Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  From a makeshift barracks in the back of J. C. Fairley’s television repair shop, with floor mattresses and a hose-rigged shower, Beech supervised the pilgrim clergy who had maintained a continuous weekly rotation since the Hattiesburg Freedom Day in January. On Friday, July 10, segregationists ambushed one of Beech’s volunteers with fists and a lead pipe as he walked with voter registration canvassers toward lunch at a Negro church. Arthur Lelyveld, the fifty-one-year-old rabbi of Fairmount Temple in Cleveland, fled bleeding along a railroad track only to be intercepted a second time when the attackers doubled back in their truck. Lelyveld wound up hospitalized along with two summer volunteers from Stanford, one with a broken arm. The assailants later drew suspended sentences and a fine, with local white newspapers emphasizing that they lived outside Hattiesburg in Collins, across the county line.

  In southern Mississippi, the spiral of persecution and summer projects continued to rise without tests of the new civil rights law. The McComb project survived to open a Freedom School with thirty-five students, which grew in spite of the destruction of Mount Zion Hill Baptist and two other Negro churches within a week. (“75 students on the lawn in front of the second church bombed in two days, while the children play in the ruins,” recorded a volunteer. “Everywhere there is enthusiasm….”) Volunteer Dennis Sweeney, along with a visiting white minister from the National Council of Churches, tried to make contact with white McComb, but he succeeded only in ripping out the social roots of the one local couple who agreed apprehensively to listen. Neighbors from a local militia called Help, Inc. surrounded the home of Malva and “Red” Heffner to abort their fleeting introduction to Sweeney on July 17, then stalked and harassed the Heffners, poisoned Falstaff, their dachshund, and orchestrated such a merciless ostracism that the Heffners abandoned their Mississippi home for good on September 5. By then, Red had fallen from 1963 Lincoln Life Salesman of the Year nearly to bankruptcy, and Malva already had lost more than her prestige as the daughter of the governor’s old law partner and mother of the reigning Miss Mississippi. “When I’d go downtown,” she lamented, “people I had known all my life would treat me like I had leprosy.”

  North of McComb in Greenwood, where Red Heffner had grown up a classmate of arch-segregationist Byron de la Beckwith, Stokely Carmichael reenacted his latest arrest for the mass meeting of July 15. “I said, ‘That’s right, niggers don’t do nothin’ but gamble and drink wine, but who taught us how?’” he declared impishly, recalling how he had preempted the word “nigger” to neutralize the sting of an arresting officer’s insults. He convulsed his audience with laughter, exhorting and emboldening them to join Greenwood’s fourth Freedom Day the next morning, but then suddenly turned somber about the dangers. “Now I don’t want any funny business here!” he shouted. One by one, names were called out of those assigned to the voter registration picket line, so they could make preparations for jail. Carmichael teased eager newcomers who welcomed the task as an honor—“I ain’t goin’,” he said—but when tension actually gave way to outrage and inspiration at the courthouse the next day, movement leaders joined an improvised call to fill the jails. Greenwood police tore up “One Man/One Vote” signs as they hauled away 111 pickets, including Carmichael and thirteen summer volunteers.

  Silas McGhee watched the Freedom Day drama from across the street, still pondering his quirky notion to sit through a movie at the Leflore Theater. He was recognizable enough in a small town for three Klansmen to surprise him on his solitary walk home and abduct him at gunpoint in their truck. Vowing to teach him a lesson, they surrounded him with shovels and a two-by-four inside a construction shed. In blind panic, McGhee tackled one of them, who grabbed his ankle and shouted, “Hit him in the head!” to the other two. They clubbed McGhee until he stomped his way loose with his free foot and ran all the way back downtown to the elevator of a temporary FBI office on Washington Street, where he collapsed. Agents followed his lead to arrest the three Klansmen under the new civil rights law—the first such case in Mississippi—and the new Silas McGhee incident became an extra rallying tale that night at the Greenwood Elks Hall.

  Excitement died down into a staff meeting that wrestled toward morning over what to do now, with precious manpower locked up and a further diversion of time and effort required to arrange bail. (It would take six days.) “James Bevel, the wonderful reverend who wears a skull cap…was there,” a mesmerized volunteer wrote home. “He is King’s right hand man, and is 10 times as good.” Bevel reminded the staff of COFO policy that jail marches in Mississippi amounted to aimless self-punishment—“just run up your bail a few thousand dollars”—and he managed to make retreat sound audacious. They should take their dilemma directly to the people, he said, and urge them to keep supporters out of jail to work hard on the summer projects. “Bevel came up with the best thing I have heard for a long time,” the volunteer concluded.

  MARTIN LUTHER KING returned to St. Augustine that same night of July 16, and recalled his departure seventeen days earlier with a tinge of regret. “The businessmen said before we left that they would comply with the civil rights bill and we were very happy about this,” he told a mass meeting. “It represented a degree of progress, and I said to myself maybe St. Augustine is coming to terms with its conscience.” He called the subsequent record a trail of violent setbacks and mixed results. Three days earlier, when postman Henry Twine tried to discuss integration with the manager of the Palms Motor Lodge, near the Fountain of Youth, a small mob of shirtless young men surrounded Twine’s car and beat him through the window, straining to drag him outside while Twine crooked his elbow around the steering wheel to resist.* Chicago Bears football star “Galloping” Willie Galimore, Lincolnville’s most treasured native son, achieved unpublicized, luxury integration by checking into a suite at the Ponce de León Hotel. Beyond the reach of Klan picketers, he celebrated with room service champagne for his friends.†

  At the Monson Motor Lodge, owner James Brock was refusing all Negroes. (“Don’t look back,” he warned a group of testers on July 16. “There are four Klansmen in a truck passing now.”) By resegregating, Brock obtained a truce agreement from Hoss Manucy, but out-of-state Klansmen firebombed the Monson anyway, and U.S. Judge Bryan Simpson soon ordered Brock to integrate again regardless of threats. At Pappy’s Seafood Restaurant, angry white customers fell upon a team of four testers. “One of the Negro integrators ran from Pappy’s into the woods,” FBI agents wired headquarters, “and was missing for about two hours until located by the Florida Highway Patrol.”

  King sent SCLC lawyers back into Judge Simpson’s court for relief under the new law. He expressed hope for continued negotiations, but promised renewed marches under Hosea Williams if necessary. “We have gone too far to turn back,” he said. Even so, King’s attention was fixed upon national politics. He told his St. Augustine crowds how much he would cherish the pen President Johnson gave him on July 2. “It was a great moment,” said King. “It was like standing amid a new Emancipation experience…something like the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln.” But he perceived one historical turning point to be imperiled by another, and most of his remarks in St. Augustine addressed the nomination that very day of Senator Barry Goldwater. “While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulates a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racist,” King declared. “His candidacy and philosophy will serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes will stand.”

  TREMORS SHOOK American politics along the color line. King had come to St. Augustine from the Republican National Convention in California, where he reviewed for the platform committee “profound and revolutionary changes” since his testimony before the same committee four years earlier. He warned Republicans of “national disaster and discord” if either political party backed away from the bipartisan affirmation of the freedom movement: “It would be a tragedy and an irony of history if the Party of Lincoln should now, some 100 years after the Proclamation of Emancip
ation, omit from its platform a strong declaration of commitment to the enforcement of all sections of the civil rights bill.” King made two further points. He urged Republicans to support effective protections against terror for those who sought to exercise fundamental rights such as voting, and he proposed as a “test for the next decade” a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, comparable to the GI Bill, designed to help the poor of all races overcome the combined weight of bigotry and automation.

  FBI agents again bugged King’s hotel room that week, and officials at headquarters recommended adding four new wiretaps to the three already installed at his office. Director Hoover, yielding to the elaborate cajolements from the White House, flew aboard President Johnson’s jet to open a permanent FBI mission in Mississippi. He arrived on July 10 to a legend’s frenzied press reception, at which he complimented Mississippians on their generally low crime rate and described the new FBI presence as a small administrative adjustment. While he and state officials agreed privately to undertake limited cooperation against Klan-sponsored violence, they publicly danced a minuet of friendship without mentioning racial discord. Jackson Mayor Allen Thompson welcomed Hoover effusively, saying, “I’m mighty glad you’re here!” and Governor Johnson tried to make him feel at home by pointing out the motto (“Dieu et les Dames”—God and the Ladies) of Hoover’s old college fraternity, Kappa Alpha, painted on the Capitol ceiling. When a reporter asked about the summer project, local newspapers headlined Hoover’s pinched statement that his Bureau “most certainly does not and will not give protection to civil rights workers.” The Jackson Clarion-Ledger noted with approval that “Hoover would not criticize statements of Gov. Johnson that the state should refuse to comply with the new Civil Rights Law.”

  For all the Director’s skillful accommodation, it did not escape notice that he spent the night of July 10 at the Sun ’n Sand, one of the few Jackson motels to accept integration, or that he frankly agreed with a reporter’s suggestion that the three missing civil rights workers must be presumed dead after three weeks. These small contradictions of segregationist conceit confirmed for wary Mississippians Hoover’s unmistakable purpose. His FBI deployment merely fueled “the wild ‘to-do’ the government is making out of the disappearance of three civil rights workers,” complained the Meridian Star, which blamed President Johnson for trying to “prove to COFO that he is their devoted slave.” A state senator denounced renewed federal “occupation” as a “calculated insult,” and resentful commentators urged citizens to shun FBI investigators with protective silence. “With so many FBI agents sleuthing in our state,” wrote one, “we should keep our eyes open and our mouths shut.”

  FBI officials passed their first test when the Director noticed nothing flimsy or fake about the FBI’s new Mississippi headquarters, which he had ordered created on Tuesday. By Friday, having labored frantically around the clock as Roy Moore, the freshly assigned Special Agent in Charge, shouted, “Money is no object!” teams of agents had leased and furnished two stories of Jackson’s First Federal Building well enough to pass as a fully functional state headquarters for dedication by Hoover, despite empty files and dummy walls hiding bare concrete. FBI Inspector Joseph Sullivan then delivered a status report on his search for the Neshoba County victims, which earned a nod from Hoover but a subsequent reproach from Washington aides for unwanted detail when the Director needed his sleep. The same aides decided not to wake Hoover that night when several callers promised to shoot their former hero the next morning as a traitor to states’ rights. Instead, the aides quietly reinforced the guard detail that whisked Hoover from the Sun ’n Sand to the airport. “Hoover Leaves State/Negro Church Burned,” announced the Saturday Clarion-Ledger, but Mississippi’s ninth church loss of the summer was a footnote to weekend chaos ahead. Before Hoover landed in Washington, his office logged three emergency calls from Walter Jenkins and another from Lyndon Johnson about a predawn bushwhacking in Georgia.

  OF THE MANY Army Reserve officers who completed two-week summer training about midnight Friday at Fort Benning, three friends—all Negroes unsure of finding safe overnight lodging—decided to drive straight through to homes in Washington. They made it as far as Highway 172 near Colbert, Georgia, when a car pulled alongside their 1959 Chevrolet. From a range of three to four feet, two. 12-gauge shotgun blasts obliterated both windows on the driver’s side. One missed Lieutenant Colonel John Howard as it tore through a suitcase into Army uniforms on hangers at the far side of the rear seat. In the front, Major Charles Brown snapped awake to find his friend Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel Penn slumped over the steering wheel beside him, dead of massive wounds to the neck and head. When Brown managed to bring the careening Chevrolet to a stop, and noticed through heavy fog that the attack vehicle ahead seemed to be doubling back, he and Howard moved Penn’s body aside to retreat at such high speeds that they ran off the road down an embankment, turning the Chevrolet on its side.

  Bulletins greeted Hoover at an afternoon flight layover in New York. His orders summoned Assistant Director Joseph Casper from vacation in Myrtle Beach, and Casper commandeered reinforcements from Newark, New York, and Washington into Georgia for instant Saturday travel and all-night interviews, which boiled down to a day-after report for the White House about five “good suspects” from the Athens, Georgia, Klan. Agents had already spread word that “a substantial payment will be made by the Bureau for good information,” and were dragging the Broad River with a magnet in hopes of recovering shotguns. “Press vigorously,” instructed Hoover on Penn case memos.

  Hoover called President Johnson on Sunday, by which time superseding alarms were sounding out of Natchez, Mississippi. In the Old River, a bayou formed by the shifting Mississippi, fisherman James Bowles had discovered the badly decomposed lower body of a young Negro male, his legs tied together. Armies of reporters converged there and also upon Meridian a hundred miles east, on the chance that this might be James Chaney. “FIND HEADLESS BODY IN MISS.,” screamed the Chicago Defender.

  On Monday, when President Johnson called Robert Kennedy for suggestions on the Penn investigation in Georgia (saying, “That was a dastardly thing, wasn’t it?”), the Attorney General deflated his hopes for a breakthrough in Mississippi. “Evidently it’s not any of the three,” said Kennedy, but he confessed that his information did not come from the FBI. In fact, Kennedy asked the President to “give us a hand with the Bureau…because most of the stuff now we get we read in the papers. For instance, the body, we just, hell, we don’t know.” Within minutes, before Johnson could check with Hoover, White House aides rushed in with television reports that search teams had found a second floating torso in the Pearl River, tentatively identified as Chaney.

  “No, that’s not correct,” Hoover told the President. “The second body has just been found, within the last hour…. It looks like we’ve got another case.” Before Hoover signed off, Johnson squeezed in Kennedy’s request that he ask Hoover to dictate for the President a basic diary of his Mississippi trip—and send a copy to the Attorney General. In Mississippi, forensics experts identified neither body as James Chaney, and the disappearance seven weeks earlier of Charles Moore and Henry Dee,* both nineteen, began to register as a phantom event that had been unreported to the civil rights movement or authorities. FBI agents eventually arrested—though state officials declined to prosecute—two Franklin County Klansmen who confessed kidnapping Moore and Dee off the streets of Meadville, beating them to death on a far-fetched suspicion of Black Muslim conspiracy, then sinking their bodies weighted to a Jeep motor block.

  Later on Monday, Inspector Sullivan imported Navy frogmen to scour for Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in case killers were using the Old River bayou as an all-purpose disposal area. For emergency manpower and equipment, he found himself jostling across two states with Atlanta SAC Joseph Ponder, who was running the FBI’s investigation of the Lemuel Penn murder. In Washington, meanwhile, an exchange of letters set a tone of governmental calm. Hoover assured the
White House that he had opened “a fully staffed FBI field office in Mississippi…without the rancor and bitterness of a Federal ‘take over,’” and Johnson replied that it was a “great solace to lean on an old friend [for] such delicate assignments.”

  29

  The Cow Palace Revolt

  REPUBLICANS OPENED their national convention in the San Francisco Cow Palace that same Monday, July 13. All three television networks covered the four-day national pageant more or less continuously, anticipating an abrupt regional and ideological shift of power toward Senator Goldwater’s Western conservatives from the long-dominant Eastern business interests. There was little suspense beyond a slight possibility that Dwight Eisenhower, the only Republican president of the past thirty years, might throw his transcendent influence publicly against Goldwater. Eisenhower was known to resent Goldwater for calling his administration a “dime store New Deal,” and privately he had threatened to renounce the Goldwater forces for reckless exploitation on civil rights, saying that if Republicans “begin to count on the ‘white backlash,’ we will have a big civil war.” Rumors of a decisive Eisenhower statement quickened when his brother Milton delivered a passionate nominating address on behalf of William Scranton, the surviving alternative to Goldwater, but Eisenhower remained neutral to the end. He could not bring himself to split his party in support of Scranton, a sure loser to Goldwater, and he had never been comfortable speaking about racial harmony, anyway.

  In his speech to the convention on Tuesday night, Eisenhower himself stirred the passions for which he blamed Goldwater. “Let us not be guilty of maudlin sympathy for the criminal…roaming the streets with switchblade knife,” he declared. The Cow Palace came alive with roars of approval. (“The phrase ‘switchblade knife’ means ‘Negro’ to the average white American,” explained a dismayed Roy Wilkins in a newspaper column entitled “Ike Struck Lowest Blow.” Wilkins could only hope that a speechwriter had inserted the sentence without Eisenhower’s knowledge.) Eisenhower evoked still greater emotion when he attacked the press, urging his audience to “particularly scorn the divisive efforts of those outside our family, including sensation-seeking columnists and commentators, because…these are people who couldn’t care less about the good of our party.” This time the delegates responded with standing cheers, many shaking angry fists at the reporters’ booths around the Cow Palace.