Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  While the hearing was under way in Washington, five young SNCC workers piled into a car and headed from Greenwood to Atlanta for the final staff meeting before Freedom Summer. They included Hamer’s campaign manager, Charles McLaurin, and Sam Block, who had accompanied Hartman Turnbow to the Holmes County courthouse. A Highway Patrol officer stopped them outside Starkville, Mississippi, and, upon discovering campaign leaflets for Fannie Lou Hamer in the trunk, transported the prisoners to the Lowndes County jail for a night of interrogation and violence, with each slapped by fist or blackjack until he admitted that he was a nigger rather than a Negro. Released the next morning on payment of assorted fines, the Greenwood contingent made it safely through Alabama to the Atlanta office of Dr. James D. Palmer for treatment before they brought their bruises into the basement of Frazier’s Lounge.

  Some thirty SNCC workers converged there with tales and emergencies from several states, but Mississippi eclipsed the others. Reports filtered in of another beating the previous day outside McComb, where a roadside posse had ambushed three white magazine writers researching local plans for Freedom Summer. Arriving with Moses from Washington, James Forman reported that orchestrated plans for a White House audience had dwindled to hopes for a congressional hearing and finally, at great sacrifice, to a self-generated production at National Theater, and that while novelist Joseph Heller and other sponsors were sending President Johnson a renewed petition for help, SNCC’s apprehensions went generally unregarded. Roy Wilkins was candidly criticizing the Mississippi summer project as pointless suffering that might embarrass President Johnson, said Forman, and corrosive doubt was spreading within SNCC itself. Staff members from the state headquarters in Jackson had reached Atlanta wincing over the fresh counsel of a jail volunteer from India who told them gently they lived too much in the present, without history or plans of long scope, vacillating unstably between suicidal hopelessness and an expectation of fixing Mississippi right away. “Oh, but you are all so American,” said the wizened companion of Gandhi, who measured his own jail time in years instead of weeks.

  James Forman told the SNCC gathering that he had watched Martin Luther King defend student initiatives to skeptical senior colleagues from the national civil rights leadership. King had praised the Mississippi summer project as “the most creative idea in the movement,” Forman reported. His generous tone surprised listeners accustomed to Forman’s trademark competitive edge toward King, but he could not dispel tensions that ran much deeper than the usual organizational rivalries.

  On June 9, beginning a three-day marathon at Frazier’s Lounge, complaints erupted that SNCC had lost the intimate kinship of the sit-ins and Freedom Rides. “There used to be a bond among us,” lamented Marion Barry. Others replied that SNCC was no longer a student movement, that the staff had grown fivefold in the past year, and that SNCC needed adult political discipline to replace its naive dormitory methods.When Prathia Hall rose to say that these arguments glossed over unspoken doubts about nonviolence and the compatability of blacks and whites in the movement, Charles McLaurin disclosed that Negroes around Greenwood were collecting arms to defend themselves during the summer project. Willie Peacock, another of those just released from the Lowndes County jail, confessed that he had brought guns into the Greenwood SNCC office. Hollis Watkins said that most supporting farmers kept guns in their houses; the SNCC staff had been able to create a covering atmosphere of nonviolence around movement activities, he added, but no more. Young SNCC workers blurted out that the Mississippi staff was “totally demoralized” just days before the first eager hordes of college volunteers were to present themselves for duty.

  Prathia Hall rose again. “No one can be rational about death,” she said. “What is happening now is that for the first time as a staff we are coming to grips with the fact that this may be it.” All their fears and heartache were valid, she cried out, but no matter how primal the urge to strike back or how pure the grievance, violence could gain nothing. “If you kill an attacker outside the window, you lose your home anyway,” she said, “because the townsmen will come to the defense of the attacker and take everything from you.” In a fit of Freedom Ride spirit, Hall declared her purpose to “bring our blood to the White House door. If we die here, it’s the whole society which has pulled the trigger by its silence.”

  Ruby Doris Smith chastised Hall and others for pretending to be surprised. “There is no one in this room who thought of this project as not involving bloodshed,” she said with fierce determination, but then Smith, too, was wrenched in the other direction. “What does it mean to say we will bring our blood to the doorstep of the White House?” she asked. “Let’s face it. When the four children were killed in the church bombing in Birmingham last year, there were no thousands of volunteers to take their place.” Lawrence Guyot, brushing close to his own private wounds, said they could not blame all the silence on the outside world, as no movement friends had rallied on behalf of him and Hollis Watkins and Willie Peacock and the others chained inside Parchman Penitentiary the previous summer. Still, Guyot argued against taking up arms. “Don’t you see?” he shouted. “They’ll shoot us quicker if we’re armed!”

  Debate broke loose from the usual factional and personal alignments. Purists berated themselves for leading lambs to slaughter, while more worldly strategists spoke up for the hard practical merit of nonviolence. “To the extent that we think of our own lives, we are politically immobilized,” said Courtland Cox. Robert Moses proposed to focus upon what he called “the controllable things.” They might not persuade Negro farmers to stray too far from their rifles, he said, and segregationists would pick their own victims, but the movement itself could resolve that neither staff nor summer volunteers would carry guns. Weary sighs of acclamation eventually drowned out quibbles, and Moses later sent Stokely Carmichael to rid the Greenwood SNCC office of weapons.

  ON JUNE 9, Malcolm X was devastated to learn that Mike Wallace had broadcast on television only his premonition of murder—“I am probably a dead man already”—without any of his careful accusations. Wallace vaguely told viewers that Malcolm felt endangered because he possessed “certain information” about Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm, concluding that the legal departments of all three networks had vetoed airing the sex charges for fear of libel suits, then set out to obtain formal paternity complaints by the mistresses. He hoped that courtroom documents would provide enough protective cover for news outlets, and that the stories in turn would relieve sectarian hostilities building in the Muslim world.

  Six Muslims were jailed and two hospitalized after a brawl outside the Philadelphia mosque on Monday. Seven young men went to the extreme of seeking refuge in the Chicago FBI office after beatings, claiming that Supreme Captain Raymond Sharrieff’s enforcement squads were lumping together dues delinquents with potential dissenters as “hypocrite” followers of Malcolm. In Chicago, FBI wiretaps picked up reverberations among the women of Elijah Muhammad’s extended household. Wallace Muhammad’s wife unburdened herself to her mother-in-law, Elijah’s wife, Clara, saying that Wallace’s own brother had brought squads to their home threatening to kill him. Wallace’s sister Ethel, wife of Raymond Sharrieff, promptly denounced her for upsetting her mother with talk of “that junk,” while another sister bemoaned the hurtful intrigues within the family. “If we don’t stop clowning,” she said, “I am going to be ashamed of being a Muslim.”

  IN ATLANTA, Andrew Young took much of June 9 to compose a searching personal letter about “the direction which my life should take.” Young sought pastoral counsel from Truman Douglass and Wesley Hotchkiss, two senior officials of the United Church of Christ who, in parallel roles with the National Council of Churches, had created historic initiatives for Mississippi. Aside from underwriting the training of Freedom Summer volunteers, the council had just voted formally to recruit and pay clergy for a long-term interracial project called the Delta Ministry. Young expressed gratitude for interest in him as its potential first director, but
he wrestled in his letter with two other choices: staying on as administrator of the Citizenship Education Program, or succeeding Wyatt Walker as Martin Luther King’s chief assistant. Mindful of his privileged legacy from the missionary Congregationalists who had educated his forebears since the Civil War, he wrote Douglass and Hotchkiss that he keenly felt the “guilt that I incurred as I watched those so educated filling their own coffers, with little concern for the needs of their less fortunate brethren.” With apologies for restless imprecision (“At times my passion for these problems gets the best of my ability to communicate”), Young groped for an administrative role to join the nonviolent street masses with “talented tenth” church bureaucrats. “I have considered myself a link between these movements,” he wrote.

  Young was diverted from such thoughts by news of court rulings in Florida. That same day, June 9, Judge Bryan Simpson terminated the ban on marches in St. Augustine and proscribed some of the county’s customized punishments for civil rights prisoners, such as the chicken coop, concrete sweatboxes, miniature padded cell, and the thirtyfold bail increase for misdemeanor charges. “More than cruel and unusual punishment is shown,” Simpson wrote. “Here is exposed, in its raw ugliness, studied and cynical brutality, deliberately contrived to break men physically and mentally.” Because the judge made his orders instantly effective, Robert Hayling and Hosea Williams considered it a jubilant duty to march forthwith that very night.

  Their pleas for support rang north into the Atlanta headquarters of SCLC, which had been embroiled all day over a crisis from Alabama. In Tuscaloosa, home of the state university, police first had blocked an anti-segregation march by forcing some five hundred marchers to retreat back inside the First African Baptist Church, and later, deciding to force them outside again for arrest, hurled tear gas and sprayed fire hoses through the church windows. The Tuscaloosa jail gained ninety-two Negro prisoners, including SCLC’s field representative for Alabama, Rev. T. Y. Rogers, and a volatile new siege held against pressures from both sides. By triage, King dispatched James Bevel to rally the nonviolent movement in Tuscaloosa, then turned to events in Florida.

  Meanwhile in Washington, President Johnson took a phone call shortly after noon from Attorney General Kennedy, who had “heard of this incident of last night.” The first two U.S. reconnaissance jets had been shot down over northern Laos. On secret, crisis recommendations that “unless we showed some strength and made some kind of reply, it would be very bad for us,” he told Kennedy, Johnson had tried to knock out the anti-aircraft batteries with surgical air strikes, which failed because of bad weather. (“It shows us that we can’t rely too much on airpower,” he said.) Kennedy expressed worry that “the Chinese will probably talk about it, and the Russians will probably talk about it,” which would break secrecy about the shadow conflict in Laos behind the undeclared war in Vietnam. Johnson managed to avoid news reports. He spent the afternoon notifying congressional leaders confidentially, saying he did not want to make “too big a deal of it” with a White House briefing. “If they’ll just quit advancing,” he told Senator Mansfield, “why then we can get out.” Mansfield pleaded for a public explanation of the administration’s Asia policy, and Secretary McNamara agreed Tuesday evening in a postmortem on the immediate crisis. “If we’re gonna stay in there,” he told Johnson, “if we’re going to go particularly up the escalating chain, we’re gonna have to educate the people, Mr. President. And we haven’t done so yet. I’m not sure now is exactly the right time.”

  “No,” said Johnson. “And I think if you start doing it, they’re gonna be hollerin’, ‘You’re warmongers.’”

  “That’s right,” said McNamara. “I completely agree with you.”

  In Atlanta, meeting across town from SNCC’s ongoing debate about the Mississippi project, the SCLC staff argued all Tuesday afternoon about how King might honor his pledge to return to St. Augustine. What Daddy King heard about two specific threats against his son alarmed him enough to call Burke Marshall in the Justice Department with pleas for protection. Marshall called Lee White in the White House, who called Florida’s Governor Bryant. SCLC sent a telegram to Attorney General Kennedy charging that the federal government was ignoring racial strife in St. Augustine. From New York, Clarence Jones orchestrated supporting messages from James Baldwin and others calculated to gain attention. Wyatt Walker called the Jacksonville FBI office only to be advised that threats against King were not a federal matter and should be referred to Sheriff Davis. Late on Tuesday afternoon, yielding to a chorus of worry that he was rushing into a death trap, King told reporters that he had postponed his flight until the next morning. With C. T. Vivian, Andrew Young raced off to the airport in his place, leaving behind a handwritten note on a copy of his fresh request for career guidance: “Dr. King—this is the letter I wrote….”

  Young’s journey coincided with Senator Robert Byrd’s last-stand address on the civil rights bill in Washington. Observers noted that the energetic West Virginian took the Senate floor at 7:38 P.M. for the final scheduled speech before a test vote on shutting off debate. Determined not to yield the filibuster while breath remained, he read into the record the entire text of the Magna Carta signed in June of 1215—“749 years ago next Monday.” Byrd traced American doctrines of constitutional liberty to historic roots in Anglo-Saxon character and specifically to the property rights British nobles had forced upon King John at Runnymede, then declared that the civil rights bill fatally undermined this foundation. From time to time, friendly senators rose for colloquies that allowed Byrd to rest his voice without endangering his parliamentary right to the floor. Senator Russell opined that the bill would guarantee the commercial destruction of white people “when it comes to employment, when it comes to promotion, when it comes to being laid off in times of economic distress,” by ensuring that “the average garden variety type of American has no chance whatever.” To prompting questions from Senator Strom Thurmond about a future in which “a woman of one race is required to give a massage to a woman of another race against her wishes,” Byrd readily agreed that the bill imposed a new form of slavery by federal mandate.

  In St. Augustine, Andrew Young walked again into a river of enthusiasm and a command invitation from Hosea Williams. Within minutes of his arrival at a tumultuous mass meeting, he was heading a double-column march of three hundred out of St. Mary’s Baptist Church downtown to the steps of the Old Slave Market. Aggressive but isolated calls of “nigger” sustained an eerie tension until one man broke from the wall of white hecklers to strike Young across the mouth, knocking him to the pavement. Curiosity seemed to check war fever for a moment, as the crowd watched Young rise slowly to his feet and resume the march across the plaza. The hecklers proceeded to St. George Street a block away, and then to the corner of Cordova. At both standoffs, the attacker darted in to knock Young down with a blackjack, and at Cordova he stood over him delivering kicks until Willie Bolden threw himself down over Young, cradling his head in his stomach, absorbing blows on his back. Another attacker singled out one of the few whites marching with Young—Boston University chaplain Will England, who had returned two months after accompanying Mrs. Peabody to jail—and beat him to the ground. “The thud of the kicks were [sic] punctuated with groans from the victim,” reported an account in the local Jacksonville newspaper. “Then a slender Negro boy, about twelve, broke from the ranks of the halted marchers and threw his body over the chaplain. The assailant turned and slouched away slowly. Policemen attempted no arrests….” Half a dozen other marchers needed hospital treatment before the columns reached the safety of St. Mary’s, from which a battered Andrew Young later emerged. “Despite what happened, we are going to continue protesting unjust discrimination,” he told reporters, shrugging when asked about prospects for federal protection.

  BY THE NEXT MORNING, June 10, as Martin Luther King left Atlanta for St. Augustine, Senator Byrd was turning to religious themes after speaking all through the night. “I have attempted to reac
h some understanding as to the Scriptural basis upon which we are implored to enact the proposed legislation…” he declared to a Senate gallery brimming with people and anticipation. “I find none.” Noting that the King James translation of the Bible had been published in the same year colonial Virginia first imported slaves (1619), Byrd listed accepted giants of theology and evangelism who had made little or no mention of race ever since. It would be preposterous to find a clear religious imperative in civil rights after all this time, he argued, because doing so would impeach the leading American divines as knaves or hypocrites. “Shall responsible men and women be persuaded that throughout the religious history of this country, they failed to preach the truth?” Byrd inquired, adding that if so, “I might say to Christians that Christ died in vain.”