Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  King feinted in several directions but stopped short of engagement. Segregation “is so deeply rooted in the entire nation,” he told the New York Times, “that I will have to give more attention to the struggle in the North.” He also pledged to return South with a nonviolent army, and left Andrew Young behind in St. Augustine as his designated spokesman—much to the disgust of Hosea Williams. From experience in Savannah, Williams considered Young a well-bred conciliator by nature. Without knowing of King’s actual instructions to dampen the local demonstrations below any flashpoint of mass jailing, he guessed that if King really wanted a nonviolent uprising, he would have chosen one of his marching lieutenants such as C. T. Vivian, who led a peaceful march of four hundred through St. Augustine after King’s speech on May 26.

  The next night, while addressing a mass meeting of twice that number at St. Mary’s Baptist Church, Williams rebelled against letting all that carefully cultivated courage dissipate again. Outside the church, Andrew Young endorsed the prudence of King’s orders even before gathering reports of white hoodlums sighted near the Old Slave Market with clubs and a few guns. One adolescent boy had been seen on the doorstep of a grocery store, calmly cleaning a shotgun of nearly his own length. As Young made his way inside with plans to call the turnout a victory and dismiss it safely for the night, Williams ambushed him from the pulpit.

  “Here is Reverend Andrew Young, down from Atlanta!” he shouted to the crowd, pointing his finger. “Who is going to lead this march?”

  Young drew Williams off to the side of the sanctuary. “Hosea, there must be five hundred Klansmen down there in that slave market,” he said under his breath. “If we go down there, we’ll get killed.”

  “We’ve got to go, Andy,” said Williams. “We’ve got to go.”

  “Why have we got to go?” whispered Young.

  Williams threw up his arms as though Young had agreed. “I want the prettiest girl in this church,” he cried out, “to march up front with the Reverend Andrew Young!”

  Young extracted one condition: the march downtown would be a silent one, without any morale-building songs or chants that might provoke hostile whites. Passing one-story homes through Lincolnville, those in the long double column did receive awkward calls of recognition and encouragement from thick clusters of bystanders that dwindled to nothing as Cordova Street neared the business district. At the King Street intersection, Police Chief Virgil Stuart halted the line to announce that “serious trouble” was lurking just around the corner in the darkness. Stuart firmly advised retreat and cut off Young’s explanation. “I’m not gonna argue with you at all,” he said, adding that his officers could not protect the marchers a step further.

  Withdrawing to a nearby parking lot, Young gathered the marchers for a short speech about the choice they all faced. “And so tonight we have to decide whether to stand back and give in to fear,” Young said, “or whether we really mean the words that we sing, ‘Before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free.’” Young tried a joke or two to lighten the suffocating mood, then offered a long prayer for guidance (“…We come before Thee like empty pitchers before full fountains, confessing our doubts…. We ask you this evening for courage.…Give us the strength of the prophets of old…but we would also pray, dear Father, for those who would stand between us and our freedom…”). When he called for those willing to go forward, nearly everyone in the giant circle assented by clasping hands through a hymn. Among press observers, Paul Good of ABC television noted a weeping middle-aged man who kept saying, “Oh, these beautiful people.” At the center of the circle, Willie Bolden found himself staring at tears streaming down the cheeks of Andrew Young, which gave Bolden pangs for having assumed that he would need to goad the aloof movement executive into the leap ahead.

  “May we march,” Young said simply.

  Three hundred fifty people in long double rows silently crossed King Street and turned toward the old cathedral, almost touching figures obscured behind trees and lampposts. Exposed, now that Chief Stuart had evacuated the area with his officers, C. T. Vivian flinched at the first loud toll of the Trinity Episcopal church bell, striking eleven o’clock, and others behind him and Young shrank inwardly from intermittent sounds, including the dull clang of a crowbar dropped on pavement. As the marchers passed the Old Slave Market, however, and turned back up King Street by Trinity Episcopal without suffering more than epithets, terror thawed to jitters of disbelief and brightened all the way to euphoria as they reached Lincolnville safely. Young theorized that the spectacle of Negro columns had paralyzed the Klan ambushers with temporary awe, but others shouted of Daniel’s deliverance from a den of lions.

  The march rekindled the spirit of the Mary Peabody campaign two months earlier. Enthusiasm carried through Thursday, May 28, when the frail polio cripple Georgia Reed volunteered to renew sit-ins at tourist motels, leading fifteen local Negroes back to jail under Florida’s “undesirable guest” laws, and the mass meeting that night spilled over at ten o’clock into another one-mile march downtown from St. Paul’s AME. Stimulated by the previous night’s drama, television reporters imported camera crews, and nearly 250 whites amassed to defend the Old Slave Market. The head of the double column made it around the perimeter and back near the return on Cordova Street, where, the path obstructed, Andrew Young tried an evasive move by calling out loudly for prayer. Spittle, jeers, and rebel yells rained down from surrounding hecklers, but no violence erupted until press photographers tried to capture the scene with flashbulbs and television spotlights, and attackers darted in to smash the equipment. A man with a bicycle chain flayed open the neck of NBC cameraman Irving Gans, sending him to Flagler Hospital. Associated Press photographer James Kerlin was kicked and beaten to the ground, losing his cameras. Flying arms snatched a tape recorder from correspondent Paul Good, whose cameraman crawled through swirling legs in an unsuccessful attempt to escape with his newsfilm.

  As Harry Boyte snapped photographs of the melee while crying out for officers to stop it, a deputy sheriff recognized him as the white man who had been introducing himself as Martin Luther King’s newest SCLC staff member. By his own subsequent testimony in federal court, the deputy charged behind a German shepherd, shouting, “There’s that nigger lover!” Bowled over and entangled in the leash, Boyte spun on the ground as the dog bit his leg and ripped his jacket. Reporters helped Boyte to his feet while the crowd diverted to destroy his camera. By then Negroes were dodging blows in full flight, with officers escorting or shooing them toward Lincolnville. A marcher named Clifford Eubanks was clubbed unconscious by an assailant who emerged from behind a hedge. Most others escaped serious injury, one story reported, “although some teen-age girls were weeping with fright.”

  Sheriff Davis and Chief Stuart interrupted the soaring hymns of thanksgiving and recovery at St. Paul’s AME to summon Andrew Young outside. “We are declaring martial law,” Stuart announced, meaning that the authorities would block further demonstrations. Long past midnight, after strategy sessions in which Young decided to challenge the edict in court, Harry Boyte picked up his college-age son, who had taken a bus to see the civil rights movement for himself. Boyte’s apprehensions grew as a car followed closely behind from the bus station to his parking space at the Holiday Inn. He sent his son scurrying to the room with the key, and ducked on the front seat just before a shotgun blast tore through his windshields back to front. The Boytes sought refuge the next morning in the empty beach cottage rented for Dr. King, only to discover that bushwhackers had fired more than a dozen rifle shots through its windows during the night, shattering furniture and breakables inside.

  BULLETINS REACHED King the next day before a rally in the San Francisco Cow Palace. To answer press suggestions of movement weakness—the New York Times detected a “loss of momentum” after the “Rout of Marchers” in St. Augustine—King pledged to “continue our efforts there through songs and prayers and not rifles and bullets.” On another
tack, he defended peaceful renewed demonstrations to critics who saw them as inflammatory rather than strong. “We cannot in good conscience postpone our nonviolent thrust merely because violence has erupted against us,” he wired President Johnson on Saturday, May 29, before addressing an audience of eleven thousand in San Diego. That weekend, he called Burke Marshall and White House aide Lee White to seek emergency federal protection. From a Klan rally in St. Augustine, reports already buzzed of roving night patrols vowing to “hang a Negro,” and an explicit death threat against King was relayed to him Sunday in Los Angeles just as pressures ruptured along another tangent. Coretta King complained bitterly from home about his constant and prolonged abandonments, after which the couple exploded over the phone line in mutual recrimination—each accusing the other of compounding rather than soothing the unbearable strains of movement life.

  Within days, FBI agents offered Florida officials a copy of the wiretap recording. They were tempted by the chance that King might agree to withdraw from St. Augustine rather than risk publicity about his nasty family quarrel, but gave up the idea of confronting King for fear of an uproar over the wiretaps themselves. Harassments remained safely covert. Only hours before the rifle ambush against King’s beach cottage, the Jacksonville FBI office had asked permission to bug the premises, and anonymous tipsters had publicized its exact location through the local press.

  For federal and state officials alike, the desire to avoid the St. Augustine conflict overrode notions to suppress or resolve it. Governor Bryant of Florida boasted to the White House that he had placed state forces on protective alert so subtly as to keep the public unaware. Hoover plucked from his desk a memo noting press claims that the FBI would investigate violence “against King and other Negroes,” and countered with a written instruction: “Be certain that we do not yield on our basic stand against doing guard duty.” On hearing that White House assistant Lee White had promised publicly to “keep an eye on” violations of Negro rights through the FBI in Florida, Hoover asked his aides, “What do we know about Lee White?” To Hoover, White’s statement implied FBI sympathy for St. Augustine protesters, which earned a full FBI file search for derogatory information about President Johnson’s top civil rights aide.

  Johnson, in the midst of a political call with Florida’s Senator George Smathers on June 1, mentioned that he was catching “unshirted hell” on St. Augustine, with demands for federal intervention and “reports that they’re shootin’ into King’s white man’s house down there…and trouble like that.” Smathers, with the caveat, “I hope I’m still maintaining some of my objectivity,” replied that the shooting episodes were “a damn plant,” most likely engineered by King’s people because King was conveniently uninjured. “King is, naturally he loves the headlines,” Smathers told the President, “and I think it would be very bad if the federal government did anything more than confer with Bryant.” On June 5, Robert Kennedy’s personal emissary reported from St. Augustine that the city was too volatile for overt mediation, let alone enforcement initiatives. “Discussions should be begun to buy time,” he recommended, hoping for the federal courts to step forward.

  That night in St. Augustine, Martin Luther King addressed a mass meeting. “I want to commend you for the beauty (Yes!) and the dignity and the courage (Yes, Lord!) with which you carried out demonstrations last week,” he cried to an audience mostly of women fanning themselves in the pews. He praised them as “heroes of St. Augustine” before withdrawing to hear arguments over tactics to sustain the local movement.

  With marches forcibly bottled up within Negro neighborhoods, and the supply of volunteers depleted by heavy fines and intimidating police blockades, King’s colleagues considered an unlikely prospect from the U.S. District Court. In open hearings that week, Judge Bryan Simpson had asked for a courtesy moratorium on sit-ins and even tiny, lawful outdoor rallies, pending his decision in lawsuits seeking protection for demonstrations. Ordinarily, King’s strategists might reject such a request as surrender, especially from a judge who had ruled consistently against them, but Andrew Young and his lawyers discerned subtle signs of conversion on the bench. Simpson ceased his whittling, for instance, when Georgia Reed testified in homespun detail about the new “chicken coop” outside the county jail, and how Sheriff Davis jammed fainting male and female prisoners together into the unshaded pen through the heat of the June days with only a shallow hole in the ground for a common toilet. (Davis testified that the coop was a bonus exercise yard for integrationist prisoners.)

  From the bench, Judge Simpson himself questioned the logic of the state’s position that only curfews and bans could protect Negroes from bloodshed, given the refusal of Sheriff Davis and Chief Stuart to say the opposing white crowds had been armed, hostile, or dangerous. “They were just a bunch of kids,” Stuart insisted on the witness stand. When Davis, under court order, read a list of his 169 supplementary deputies, Simpson bolted upright at the name “Holsted Manucy,” saying, “Why that man’s a convicted felon in this court!” From a 1959 moonshine trial, the judge recognized “Hoss” Manucy as a rough-cut pig farmer and leader of the thousand-member Ancient City Hunting Club. Simpson asked whether the Hunting Club was a parallel Ku Klux Klan for Catholic St. Augustine, technically separate because the Klan proscribed Catholics along with Jews and Negroes, and did not seem satisfied with Sheriff Davis’s bland denials. From these hints of judicial favor, movement leaders decided to accept Simpson’s truce request in spite of the risk that he would rule against them or smother them with delay.

  King left St. Augustine to deliver the baccalaureate address two days later at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, taking Coretta with him to calm the recent marital discord. They passed together through surreal acclaim. A young girl on campus amused King by asking persistently why he was not at least vice president of the United States. A well-meaning visitor called at the door of his faculty guest home with a pet Great Dane, causing a fright and then permanent banter between King and his traveling aide Bernard Lee over who had recoiled more ignominiously. In his college address, King spoke of a “long and difficult wilderness” between the Red Sea of liberation and the Promised Land of democracy. By the afternoon commencement, when Sargent Shriver exhorted Wesleyan graduates to help enact the Johnson poverty legislation,* King had moved on to New York as the first gentile to receive an honorary degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary, sponsored by Rabbi Heschel.

  24

  Brushfires

  THAT SAME NIGHT, Sunday, June 7, arsonists set fire to the St. Augustine beach cottage for the second time since the May 28 fusillade. King and his new Research Committee were discussing movement strategy in a New York hotel room, and nearby, Malcolm X was working the telephone to spread the story of Elijah Muhammad’s sins, calling Muslim women for the most part, hoping they would use their networks to verify his accusations that Muhammad seduced at least five of his secretaries, plus his own niece. Malcolm told them that Muslim men were factionalized to the brink of gang war, and complained that Captain Joseph’s men had swarmed angrily upon a street corner discussion just the day before in Harlem, with Malcolm’s sympathizers escaping only when one of them pulled a shotgun from the trunk of a car. The Nation of Islam was threatening bloodshed in the hope of eliminating him before he could establish the ugly truth, Malcolm told one telephone confidant on a wiretapped telephone line.

  “You think the Messenger is that ruthless?” she asked.

  “Any man,” Malcolm replied, “who will go to bed with his brother’s daughter and then turn and make five other women pregnant, and then accuse all these women of committing adultery, is a ruthless man.”

  At the Audubon Ballroom later that Sunday night, Malcolm departed from his speech about the hajj and his hopes for the United Nations to tell 450 listeners about the concubines. “The Nation would even murder to keep this quiet,” he said. Word of his public revelation flashed across Harlem into the regular service at Temple No. 7, where loyalist memb
ers stayed late to hear lieutenants declare war in a closed emergency session.

  At 9:08 the next morning, Malcolm’s wife, Betty, received the first of many anonymous phone messages: “Just tell him he’s as good as dead.” Before noon, without mentioning the threat, Malcolm patiently unfolded the scandal to CBS correspondent Mike Wallace, who, saying he was still digesting news reports of Malcolm’s revised philosophy on white people, had some trouble adjusting to an avalanche of internal Muslim gossip. Nevertheless, on hearing that the story was being offered to other journalists, Wallace rushed him into a studio that day to film the allegations in meticulous detail. For verification, Malcolm produced the written and recorded statements of several accusing mistresses. He alerted friends to watch Wallace’s New York news show the next day, saying that quick publicity could drain the potential for intra-Muslim violence in many cities.

  IN WASHINGTON, at the National Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue, Bob Moses introduced witnesses for a citizens’ hearing on Mississippi that lasted through Monday, June 8. “It cannot be stated too many times,” declared an invitation to members of Congress, “that our basic goal is to obtain Federal preventative action before any more names are added to the list of civil rights martyrs.” Lawrence Guyot testified about labors to maintain Mississippi’s first picket line since the Hattiesburg Freedom Day in January, and a halting Elizabeth Allen told how her husband, Louis, had tried to survive after witnessing the daylight murder of pioneer registration worker Herbert Lee. (“That is why [Louis] went to Jackson when the police broke his jawbone,” she said. “He asked the FBI for protection, and they tell him different ones would help him, because he has a fear in himself. They took his credit from him. He had stood good in Mississippi, but after he tried to raise himself, and he, a man that wasn’t just anything, they took his credit from him and which he got killed the 31st of January….”) Hartman Turnbow testified about the retributions against him as the first Holmes County Negro of the century to present himself as a voter (“I attempted to register, and they bombed my house and shot in it…. So every little thing they can get on me, they still do”), and Fannie Lou Hamer told of her troubles in the movement since being beaten a year earlier in the Winona jail. “Not only have I been harassed by the police,” Hamer said, “I had a call from the telephone operator after I qualified to run as congresswoman. She told me, ‘Fannie Lou, honey, you are having a lot of different callers on your telephone. I want to know do you have any outsiders in your house? You called somebody today in Texas. Who was you calling, and where are you going? You had a mighty big bill.’”