Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  First, they had to stop briefly under a streetlight to repair engine trouble, which attracted the suspicion of a white pedestrian and soon the police. Second, while the automobile registration papers had no mention of SNCC ownership, Carmichael had misplaced his letter of permission from the stand-in owner, which landed him in the Durant city jail for investigation of car theft. After several car and luggage searches, officers located civil rights literature that Carmichael had taken pains to conceal, which brought conspicuously armed civilians to the jail by midnight. Released, Cobb found himself pleading to stay in his cell. Refused, ordered to leave, he locked himself in the car just outside the jail. Movement logic told him that his best chance was to stay put, positioned at least to holler in the town square. His imagination circled all night on fear and adrenaline, wondering whether Mickey Schwerner had faced the same predicament.

  Their safe emergence from Durant was among the Friday morning bulletins that raced to Jackson—along with confirmation that both the Ridenhour and Itta Bena alarms were resolving into mere scares. In Washington, with President Johnson and Justice Department officials looking on hopefully, Allen Dulles called J. Edgar Hoover at midday from the Oval Office. Following the carefully prepared script, he reported that all the leaders of Mississippi had spoken highly to him of the FBI. For Hoover’s sake, Dulles promised to use his family influence with the National Council of Churches to curtail funding for the incendiary summer project, and he sympathized with Hoover’s complaint that the volunteers were irritating Mississippi white people, first by living in colored homes and second by indoctrinating colored people to vote. Then Dulles outlined his recommendation to the President that Hoover “ought to review the number of agents” in Mississippi. “I realize it’s difficult for you,” he said, but state officials would not enforce the law without “somebody looking over their shoulder a bit, and I think you’re the only fellow that can do it.”

  Hoover gave ground, but suggested that U.S. marshals would be better than FBI agents for the “superhuman task.” When he praised the marshals as “symbols of authority,” who could deter civil rights violations, Dulles realized that his influence had crested. Motioning for help, he fended off Hoover with hasty excuses—“I’m in the President’s office now, and I think he wants this office”—and gave up the telephone.

  “Edgar?” said President Johnson. “…What he is sayin’ there in substance is we want to…avoid the marshal thing and the troops thing…. I’d rather you send another fifteen people or twenty people.”

  Hoover improvised a fallback idea. If the marshals handled deterrence, and the Justice Department concurred, he suggested that the Bureau could make a show of aggressive civil rights arrests in “Teenie Weenie,” as he mistakenly called Itta Bena.

  Johnson, winking at Nicholas Katzenbach, said he would make sure Katzenbach would authorize the arrests, but he parried Hoover’s idea about sending in the U.S. marshals. Only the Bureau was respected enough to frustrate integrationist schemes for military occupation, he said, and cajoled Hoover until the Director agreed with the Dulles recommendations. “You get your men in there now,” urged the President in a rush. He said the White House would announce that “we’ve asked for additional men, and you’re gonna send ’em.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Hoover replied.

  By nightfall, there were celebrations in Mississippi over miraculous reports that FBI agents had arrested three of the previous day’s shotgun-toting vigilantes from Itta Bena. “You dig it,” wrote a giddy Harvard volunteer from Greenwood. “They are in a Southern jail!” Editors of the Times received news from “that horror-ridden state” swiftly enough to make Saturday editions in New York, praising these FBI arrests as “the first sign anywhere in Mississippi of effective action to uphold the upholders of the Constitution.”

  Bob Moses dampened optimism that whipped through the Ohio training center. So did John Doar, who had arrived to address the second-week volunteers before they embarked for Mississippi. The volunteers saw the arrests as recognition of federal authority that had been there all along—in Section 3052 of Title 18, and elsewhere, according to the COFO handouts—and by logistical extension ought to generate FBI protectors throughout Mississippi. Doar regretted that the world of civil rights did not yield to logic. From the day’s maelstrom of phone consultations within the government, he saw Itta Bena as a feint in the contorted maneuvers over the federal presence in the state. Doar was hearing that Hoover was on the verge of surrender, which might produce the first permanent FBI offices in Mississippi, but he knew better than to guarantee the outcome. He only repeated his warning from the previous week, that the volunteers should count on zero federal protection, and endured a greater volley of protest now that the violations were no longer hypothetical.

  Moses defended Doar again. Later Friday night, to hushed volunteers with their bags packed, he began farewell remarks with symbols from literature, wondering if the volunteers had read any of the “Ring” novels by J. R. R. Tolkien on the weariness of constant attention to good and evil. After a long pause, he said abruptly, “The kids are dead.”

  Moses explored readiness for other deaths: “I justify myself because I’m taking risks myself, and I’m not asking people to do things I’m not willing to do…. If for any reason you’re hesitant about what you’re getting into, it’s better for you to leave.” He nearly begged them to go home, recorded one volunteer, and closed with a special plea to those going forward in the second wave, most of whom had trained as teachers to open the experimental Freedom Schools. “Be patient with the kids and with Mississippi,” he said. “Because there is a distinction between being slow and being stupid. And the kids in Mississippi are very, very…very slow.”

  Moses withdrew to compose statements for the next day: a ringing defense of the summer project* and a passionate request that untrained sympathizers stay out of Mississippi. The volunteers started a slow movement song, “They say that freedom is a constant struggle.” Boarding buses, they rolled south from Ohio in the darkness so that they, like Louise Hermey and Andrew Goodman the week before, could be dropped off at appointed stations in Mississippi before sundown on Saturday. By then, FBI Inspector Sullivan extended the systematic search of Neshoba County with grappling hooks and a small armada of skiffs to drag a fifty-mile stretch of the Pearl River.

  27

  Beachheads

  ON HIS WAY to receive Greek Premier George Papandreou before lunch on Thursday, June 25, President Johnson encountered Lee White outside his office with a message that Martin Luther King wanted him on the telephone. Johnson waved off the call. “Tell him I’ve sent eight helicopters down there this morning,” he instructed White. “And two hundred marines.” Running late to a prebriefing from Dean Acheson and McGeorge Bundy on how to get Papandreou to calm chronic Turkish-Greek violence on the island of Cyprus, Johnson told White to tell King that he already had “made available every facility of the federal government and the Defense Department.”

  White lacked the time or nerve to say that King was not calling about Mississippi but St. Augustine, where he was caught in his own trap of violence. Segregationists, held back from demonstrators by a thin line of State Police, directed their fury all week against others, including the national press. Troopers rescued John Herbers of the Times from one mob, after which Herbers moved on to Mississippi in time to earn a byline for chasing down the missing companion of volunteer Ron Ridenhour. When a Danish photographer created a small international stir by complaining to his embassy of a Klan beating on a St. Augustine beach, Halstead “Hoss” Manucy’s vigilante deputies retaliated by offering “protection” only to reporters who ostracized the Dane. A UPI reporter told FBI agents that he had been forced to match what his ABC competitors were paying Manucy for safety during demonstrations.

  More disappointing for King, beyond the dwindling press corps huddled behind Manucy’s lines, were settlement negotiations that kept stalling. On his instructions, the quartet of B
oston University professors checked into the Monson Motor Lodge under assumed names, having exchanged Harold DeWolf’s Massachusetts vehicle for a local rental with Florida license plates. While three of them tried to establish cover identities as tourists—with church historian Neil Richardson posed as an archaeologist, hoping to examine artifacts from the Spanish period—Harold DeWolf looked for an isolated pay telephone. From a booth, he arranged clandestine meetings to receive truce terms from white business leaders, and only then did he make contact with Negroes, slip across no-man’s-land to meet a series of Lincolnville couriers ending with Andrew Young, and finally come upon the sight of six-year-old Martin Luther King III playing with his father at the home of Janie Jones.

  Movement leaders unanimously rejected the offer DeWolf presented; King kept saying that while he did not want to humiliate anybody, he needed at least the pledge of a biracial committee in order to leave town in good conscience. Before DeWolf could return to white leaders to seek better terms, however, State Senator Verle Pope refused to see him again, pleading threats against his home for selling out to Negroes. Night riders had thrown six concrete blocks through the windows of his insurance business, and Pope said he no longer could subject his family to such danger. His withdrawal on Thursday morning left DeWolf dangling with a frayed disguise. Reporters at the Monson debated whether he was an odd-looking FBI agent or a suicidal fool. King remained convinced that the hard-pressed white business leaders wanted to settle as badly as he did. Seeking a federal mediator to break the barrier of a small town under siege, he placed a call directly to President Johnson—only to have Lee White put him off with word that the President was doing everything he could.

  Two hours later, at 2:30 on Thursday afternoon, the most intrepid of the movement demonstrators mobilized from Elk’s Rest Lodge for the second wade-in of the day. A newcomer among them, Rev. Elizabeth Miller, was more apprehensive than most because segregationists only yesterday had broken the nose of the sole white female in the line. Like the rabbis the week before, Reverend Miller had answered an appeal to her religious assembly—the American Baptist Convention of Valley Forge, where she headed the Division of Christian Social Concern.* Close behind Fred Shuttlesworth and C. T. Vivian, Miller joined double columns of forty marching down the broad low-tide beach inside a protective corridor of assorted state and local officers that funneled them into the water. They halted knee-deep before an opposing crowd of nearly a hundred segregationists stretched across the mouth of the funnel. From a shower of epithets, Miller heard obscene guesses by white women about the nature of her company with the Negro demonstrators.

  An officer with a bullhorn warned that anyone who interfered with the integrated swimmers would be arrested. This new policy superseded the previous practice of jailing nonviolent victims while releasing their attackers, which had allowed the white opposition to grow more rowdy under tacit license. Segregationists growled with disbelief at the change. Several of them closed in to knock Shuttlesworth and a visiting Episcopal minister off their feet. Rev. Walter Hampshire of New Jersey called out for prayer, which soon made Reverend Miller all the more conspicuous behind him as one of the few demonstrators who, wearing street clothes instead of bathing dress, declined to kneel in the Atlantic. Three white women darted from the beach through the line of officers to bowl Miller over and then pummel her, one with a rubber-thong sandal, touching off a general assault. Demonstrators threw themselves over those fallen in the water. Several segregationists resisted when troopers waded in to make arrests—one so fiercely that troopers clubbed him. The unexpected sight of a bleeding white fighter triggered sympathy, then rage against the Florida officers. “They didn’t beat the niggers!” shrieked one woman. Conflicted local deputies switched sides and loudly protested—reported an FBI observer—that “blows struck by the state officers were unnecessary.” Some of them came to the aid of segregationists, whereupon fights erupted among the officers themselves. As combatants were pulling themselves apart and away, Reverend Miller remembered enough nonviolent training to dumbfound one of her recent attackers by returning her sandal.

  About five hundred segregationists rallied first that night at the Old Slave Market, drawn by outrage over treatment of whites on the beach. The four Boston University professors stepped gingerly among them, curious to observe their first demonstration now that their clandestine negotiations were in stalemate. Arriving fresh from a mass meeting at St. Paul’s, where a foot-stomping rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In” greeted King’s entrance to speak, the professors came to a plaza decorated with a banner of King’s face over a raccoon’s body, captioned “Martin Luther Coon/And All His Little Coons/Are Going Down.” Harold DeWolf was startled to find himself standing near Manucy, which he discovered by overhearing a press interview in which Manucy proclaimed with easygoing frankness that his business was “raisin’ pigs and shootin’ niggers.” From the platform, J. B. Stoner stirred the crowd’s indignation against the all-white state troopers for their betrayal that afternoon, urging segregationists to write down the badge number of any officer who interfered. When he introduced a featured speaker “bigger than the FBI and all the niggers in St. Augustine,” Rev. Connie Lynch acknowledged applause, showing off his speaking vest made from a Confederate flag.

  Still fondly remembered by local Klansmen for his rousing speeches the previous September, Lynch vowed to liberate any arrested segregationists “one way or another.” To the silent astonishment of DeWolf and his fellow theologians, he worked the crowd into righteous frenzy over what he called the divine mission of 140 million American white people. “Let me tell you that God’s with the white man in this struggle for racial purity!” he cried. “This is law ordained that came out of the heavens!” He liberally quoted the Bible: “Remember the words of Jesus Christ, who said, ‘You can’t love two masters.’ You love the one…and you HATE the other!”

  Suddenly, Lynch pointed over the crowd to a stirring across Cathedral Plaza to the rear. “There they come!” he shouted. “The niggers are coming now!” His audience turned upon Fred Shuttlesworth’s nightly march from the mass meeting up King Street and back. The attackers pushed nearly two hundred of Governor Bryant’s assorted special detail—troopers, wildlife officers, liquor agents—back hard upon the double column. The demonstrators, mostly teenagers paired boy and girl, knelt to cover their heads. There was a pause, during which one Florida reporter remembered hearing the click of traffic signals, followed by an ignition of guttural cries. Rocks, city trash cans, and other missiles rained down on Negroes and officers alike. One trooper fell, shot through the arm with a zip gun. Some officers melted away, leaving gaps for assault by fists and clubs; others rousted Shuttlesworth and his columns through an opening back to the west along Cathedral Street.

  The retreat stalled at the far end of the plaza, hemmed in. Crowds closed on state troopers who held five captured attackers in custody, then chanted, “Turn ’em loose!” When the cowed officers released their prisoners to stand aside, roars of approval dissolved restraints on the surging mob. Nineteen immobile Negro bodies soon lay in clumps on the pavement; chaos drowned out the sirens of arriving ambulances. Demonstrators broke ranks to flee zigzag through gantlets. Harold DeWolf, too frightened to move or speak, saw in front of him what became an indelible slowmotion memory of a Negro girl slugged to the ground, a foot drawn back, and a boy draping himself over her head in time to absorb the kick. Homer Bigart compressed the scene into one sentence for the morning New York Times: “A number of Negro women had their clothes torn off while they were being clawed and beaten by screaming terrorists.”

  Newsweek correspondent Marshall Frady was trampled while trying to help a wounded girl hiding in shrubbery. Fred Shuttlesworth picked up another young girl who had knocked herself out running headlong into a parking meter; in a lapse of his nonviolence, he brandished a fist to hold follow-up attackers at bay. A few demonstrators fought back aggressively, sending three whites to the hospital. Offic
ers arrested violent Negroes when they could. Some local police blended into the mob, or lent billy clubs to friends, and Sheriff Davis later conceded in court that he had used his bullhorn in the waning moments to invite whites back for a “march through niggertown” the following night. What limited casualties to roughly a quarter of the 180 demonstrators, an FBI observer concluded, was that the mob after a time “seemed primarily interested in preventing officers from making arrests.” Sensing this, the most dutiful of the state troopers single-mindedly herded stragglers back to Lincolnville. Trotting at the front, Rev. Elizabeth Miller learned to recognize outbursts of sporadic violence by the bark of police dogs and the sudden flashes of television lights trailing behind.

  King preached to the wounded and rescued back at St. Paul’s, then placed telephone appeals. “This is the worst night we’ve ever had,” he told Clarence Jones in New York. He said forty people were beaten badly enough to need treatment—more trauma than the Freedom Rides, bigger hospital bills than Birmingham—in bedlam that was “getting tough on nonviolence.” Only demonstrators were being arrested, he complained bitterly, adding that “the Klan is making a showdown down here and the federal government has not done a thing!” King scrambled with Jones to plan a telegram campaign demanding federal mediation—possibly federal troops to stop a “reign of terror”—but reality overtook him within minutes. He conceded to Jones that President Johnson was preoccupied already with the presidential campaign and the death watch in Mississippi. Even in the aftershock of the Florida rampage, King broke away to call the Goodman parents about their missing son. He did call Burke Marshall at the Justice Department, begging for federal intervention, but he did not criticize Marshall’s noncommittal response too harshly—in part because just then he was encouraging Marshall to push the civil rights bill through the last mile of its journey through the Congress.