Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  To support his point, Byrd expounded on the biblical “curse of Noah” and quoted the law of Leviticus against letting “thy cattle gender with a diverse kind.” Citing the parable of vineyard laborers, he said Jesus not only condoned employment discrimination but endorsed a property holder’s right “to do what I will with mine own.” He found authority in the book of First Peter for a hierarchy of kinds, “even in heaven,” and went on to dismiss Jefferson’s doctrine of equal creation as extraneous obiter dictum from “the verbiage of the Declaration of Independence.” Byrd recited the parable of the ten virgins from the book of Matthew to justify a society stratified by attainments and inherited features. “If all men are created equal,” he asked the Senate, “how could five of the virgins have been wise and five foolish?”

  The exhausted senator pressed through segregationist interpretations of Luke and Paul, pausing only to thank his chief opponent for a gift of red roses “from the garden of Mrs. Humphrey.” After conceding a superficial relevance to civil rights in the Good Samaritan parable and Jesus’ command to love neighbors as oneself, Byrd thundered his response: “But the Scriptural admonition does not say that we may not choose our neighbor!…It does not admonish that we shall not build a wall betwixt us and our neighbor.” With a final flourish from Daniel Webster’s eulogy for George Washington, he yielded the floor after fourteen hours and thirteen minutes—the longest speech of the longest filibuster in Senate history.* The Senate secretary then called the roll on the petition for cloture, and one by one, relayed from the hushed chamber through Roger Mudd’s live outdoor broadcast, the suspenseful tally grew. Californian Clair Engle, hospitalized and unable to walk or speak for months after two surgeries for brain cancer, was wheeled unexpectedly into the Senate long enough to record an aye vote by pointing to his eye.

  In Massachusetts, handed a note ten minutes after the roll call, President Johnson interrupted his commencement address to announce simply that “we voted cloture in the Senate today by a vote of 71 to 29.” No further explanation was needed to elicit a standing ovation in the Holy Cross College football stadium, led by Governor Endicott Peabody. Johnson flew home to a rubdown before grim war bulletins from Vietnam were delivered, and was huddled over them that evening with adviser McGeorge Bundy when Attorney General Robert Kennedy poked his head in the office. “Hello, hero,” said Johnson, in tribute to Kennedy’s hard work toward cloture.

  “Wasn’t that good?” Kennedy replied, and the President whisked him off to daughter Lynda Bird’s hamburger party in honor of young Presidential Scholars. Under red-striped tents on the White House South Lawn, they joined a host of attending celebrities, all of whom (except for J. Edgar Hoover) celebrated the day as buoyant supporters of civil rights: among them choreographers George Balanchine and Martha Graham, poets Ogden Nash and Gwendolyn Brooks, baseball star Stan Musial, folk singers the Kingston Trio, conductor Leonard Bernstein, actor Sidney Poitier, and writers Philip Roth, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, and Harper Lee. Before retiring, Johnson conferred with congressional leaders on his foreign aid bill, and instructed Lee White to respond to wire stories about King’s plight in St. Augustine. “Open up some communication down there,” he said. “…Then call the governor, too…. Get Burke Marshall on it. Let’s watch it now.”

  On Thursday, even while complaining to his staff that Robert Kennedy was planting political stories against him, Johnson called the Attorney General to say that his follow-up note on Vietnam was “the nicest thing that’s happened to me since I’ve been here.”

  “Oh, that’s very nice,” said Kennedy.

  “And you’re a great, great guy, or you wouldn’t write that kind of letter,” said Johnson.

  Johnson also reached across the passions of the cloture debate, asking Richard Russell to “do a little heavy thinking for me” about Asia.

  “Well,” said Russell, “we’re just like a damn cow over a fence out there in Vietnam.”

  Johnson bemoaned his dilemma in earnest: “A. W. Moursund said to me last night, said, ‘Goddamn, there’s not anything destroy you as quick as pullin’ out and pullin’ up and runnin’, ’cause America wants by God prestige and power, and they don’t want.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I don’t want to keep—’”

  “That’s what he said?” Russell interrupted.

  “‘I don’t want to kill these folks,’” Johnson continued. “He said, ‘I don’t give a damn.’ Said, ‘They didn’t want to kill ’em in Korea,’ but said, ‘if you don’t stand up for America, there’s nothing that a fella in Johnson City or Georgia or any other place, they’ll forgive you for everything except being weak.’”

  “Well, there’s a lot in that,” said Russell. “A whole lot in that.”

  The President sighed, wandered through other subjects, then congratulated Russell for gallantry in defeat on the cloture vote. “Bob Byrd just stood to the last, didn’t he?” he said.

  “Yeah, he sure did,” said Russell. “…He’s tough as hell.”

  “He’s a good little boy,” said Johnson.

  AT HIS MASS MEETING Wednesday night in St. Augustine, Martin Luther King recognized the “magnificent drama taking place on the stage of American history.” He praised as its vanguard “all of these persons back with us who have been in jail, I think about ten days”—Georgia Reed and others just released under Judge Simpson’s bail reduction. After beckoning them to stand in the church, “so that we can see them and give them a great hand for their courage and their dedicated witness in this city,” King preached on what he called the dignity and discipline of those who had marched with Andrew Young the previous night. “And we go on with a faith that unearned suffering is redemptive,” he said. “Now we face the moment of great decision. Now we face the moment when we must put on our walking shoes and get ready to make a definite witness.”

  King withdrew to debate the complications of that decision. He and his aides realized that the conflict in St. Augustine was a footnote to the national legislation against segregation, and they wanted to avoid an upheaval that might jeopardize the measure on the edge of victory. (While the filibuster was broken, the Senate version differed from the House version, and numerous pitfalls littered the path toward final approval of identical bills, suitable to become law.) Parallel to Johnson’s tricky course between the House and Senate, King tried to keep the nonviolent movement healthy without feeding the incipient white backlash. Privately, at his urging, Johnson officials pushed the St. Augustine officials for small concessions—such as a biracial commission—that might allow King to withdraw. Without a truce, they argued, St. Augustine was about to repeat the 40 percent loss in tourist business that had followed Mrs. Peabody’s arrest in April. The White House brokered messages between King, Judge Simpson, and Florida politicians. “The Governor said that he would talk to the Mayor about the possibility of calling a meeting,” Lee White reported to Johnson.

  When St. Augustine held fast, King felt obliged to keep faith with the local jailgoers and with the national movement that had created the civil rights bill in the first place. To do nothing was to risk charges of collapse from the same people who accused the movement of provocation. Despite growing Klan violence, King’s hopes for state or federal protection were slim. He was not privy to the vituperative hate mail that greeted Judge Simpson’s order restoring Negro demonstration rights,* but he knew from impeachment rumors and overt pressures that Simpson had stretched judicial help to the limit. Therefore, by logic familiar from the low point in Birmingham the previous spring, the battered local movement must expose itself to further punishment, and King resolved to submit himself to jail. Personalized threats and his demolished beach cottage recommended that he get there by a short, unannounced route, in the daytime.

  At 12:22 on June 11, along with Ralph Abernathy, Chaplain Will England, and two others, King presented himself for lunch at the Monson Motor Lodge, a motel favored by visiting journalists. Several dozen reporters gathered behind in a tight semicir
cle, jostling for notes and photographs as owner James Brock confronted King’s group outside the entrance. “We can’t serve you here,” he told King. “We’re not integrated.” King said he would wait. When Abernathy asked about a sign welcoming tourists, Brock explained that exceptions to segregation were reserved for Negro servants of white patrons, who could take meals from the service area. King asked Brock if he could understand “the humiliation our people go through.”

  A waiting customer called out from the back of the crowd, asking whether Brock was open for business. Told yes, the burly man pushed his way through, shoved Abernathy into King, then threw King roughly to the side of the door. “Black bastard,” he said on his way inside.

  Brock told King it would ruin his white business if he accepted Negroes. He appealed for consideration of his own hardship as a local citizen of prominent obligations—a Rotarian, head of the Community Chest, president of the Florida Hotel and Motel Association. “I ask you on behalf of myself, my wife, and our two children,” he told King, “to leave.” As he turned to face news cameras, Brock added, “I would like to invite my many friends throughout the country to visit Monson’s. We expect to remain segregated.”

  Chief Stuart and Sheriff Davis arrived to end the dialogue with arrests for breach of peace, conspiracy, and trespass with malicious intent, among other charges. Eight volunteers, including a white woman, stepped forward on Davis’s announcement that he would accommodate anyone who wanted to join King in jail. A Negro teenager changed his mind when asked pointedly by Stuart if he were sure.

  A rumor swept through Lincolnville that Klansmen dressed as women were training to assassinate King, and a fantasy report came back from the white side of town that a squadron of seventy-five Black Muslim snipers was already deployed to fire from rooftops near Lincolnville. (The latter took hold as accepted fact. “Had it not been for the white police,” a leading radio station reported of an aborted Klan parade, “veteran observers say that no white would have gotten out alive.”) In the placid daylight hours, city work crews removed the brick borders from public flower beds near the Slave Market, so they could no longer be heaved during night marches.

  Police officials told the FBI they wanted to move King out of St. Augustine to avoid a jailhouse lynching. “Medgar Evers was just a two-bit local philanthropist, and now he’s a martyr,” editor “Hoopie” Tebeault explained. “We don’t want that to happen here.” Handcuffed, placed inches from a German shepherd guard dog in the back seat of Sheriff Davis’s car, King was removed from the county jail the next day for grand jury questioning, then returned when the paperwork was not complete for his transfer to Jacksonville.

  Messages on everything from local gossip to long-range trends in national politics reached King’s cell. Historian Lawrence Reddick, King’s friend and first biographer, was submitting to his New York Research Committee a sober analysis of the George Wallace campaign. He discerned from its stunning success that while Northern whites had sympathized with the Negro movement against crude Southern brutality, many privately favored “the principle of racial separation.” Reddick warned King confidentially that a voting majority “can be mobilized by the anti-Negro camp on an appeal that is reasonable and correlated with other long-time, deep-seated desires and irritations…. Many an individual in our society feels overwhelmed by gigantic forces.” If George Wallace himself could refine such a message from hateful segregation,* Reddick reasoned, other national politicians surely would follow. “This also may be part of the secret of Goldwater’s support,” he wrote. Reddick advised that the movement should forswear any claim to racial preferences or compensatory treatment, no matter how justified by history. “Equality is the principle that permeates the American ideology (despite exceptions here and there),” he concluded. “…We cannot win without allies. We cannot win with the majority of Americans apprehensive of our advances.”

  King, knowing he could not stay in jail long, grasped for ways to maintain the spirit of the St. Augustine movement. His goal was to hold on through the anticipated ordeals, with an eye on the civil rights bill and a finger on the pulse of nonviolence. Already, he had urged national celebrities to bring their witness to the mass meetings in St. Augustine, but none agreed to come. (Actor Marlon Brando sent King a telegram of regret on account of his bleeding ulcer and “great personal strife.”) King eventually came down to those who had answered his most desperate calls the previous two years, from Albany and Birmingham. “Dear Sy,” he wrote, “I am dictating this letter from the St. Augustine City Jail.” Andrew Young had brought King word that Rabbi Israel Dresner—a Freedom Rider from 1961, who had brought King to preach at his New Jersey synagogue after the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race—was about to attend a convention of reform rabbis in the Catskills. “Perhaps if this letter could be read to your brethren next week, it might be considered a ‘call’ to St. Augustine,” King wrote Dresner. “I would imagine that some 30 or so rabbis would make a tremendous impact on this community and the nation. We would hope that some would be prepared to submit to arrest.”

  PART THREE

  Freedom Summer

  25

  Jail Marches

  ON FRIDAY, JUNE 12, with King in jail, Hosea Williams presented himself for arrest in order to cajole fifty-five reluctant recruits to join the daily restaurant sit-ins. With local volunteers running low, the St. Augustine movement welcomed a busload of temporary reinforcements who arrived that day from Birmingham, and Williams announced on his way to jail that other buses would arrive from Albany, Georgia, and Williamston, North Carolina. A crowd of nearly two hundred mustered for an early evening rally at the Slave Market, guarded precariously by a ring of police officers. No sooner did the Negroes retreat than a larger crowd of hecklers seeped into the plaza for a boisterous counterrally featuring the white opposition’s imported talent. “We’re not gonna be put in chains by no civil rights bill now or any other time!” shouted J. B. Stoner. “There’s nothing in the Constitution that gives Congress the authority to tell us we’ve got to eat with niggers!”

  A whiff of legend about Stoner helped him command the enthusiasm of the segregationist crowd. He had turned up after spectacular racial violence for years, as police suspect in conspiracies from the 1958 bombing of Atlanta’s Temple Beth-El to the Birmingham church bombing the previous September, and as defender of his friend Byron de la Beckwith in the Medgar Evers murder. Until his conviction more than a decade later on an old charge—blowing up part of Fred Shuttlesworth’s church and parsonage—Stoner would carry the Klansman’s presumed immunity from restraint by any jury.

  Almost alone among whites of the 1950s, Stoner had studied the Nation of Islam with the taunting respect of an opposing sectarian. “You need to learn more about that evil genius, Elijah Muhammad, or you will never stop him and his niggers from taking over your city,” he had warned the New York police commissioner in 1959, offering to lend specially trained warriors from his Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Stoner claimed to have been called into Klan leadership in 1942, at the age of seventeen, and had specialized in anti-Jewish polemics as founder of the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party out of Chattanooga. Like his friend and fellow stump speaker, Rev. Connie Lynch, and Sam Bowers of the new White Knights Klan in Mississippi, he championed the sectarian doctrines of Dr. Wesley Swift, a California fundamentalist who managed to repackage the historical Jesus as an Aryan instead of a Jew—and Anglo-Saxons as the Chosen People of the Bible—by tracing strange, previously unknown migrations of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel through Bethlehem and the Caucasus into Northern Europe. Evolving years later into Aryan Nations, Swift’s Christian Identity movements would inspire white supremacy groups for the remainder of the twentieth century.

  That Friday in St. Augustine, Stoner waved a Confederate flag behind an imposing wall of bodyguards. His discourse on the Founding Fathers—“When they said that all men were created equal, they weren’t talking about niggers…”—drew only sporadic cheers fr
om an audience that was easily bored, dressed in beach clothes on a balmy night, but Stoner struck home with coarser talk. “The coons have been parading around St. Augustine for a long time!” he shouted, and proposed to get even by marching through the darkest streets of Lincolnville with flags, weapons, and scraps of Klan regalia. His dare provoked a crescendo of war whoops. “Under no circumstances should you panic,” Stoner advised. “If some nigger calls you a bad name, pay no attention because what a nigger says doesn’t matter anyhow.”

  Flanked by Chief Stuart and Sheriff Davis, who had assembled a protective escort of armed officers, Stoner led a double column of two hundred segregationists and some thirty trailing reporters out of the Slave Market, behind accommodating Negro “scouts.” Stoner walked with a slight limp from childhood polio. When the march entered Lincolnville, which lacked street lamps, police flashlight beams scanned wary faces and crowded front porches on both sides of the narrow streets. Near the point of greatest apprehension, a rowdy nightclub called Big Daddy’s Blue Goose Bar, Negro residents ambushed the semi-martial cavalcade with repeated choruses of Andrew Young’s favorite hymn for mass meetings, “I Love Everybody, I Love Everybody in My Heart.” Faltering at first, the orchestrated welcome grew stronger once its effect on the grim invaders registered clearly. Stoner called for a strong white marching song to drown out the fraternal mush from Negro residents, but there was confusion down the long columns about what selection fit the moment. The whites halfheartedly settled on “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain.”