, because Spike had followed up the Presbyterian work in Hattiesburg with the first institutional commitment to the summer project: a pledge from his Commission on Religion and Race to finance all training and transportation of summer volunteers.

  Lowenstein campaigned against the guild, too, in a way that would be remembered long after the broader opposition was forgotten. Something about Lowenstein mirrored the internal tensions within the student movement. Moving between separate worlds easily—too easily for many students—he was part big shot and part itinerant waif. Lowenstein would materialize out of nowhere, argue all night, and nap on the floor like a fresh recruit for the sit-ins, all the while dispatching messages to personal friends in Congress. Lowenstein wanted to debate not merely the substance of decisions but how they were made. Rather than deferring as an outsider to peer consensus, he pressed for votes and rules of representation to match SNCC’s goals for Mississippi. He wanted to know why the approval of the summer project remained tentative but the welcome of the Lawyers Guild seemed final. He wanted to know how the wishes of several thousand Mississippi NAACP members were to be counted against those of a few hundred SNCC workers and followers. To objections that sharecroppers like Fannie Lou Hamer represented a moral and political transformation far beyond their present numbers, Lowenstein argued that COFO needed a working bridge between politics and ideology. If the SNCC workers of Mississippi could not find common language with the middle-class Negroes who had supported Medgar Evers, how could they hope to reach an understanding with President Johnson?

  These were sensitive questions. Rebuffed in Atlanta, Lowenstein peppered SNCC with so many questions on the terms of political cooperation that Moses finally asked an assistant to fend off his calls. Lowenstein knew SNCC well enough to cite the one cardinal rule of its informal brotherhood: that the movement should respect the wishes of those willing to put themselves on the line. Students had built the movement on this standard, breaking through traditional authority, but now embattled pioneers wanted summer volunteers to face the risks of Mississippi while submitting to them as entitled experts. Lowenstein believed the movement should treat the summer volunteers as partners. To run the summer project, he proposed a joint policy board composed of students and Mississippi workers, headed by Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin. It infuriated him to hear that while the SNCC leaders refused to exclude guild lawyers on principle and necessity, they could bar him from meetings and exclude the volunteers themselves from their councils.

  Over the two chaotic months of preparation that remained, Lowenstein tried to protect the summer project from public attacks, sometimes against his own sympathies. When the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins threatened to denounce COFO as infiltrated by the National Lawyers Guild, Lowenstein hurried to New York to pacify him with the traditional argument that defendants had a right to counsel of their choice, Communist or not. He delivered more speeches about Mississippi as a historic crucible of American democracy. “My roommates were positively awed, and they don’t awe easily,” wrote an admiring correspondent from Yale. At Queens College, Lowenstein inspired New York students to apply for Mississippi assignment—including one senior, Andrew Goodman, who was completing a term paper on the startling racial controversies emerging from the Nation of Islam*—and a Stanford speech rallied even those students to whom Lowenstein had confided his stinging criticisms of SNCC as immature and undemocratic. He confined his public doubts to cryptic remarks—“militancy should not be confused with effectiveness”—but close contacts knew he felt troubled and betrayed. His acolytes included campus politicians who by nature were acutely conscious of student rights on everything from cafeteria quality to constitutional expression, and some of them looked past Lowenstein’s barnstorming enthusiasm to pick up his cautions about going blindly into alien Mississippi. “It is fundamental to our role in this that we insure the student voice and perspective in policy formulation,” a worried student body president wrote Lowenstein.

  To SNCC leaders still struggling with fundamental strategy, Lowenstein represented two opposing nightmares about the Mississippi summer project. A newly calculating, political faction feared that his recruits would bowl over a fledgling movement by numbers and cultural connections, while those who embraced the conscience of the “beloved community” shrank from the implications of using prominent white volunteers as bait for federal intervention. If the daughter of a U.S. senator were arrested, who would decide when to post bail—her family or the Mississippi movement? If she were jailed with Mississippi Negroes, must they be released as a group? How would the safety and comfort of the prisoners be weighed against the political value of continued confinement?

  Nervous applicants and their parents bombarded COFO headquarters with hundreds of related questions, receiving mostly evasive replies. A Stanford organizer complained that COFO planners remained about “as communicative as a colony of Trappist monks.” Moses, firmly resolved that control must be retained within the Miss
issippi movement, lacked the means to supply definitive answers even if he had them. As late as early May, he acknowledged that SNCC could not feed even the few permanent workers who were supposed to be processing volunteer applications. Only $10,000 had been raised for the project against a minimum budget of $800,000, and the toilet in the Jackson Freedom House remained clogged for want of $5 cash to pay a plumber. Moses sometimes despaired of going forward at all.

  Hearing that Moses was giving up, Lowenstein discontinued his campus recruiting in May. SNCC workers rallied to the project as a leap of faith, and even those who still opposed the summer project recoiled from the notion that Lowenstein might call it off. Some saw Lowenstein as folding for selfish reasons, while others suspected that he had been plotting sabotage all along. Lowenstein railed against mixed signals, and battled personal rejection by maneuvering with more frenetic stealth than ever—showing up on the fringe of meetings, drawing confidants aside while looking past everyone else. The few whites already working with SNCC in Mississippi mistrusted him as a manipulator.

  As deadlines approached, Lowenstein became as evasive about his own plans as COFO leaders were about the inner workings of the summer project. Admirers who still called him the “human syllogism” grew mystified by his hints that he might not be in harness with Bob Moses. “I admit it took me four readings to discover I still didn’t know what was happening after getting your letter,” confessed one correspondent. Another bewildered, aspiring volunteer wrote: “Where will you be this summer if not in Mississippi?…Where are you going to be for the next few months so I can catch you some time? Won’t you be in Miss. at all?”

  In the end, Lowenstein fled not only Mississippi but the United States. Before retreating to Europe and the ferment of his original childhood cause—restoring democracy to Franco’s Spain—he asked some volunteers to withdraw from the summer project, too, arguing that COFO was forfeiting its chance to develop a historic biracial coalition. Dennis Sweeney, one of his most ardent student followers, was among those trapped between warring passions. But for Lowenstein, he never would have left Stanford to work on the Mississippi Freedom Vote the previous fall; having gone, he could not stay away from fears and inspirations of melting purity. Sweeney decided to return to Mississippi without the approval of his mentor. Lowenstein, characteristically, first resented the choice as a personal defection, then helped arrange a foundation grant to finance it. Sweeney was destined to become one of the movement’s most extreme psychological casualties—he would assassinate Lowenstein in 1980—but for now he shrugged off the conflict. “Please let me know what you’re doing next year when you decide,” Sweeney wrote as he left for Mississippi. “I may join you.”

  20

  Mary Peabody Meets the Klan

  ABOARD AN EVENING FLIGHT from Boston on March 29, still wearing their church dresses and Easter hats, there arrived four distinguished reinforcements known mainly for their marital connections to three Episcopal bishops and to H. S. Payson Rowe, a socially prominent insurance executive with John Hancock. They were greeted at the Jacksonville airport by a man of slightly oversized head and superabundant energy—Hosea Williams of Savannah, who, since capturing publicity the previous year with his jail marches and his daily sermons atop Tomochichi’s Rock, had volunteered his way into trial duty on Martin Luther King’s SCLC staff. Williams briefed the arriving matrons on the drive south to St. Augustine. In less than a week, he had battled the equally temperamental local leader Robert Hayling about the discipline of nonviolence while preparing white New England college students for coordinated demonstrations over spring break. Integrated groups had been turned away from most of the white churches that morning, he reported to his passengers, and nearly seventy people had been jailed in the opening sit-ins.

  Not all the passengers shared Williams’s excitement over what he called the early signs of a bona fide movement. In particular, Mary Peabody, wife of Bishop Malcolm Peabody, replied that while she had enjoyed the nonviolent training at the Blue Hill Christian Center, she did not think they would need it once they got a chance to explain themselves to local authorities. “I do not believe they will deny me the pleasure of lunch with my Negro friend,” she said pleasantly.

  Hosea Williams turned from the steering wheel. Although he knew Dr. King had entrusted him with a maximum celebrity in the mother of the Massachusetts governor, he felt compelled to prepare her for reality. “Mrs. Peabody,” he said finally, “these folk will deny Jesus.” His comment stifled discussion in the car. The women remarked that if it could be true, there would be little common ground for discussion.

  In St. Augustine, they made a grand entrance upon the mass meeting at Zion Baptist Church, where the wife of a Yale divinity professor told of being surrounded by angry-looking men that day while handing out leaflets to tourists—how the terror had lifted from her face with such mysterious clarity that her assailants left her alone. The chaplains of Smith College and Amherst were present, along with nearly a hundred students from Harvard, Mount Holyoke, Brown, and schools as far north as Gorham Teachers College in Maine. All of them joined Hayling’s local stalwarts the next morning for nonviolent workshops at the Elk’s Rest Lodge in the center of Lincolnville. From there, the four senior arrivals went off to test segregation against the perfume of chivalry.

  Downtown near the Old Slave Market, Esther Burgess made sure that the fruit cup at McCartney’s lunch counter was fresh rather than canned, and her three companions ordered a breakfast of pancakes. When their dishes arrived, Mary Peabody congratulated the waitress. “How nice it is that you serve colored people here,” she said.

  “We don’t,” the puzzled waitress replied.

  “Well, Mrs. Burgess is colored,” Peabody observed, whereupon the waitress retreated from view. A premonition made Burgess hastily consume her fruit cup before a store manager arrived to study the four faces at his lunch counter. Settling before Burgess, whose skin was light enough to pass, he asked whether she considered herself a Negro. She did.

  Evicted, the four women walked on to other designated sites. Peabody decided that she had declared victory too early, and devised new strategies, but advance blockades materialized at every entrance. The women eventually gave up on the assumption that someone had spread a warning, perhaps identifying them by Peabody’s distinctive red hat crowned with a double tier of sequins.

  Back at Elk’s Rest Lodge, Hosea Williams asked if they would join the afternoon corps of jail volunteers. Burgess stepped forward, and late that afternoon seven companions escorted her first to the Monson Motor Lodge—where the manager intercepted them with an offer of outdoor service near the kitchen. “But that’s insulting,” protested Mary Peabody, speaking for the delegation.

  “You and I will never live to see the day when people will be forced to take others into their hearts,” the manager declared.

  “Where is your heart?” Peabody inquired, but she moved on when the manager held his ground.

  The group managed to reach a table in the empty bar of the Ponce de Léon Motor Lodge, and when Sheriff L. O. Davis entered with a brace of police officers and two German shepherds, Peabody refused to leave until he retrieved and read for her the exact language of Florida’s “undesirable guest” statute. None of the unflattering definitions applied to her party, she remarked, but Peabody and two of her Boston friends retreated politely before Sheriff Davis’s stern choice of immediate departure or jail. The other five stayed on to face arrest: Hayling, two chaplains, a Pembroke student, and Esther Burgess, who, trembling, was placed with one of the police dogs in the back seat of a squad car. A Boston reporter called out to her, asking whether her husband, Bishop John Burgess, would approve of her course. “I have a higher loyalty to God,” she called back.

  Sealed off from the hymns of public encouragement in the mass meeting, a leadership crisis was flashing from the back room at Elk’s Rest Lodge to the sponsoring officers of the New England SCLC chapter. It superseded even the concurrent plag
ue of hit-and-run violence against the spring prayer vigil in Williamston, North Carolina, their chapter’s adopted project. (On Easter, segregationists had beaten their colleague Paul Chapman outside the local Espiscopal church, smashed the windshield of Lois Chapman’s car, and hospitalized a visiting Massachusetts student with blows from a baseball bat.) From Boston, Virgil Wood and James Breeden contacted William Sloane Coffin at Yale, where he was on standby alert, and dispatched him to St. Augustine with the sole objective of talking Mary Peabody into jail, grandmother of seven or not.

  BEFORE COFFIN ARRIVED in St. Augustine the next day, March 31, Peabody tried to attend the morning communion service at Trinity Episcopal Church, a prestigious congregation across the Slave Market plaza from the cathedral. She found the doors locked and Sheriff Davis standing guard outside along with the rector, Rev. Charles Seymour, who explained that the vestry considered her attendance a demonstration rather than worship, and therefore had canceled the service to protect life and property. Seymour invited Peabody into the church anteroom to hear his vestrymen defend the cancellation vote on the ground that their Florida bishop had interceded with her husband, bishop of the Massachusetts diocese, to argue by phone that his wife’s purpose would damage comity within the national church. For more than an hour, Peabody tried to justify her theology against their charges of meddling.