Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  King knew nothing of FBI wiretaps, Neshoba County investigations, or secret presidential orders for his safety. Aboard his flight from Atlanta, he flipped through news magazines like a business tourist while his traveling assistant Bernard Lee read Du Bois’s classic, The Souls of Black Folk. A well-dressed young passenger across the aisle recognized King. “I happen to be a Christian,” he repeated several times, asking with a polite edge whether King thought he advocated “the same love Jesus taught” even though King’s methods “incite one man against another.” King replied that nonviolence aimed at a “love that is strong, so that you love your fellow men enough to lead them to justice.” He asked whether his questioner thought segregation was Christian. “I was anticipating that,” the passenger warily replied, adding that he was less resolved on the large issue than on his hunch that King’s methods were “causing more harm than good.” King asked what methods the passenger suggested, which eventually elicited an opinion that the new civil rights law was harmful, too, and would “just carry on the trend toward federal dictatorship.” When he expressed his inclination to vote for Goldwater, they lightened the stakes by sparring over presidential election odds until the passenger moved to another seat. King returned to his magazines, shaking his head. “Such a young man, too,” he said to Bernard Lee, who scarcely had noticed. “These are the people who are rallying to Goldwater.”

  At the Jackson airport, blinking into bright sun at the foot of the outdoor stairway, King looked lost when reporters converged to ask about riots in New York and rumors that Goldwater might agree to set aside the race issue in the presidential campaign. “I’m here on a twofold visit,” King declared. “First I’m here to demonstrate the absolute support of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for this summer project, this COFO project. Uh, secondly, I am here to…support the tremendous quest for the right to vote on the part of the people of the State of Mississippi in the midst of bombings, murders, and many other difficult experiences….” Roy Moore, SAC of the new Mississippi FBI office, identified himself from the crowd, and when King’s connecting flight landed a few hours later in Greenwood, an FBI escort mobilized for the drive into town.

  The 111 prisoners arrested on Greenwood Freedom Day were emerging from jail, foul-smelling and haggard from a six-day hunger strike, and some of them briefly mistook the commotion downtown as a welcoming ceremony for them. Unfamiliar reporters prowled with clipboards and camera equipment, wrote volunteer Sally Belfrage, who noticed that “for Negroes there hardly seemed to be anyone who wasn’t rushing around looking for King, cooking for King, talking of King as if they couldn’t find him, and thinking of him if there was no one to talk to.” The famous visitor turned up here and there at the heart of a swirling entourage. “Gentlemen, I will be brief,” he told customers at the Van Pool Room.Dorothy Cotton, James Bevel, Andrew Young, and C. T. Vivian went ahead with runners to summon patrons from the Red Rooster Club and the Savoy Cafe to hear King, standing on a bench, tell them that “Mississippi has treated the Negro as if he is a thing instead of a person. Above all things they have denied us the right to vote. We have got to show the world we are determined to be free.” Times reporter John Herbers recorded that “most residents appeared to be astonished by Dr. King.”

  There were two fervent mass meetings that night. An airplane overflew the Negro neighborhoods to drop Ku Klux Klan hate leaflets denouncing the “Riot King.” In the churches, Ralph Abernathy raised $1,288 with an appeal for everyone to give COFO “the price of a good fifth of Scotch,” and the crowds received King’s speeches with what volunteer Belfrage called “searing love.” She marveled at the crowd’s mass adulation from the fringe where some staff workers shouted “De Lawd!” with the mocking undertone that was becoming a private signature of SNCC. Resentment of King festered among young movement veterans who disapproved of his royal style or criticized him for harvesting attention that was built on their long sacrifice. They took the conspicuous FBI detail as evidence of a double standard.

  The next morning, while FBI SAC Roy Moore posted agents on King’s flight from Greenwood to Jackson, James Eastland interrupted Senate debate on President Johnson’s poverty bill with a speech charging first that King was corrupted by Communists, second that the summer project was, too, and third that integrationists with such glaring character defects were not above concocting the Neshoba County murders as a hoax. “Many people in our state assert that there is just as much evidence, as of today, that they are voluntarily missing as there is that they have been abducted,” the senator declared. He challenged critics to produce hard proof of a crime, and defended Mississippi voters as victims rather than perpetrators of bigotry. “They do not seek racial violence,” he said. “They do not want it. There is a conspiracy to thrust violence upon them.”

  King rejected Eastland’s claims of subversion, saying there were “about as many Communists in this freedom struggle as there are Eskimos in Florida.” As for the charge of self-abduction in Neshoba County, King told reporters that he could only hope the FBI would pursue the case with the same dedication and technical wizardry it had employed “some years ago” to prove that an airplane crash near Denver was homicidal insurance fraud. King’s comments, which reflected what he had picked up in Mississippi about the 1955 case for which SAC Roy Moore was best known, were broadcast by Walter Cronkite on the Wednesday network news—then instantly and sourly noted at FBI headquarters as a criticism of the Bureau. Roy Moore himself stayed up past midnight on the logistics of King’s FBI protection. Early the next morning, Atlanta agents monitoring the wiretap on King’s home phone overheard an ABC News correspondent warning Coretta King of news tips that her husband would be assassinated that day in Mississippi. Flash bulletins about the call briefly detached Atlanta SAC Joseph Ponder from his Lemuel Penn investigation to address the thorny question of how to verify and respond to the information without compromising the secrecy of the King wiretap. In Mississippi, Moore buttressed the protective detail with “all available manpower as necessary.”

  For King himself the threats were old and the FBI escorts a welcome novelty. Inspired by Greenwood, he told a large rally at the Jackson Masonic Temple about his 1957 visit to Africa for independence ceremonies in the new nation of Ghana, recalling how much it impressed him to see that “all of those leaders who are now in the cabinet and in Parliament are men who went to prison. In other words, I’m saying to you my friends that often the path to freedom will carry you through prison.” King’s homage to sacrifice received a tepid response from the relatively prosperous “city” crowd of Jackson Negroes, who preferred to hear less about jail. “Yes, in a real sense, we are the conscience of America,” King persisted. “We are its troubled souls, and we will continue to insist that right be done because both God’s will and the sacred heritage of our nation speak through our echoing demands.”

  King’s message, while too fiery for Jackson and too theatrical for Greenwood SNCC workers, was a rare fit for Bob Moses. Just before King’s arrival, Moses had circulated an “EMERGENCY MEMORANDUM” about the summer project’s political ambition to unseat Mississippi’s regular, all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Sounding an alarm that movement workers “are not aware of the massive job which remains” to create an alternative party organization called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)—democratic in the sense of open to all persons, and Democratic in the sense of loyal to President Johnson—Moses urgently demanded that supporters “must devote all their time to organizing for the convention challenge.” The required groundwork, which amounted to precinct canvassing for a hypothetical political party, ran against the summer project’s emotional tides of cathartic inspiration, survival, cultural epiphany, and tests of bravado at the courthouse. Some strategists opposed the entire venture as a quixotic diversion into conventional politics for a summer project that was overwhelmed and nearly spent, but Moses prevailed. With his allies, he saw the shortfall in p
olitical preparation as yet another reason no worker could be spared to go to jail over an integrated meal or movie. To make up ground in a desperate hurry, Moses looked to Martin Luther King for raw celebrity leadership on the traditional model, as opposed to the patient, low-key cultivation SNCC had pioneered in Mississippi.

  KING MET MOSES at Tougaloo College on Thursday, July 23, the morning of the wiretapped prediction of his murder. They discussed a host of tactical questions, including the prudence and design of demonstrations in Atlantic City to dramatize the plight of Mississippi. Al Lowenstein, back from Europe, stayed away from the meeting because of the controversy about his overbearing manner, but his traveling speeches and agitations remained fixed on what he called “my obsession with Mississippi.” By telephone, Lowenstein peppered the Tougaloo agenda with suggestions ranging from public relations (“Praise the civil rights act and then proceed to talk about all our needs that it doesn’t meet”) to the selection of challenge delegates (“Must be clear that the delegation is in control of its own decisions…”). Of the hasty preparations for the MFDP’s own founding state convention, he had forwarded advice from Los Angeles: “Create an atmosphere of representation with placards for all counties. Invitations would go to all prominent Democrats we can think of, even though they can’t come….”

  King, as had promised, made tape-recorded radio spots urging support for the Freedom Democratic Party. He promised to continue speaking of the MFDP challenge as a national test (“America needs at least one party which is free of racism…”), and discussed with Moses a coordinated strategy of negotiation, lobbying, and demonstrations for the late-August Democratic convention. On Friday, his fourth day in Mississippi, King appeared on television to explain the elementary facts of the MFDP. “What is it?” asked the moderator. “Why is it? How does it work and who can join?” Officials of Jackson’s WJTV parried intense viewer criticism of King’s appearance by citing a legal obligation to sell airtime to Negroes, but in truth they sold nothing and yielded instead to the faint new risk of catastrophic loss. Acutely aware of the ongoing, church-sponsored petition to strip the crosstown NBC affiliate WLBT of its FCC broadcast license, WJTV’s management produced King’s panel show as an exhibit of fairness, which observers later recognized as the “first Negro political television program in Mississippi history.”

  From the station, King drove eastward in a caravan of more than twenty cars belonging mostly to news correspondents and the FBI. He took extra time at one highway rest stop to snack on a pickled pig’s foot from a large display jar on the counter of a rural store. Abernathy and others joined him to gnaw through one foot after another, leaning forward to keep from dripping on their suits, while they enjoyed the queasy abstention of Andrew Young. “Come on, Andy,” prompted King, who often teased his companion for “high white” refinements and limited cultural range.

  Additional FBI units from Inspector Joe Sullivan guided them into Neshoba County, leapfrogging ahead to cover highway intersections all the way to the small town of Philadelphia. Of the local citizens who stared grimly at the arriving procession, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Judge Leonard Warren promptly wrote letters demanding to know how the FBI reconciled the presence of “20 to 24 agents” around King with Director Hoover’s public disavowal of protective duty for civil rights workers. (“We believe that the protection of King could have been adequately handled by state and local law enforcement officers,” Sheriff Rainey wrote Hoover.) The inconsistency squeezed Hoover’s assistants, who could neither disclose President Johnson’s explicit order nor ignore Sullivan’s reports that Judge Warren and Sheriff Rainey were themselves among more than a dozen people being investigated in the triple disappearance. Eventually, headquarters resolved simply to ignore the letters. Hoover, who often stressed the more salacious angles in his investigative reports, told President Johnson that Bureau agents identified “a long line of Negro women with whom [one of many suspects] has had sexual relations.”

  King received a lukewarm reception even in Philadelphia’s Negro neighborhoods. There was no organized turnout or church sanctuary for a meeting, and advance criers rounded up no more than fifteen hesitant listeners at street stops and grocery stores on a roving tour. On spreading word that King had challenged a young hustler in a pool hall, more than fifty drifted in to watch the famous preacher playfully lose a game of billiards. Reporter Paul Good winced at the “cornpone evangelism” of Ralph Abernathy’s worshipful introductions of King, whose big words and florid metaphors seemed to leave his audience cold until he spoke of fear. King said he had no doubt that the three missing civil rights workers were long since murdered from the jail down the street, or that everyone there lived with reasons to be afraid. “But if we are gonna be free as a people we’ve got to shed ourselves of fear, and we’ve got to say to those who oppose us with violence that you can’t stop us by bombing a church,” he said. “You can’t stop us by shooting at us. You can’t stop us by brutalizing us, because we’re gonna keep on keeping on until we’re free.” These words stirred a response, after which King explained why they should tell their friends and family to register with the Freedom Democratic Party. He said on the walk through Philadelphia that he drew strength from the faces of people who remained human through such visible suffering.

  The caravan reassembled for a drive ten miles into the countryside, where King and SNCC chairman John Lewis spoke briefly over the ruins of Mount Zion Church. In late afternoon, when most reporters had dropped away to file their stories, King drank iced tea in the Cole farmhouse nearby, listening to reports on the Klan ambush and arson five weeks earlier. Bud Cole, nearing sixty years old and still recovering from injuries, did not say much as usual, but Beatrice Cole recalled the exact hymns for mercy that had welled up in her during her husband’s awful beating. She had King and his party singing prayerfully along, then howling with laughter at her folksy account of the other thing that had seized her mind—a panicky uncertainty about which of two pocketbooks she had brought to the church that night. One was filled with Mount Zion church literature, she said, the other with MFDP leaflets, and she had been petrified that the Klansmen surely would kill them all if they found the leaflets. Fortunately, it did not occur to the attackers that she, rather than the male church trustees, might be Mickey Schwerner’s prime contact at Mount Zion.

  AT ROUGHLY the same hour in Washington, legions of reporters strained to find out what was transpiring at the White House, where President Johnson and Senator Goldwater met alone for sixteen minutes to discuss ground rules for the presidential campaign. There had been press reports all week that the two sides were jockeying over a “gentlemen’s pact” to exclude the race issue from active contention. Johnson and Goldwater complimented each other as American patriots above all differences, and agreed to avoid emotional appeals that might exacerbate national divisions in troubled times—on both civil rights and the military conflict in Vietnam. The President later expressed relief that the Republican candidate did not use the White House as a “launching pad” for campaign attacks. Instead, a bemused Johnson told Nicholas Katzenbach in confidence that Goldwater talked about how much he wanted to fly one of the new military aircraft, “and got on about it like a kid on a toy.”

  In Mississippi, King made it safely to a late rally in Meridian that Friday and then to rooms at the E. F. Young Hotel, where he and his travelers stripped to boxer shorts in the humid night heat and sipped beer as they swapped stories of the long day. On Saturday, he flew home to Atlanta only to be summoned promptly to a festering crisis in New York City.

  The summer project proceeded without King. Two more churches in McComb had been arsoned during his visit, and on Sunday in Greenwood Silas McGhee decided to return to the Leflore Theater for the fourth or fifth try of the month, this time with his brother Jake. They made it safely through the feature presentation of The Carpetbaggers, starring George Peppard, but an angry crowd of two hundred blocked their exit—“cursing and hollering and carrying on,
” said Silas—daring them to leave.

  Young Greenwood whites clogged traffic from the theater back past the courthouse onto the Yazoo River bridge. From the theater lobby, the McGhees called three Negro taxi companies, which refused to run the blockade, then the police and the local SNCC office. From there, calls for help established that while local FBI agents and most of the Greenwood police department had reached the lobby, the police refused to escort the McGhees through the hostile crowd and the FBI agents insisted their job was to observe. Telephone appeals spread to distant journalists, members of Congress, and to FBI offices in Memphis and Jackson, where agents dodged questions about how the Bureau could lavish protection on Martin Luther King and then leave the McGhees to a mob. (“I’m not going to go into that,” one agent replied.) When two SNCC rescue cars pushed through to the theater entrance about ten o’clock, confusion about which was the decoy slowed the McGhees’ escape so that both absorbed blows, and one attacker threw a Coke bottle through the car window, cutting both brothers—especially Silas—with shards of exploding glass.

  The blockade promptly relocated to Leflore County Hospital, where the McGhees received emergency treatment. There were fewer cars but more guns by midnight, when Corporal Clarence McGhee, a strapping paratrooper on home leave, darted in to rescue his younger brothers but could not get back out. A call to his commander at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, was among the host of appeals going out on the hospital pay telephones. From Washington, John Doar advised movement callers not to alienate FBI agents, but recrimination ran high on all sides, along with mutterings against President Johnson. Summer volunteers made notes: “Now (12:40 Atlanta) hospital doors are locked. SNCCs are inside. There are 3 FBIs…and highway patrols are back and forth in front.”