Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  In Mississippi, on the advice of a chagrined John Doar at the Justice Department, Moses had posted emergency notice to every COFO office that summer workers must think quickly and clearly to give potential attackers a “Screws warning” at the first instant of violence, saying, “I want to inform you that I am here working on voter registration.” This far-fetched legal prescription would lay groundwork for U.S. redress. “If you’re gutsy,” Moses continued, “you can add something like, ‘You should know that this is protected by federal law.’ Carry on.”

  ON AUGUST 6, the day of the Lemuel Penn arrests in Georgia, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party held its founding statewide convention. Mostly by bus, a crowd upward of two thousand gathered at Jackson’s Masonic Temple. The hall was decorated in humble imitation of the national political conventions. Hand-lettered placards grouped the elected delegates by county: Neshoba, Sunflower, Forrest, Leflore. At center stage, beneath an American flag and a banner reading “Freedom Democratic Party,” speakers welcomed a gathering predominantly of sharecroppers who ate sandwiches from paper bags, advanced their dream of voting with formal roll calls, and answered the chilling loss of three colleagues who lay in the morgue with the spirited conviction of a mass meeting. “Until the killing of a black mother’s son becomes as important as the killing of a white mother’s son,” one speaker cried out, “we who believe in freedom cannot rest.”

  Heat wilted everyone in the hall. COFO chairman Aaron Henry wiped his face with a handkerchief on the platform near Rev. Edwin King, who stirred the air with a church-issue hand fan. In shirtsleeves and his trademark bow tie, Washington attorney Joseph Rauh explained his “magic numbers” for achieving a practical miracle at the Democratic National Convention two weeks hence. “Eleven and eight!” he shouted. Under party rules, eleven votes (10 percent) from the 108-member Credentials Committee could send a minority report to the convention floor recommending that the Freedom Democrats be seated instead of, or alongside, the regular Mississippi Democrats, and a petition from eight states could secure a roll call vote. Rauh envisioned a stark moral and logical choice posed on national television in the glare of widespread revulsion against racial brutality in Mississippi. Democratic delegates would be loath to support the all-white delegation over the Freedom Democrats, he predicted, especially since the regular Democrats, including Governor Johnson and the state legislature itself, were endorsing the Republican nominee because of his stance against the civil rights bill. “When you have two [delegations] that claim to represent the regular party, you take the loyal one,” Rauh declared, surveying a Masonic Temple unanimous for Lyndon Johnson. “There’s not a Goldwater fan in the house!”

  “Bob Moses didn’t seem so confident,” one volunteer in attendance wrote home. “President Johnson is afraid he will lose the whole South if he seats the FDP.” One Sunflower County delegate rose from the floor to ask exactly what the Freedom Democrats would do way up in New Jersey, where most had never ventured. “As things stand right now,” Aaron Henry candidly replied, “we don’t know what the hell we’re going to do when we get to Atlantic City.”

  In a plaid suit jacket, removing her dark glasses to speak, Ella Baker alone seemed in command as she compressed the lessons of thirty years’ activism into a keynote address. She declared the new party “open to all the people who wish to subscribe to its principles…even the son of the planter on whose plantation you work.” To exercise the vote was a serious matter, and beyond courage they would need knowledge of history plus the good sense to detect phoniness in their leaders and themselves. “Now this is not the kind of a keynote speech perhaps you like,” said Baker, “but I’m not trying to make you feel good.” At night after work, “instead of spending our time at the television and radio,” she said they all needed to be studying the world around them. She urged them to read W. J. Cash’s classic political study, The Mind of the South. “Young men and women want some meaning in their lives,” said Baker. “Big cars do not give meaning. Place in the power structure does not give meaning.”

  In the audience, correspondent Paul Good marveled that Baker’s summons to civic duty earned thunderous ovations. The crowd erupted into a prolonged demonstration of dancing and weaving to a succession of freedom songs—“Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “This Little Light of Mine.” “This was probably the most soul-felt march ever to occur in a political convention,” a volunteer wrote home. Another volunteer, transfixed by the sight of county placards bobbing above heads and arms, observed that “all of us here are pretty emotional about the names of the counties.” Labels that normally headed the daily toll of affliction, she added, for once “meant people who work 14 hours a day from sun-up to sun-down picking cotton, and live in homes with no plumbing and no paint, were casting ballots to send a delegation to Atlantic City.”

  Strong sentiments masked some conflicts and caused others. Charles Evers refused to observe even a moment of the historic convention, taking refuge in his office upstairs at the Masonic Temple. Like his slain brother Medgar, he partly shared the resentment of his NAACP employers toward the upstart young people and their untried tactics such as the “pretender” political party. In reply, organizers of the summer project pushed slates of freedom delegates that excluded most NAACP candidates as too “middle-class” to represent Mississippi Negroes. “Misunderstanding” over fund-raising memorials briefly divided partisans of SNCC, which claimed martyr Andrew Goodman, from CORE, which had employed Schwerner and Chaney.

  Outside the hall, shrill public disputes continued over the meaning of the three murders. Some agents of the state government hinted that the precise information about the location of the grave site indicated the FBI’s complicity in the crime, while others drew comfort from reports that the still-secret autopsies showed no signs of beatings—as though proof of swift execution by gunshot might somehow deflect suspicion from the Mississippi Klan.

  Church lawyer Jack Pratt pitched into the propaganda war. On Thursday and Friday—a year after bursting naively into Parchman Penitentiary to rescue forgotten Leflore County prisoners—he arranged and observed a follow-up autopsy on behalf of the Chaney family, then persuaded pathologist David Spain to render his conclusion in nontechnical language: “…I have never witnessed bones so severely shattered, except in tremendously high-speed accidents such as airplane crashes.” Although later evidence would show that the bone damage had been caused by a bulldozer during burial, Pratt’s efforts reversed the New York Times news headings overnight, from “No Evidence of Beating…learned authoritatively,” to “Chaney Was Given a Brutal Beating.”

  Hastily—once the mortuary segregation laws were invoked to block family desires for joint permanent burial in Mississippi—the remains of James Chaney were transported from the second autopsy in Jackson home to Meridian for reinterment alone before dark on Friday. Then silent marches wound through town from four churches to converge upon the tiny, wood-framed First Union Baptist. (“The police held up traffic at stoplights,” a volunteer wrote home, “and of all the white people watching, only one girl heckled.”) There, under the bright lights of television news, one architect of the summer project delivered a volcanic eulogy. CORE’s David Dennis had promised his national office a calming and hopeful message, but on sight of the victim’s broken young brother—“little Ben Chaney here, and the others like him in the audience”—he snapped.

  Dennis gripped the broad pulpit draped with white cloth. “I bury,” he started, then winced, eyes closed. “Not bury. Sorry. But I blame the people in Washington, D.C., and on down….” He decried “the living dead we have right in our midst, not only in Mississippi but throughout the nation.” His voice became a whispered shriek: “See, I know what’s gonna happen! I feel it deep in my heart. When they find the people who killed those guys in Neshoba County, they’ve got to come down to the state of Mississippi and have a jury of all their cousins, their aunts, their uncles. I know what they’re gonna say—not guilty…I’m tired of that!”
Overwrought, Dennis waved spread fingers to and from his chest. “I’m not going to stand here and ask anyone not to be angry, not to be bitter tonight!” he shouted. “…We’ve got to stand up. The best way we can remember James Chaney is to demand our rights…. If you go back home and sit down and take what these white men in Mississippi are doing to us…then God damn your souls!” Tears choked off further words, and the crowd answered with moans.

  Bob Moses snapped differently. He lost himself to what a kindred observer called the “blessed chaos” of a Freedom School convention that same Friday and Saturday in Meridian. While it was impossible yet to know the future miracles among the youth delegates from across Mississippi, such as the fourth-grade sisters destined to become a law professor and a Fulbright scholar, no gloom could withstand the energy of the recitals, displays, and caucuses on public business. The student assembly took as its call a variation on the Declaration of Independence* composed by the Freedom School at St. John’s United Methodist in Hattiesburg—the church of Victoria Gray, now a Freedom Party candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives—then formed eight committees to create a “youth platform” for the Freedom Democratic Party. An education caucus proposed thirteen planks: “4. That the school year consist of nine (9) consecutive months….13. That teacher brutality be eliminated.” Others returned with recommendations that were variously general (“Negroes appointed to the police force in large numbers”), specialized (“Cotton planting allotments to be made on the basis of family size”), and clairvoyant (“We oppose nuclear testing in residential areas”).*

  In plenary session, the Freedom School delegates eventually voted down as “too socialistic” a plank calling for land reform, and replaced, in the foreign policy section, a targeted boycott of Fidel Castro’s Cuba with a more general call: “The United States should stop supporting dictatorships in other countries….” For Moses, specifics counted little next to the pulsating debate itself, with haggles over procedure and the meaning of words. It rolled back primal fear not only in the students but the volunteer teachers—Stanley Zibulsky, the New Yorker petrified when he arrived at Vernon Dahmer’s farm in July, was among many hoping to stay on in Mississippi past the summer. Debate released crippled imaginations into soaring, unpredictable flight, as Freedom School students who newly measured the world by their notions also undertook to decorate COFO offices with original art. They carried Moses beyond shock or the revelry of a ragtime funeral. “It was the single time in my life that I have seen Bob the happiest,” said a fellow observer at the Freedom School convention. “He just ate it up.”

  33

  White House Etiquette

  IN WASHINGTON, President Johnson stirred his own whirlwinds behind two historic bills that converged in Congress that same Friday, August 7. Working the telephone mercilessly toward the critical votes, he spurred a harried operator to find targeted legislators: “I want to talk to him, honey, wherever he is…whether he’s on the floor, if he’s got a red tie on, or if he’s barefoot. And I also want Senator Smathers—get him even if he’s in a beer house.”

  To “resist further aggression,” and to assist South Vietnam “in defense of its freedom,” the Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorized the President to use “all necessary measures,” including military force. For Johnson, the nearly unanimous vote—416-0 in the House, 88-2 in the Senate—fixed a national claim for the United States as the aggrieved party in Southeast Asia, and also neutralized Vietnam as a presidential campaign issue by depriving Senator Goldwater of political ground to press for bolder attack. Johnson congratulated Rusk and McNamara for harnessing an instant wave of public enthusiasm, but he told them secretly that he “did not wish to escalate just because the public liked what happened….” Instead, he wanted to use the reprieve to seek methods of “maximum results and minimum danger” before weakness in South Vietnam presented another crisis. Already, while grandly inspecting the war “front” in a jeep under camouflage of ferns, General Nguyen Khanh had seized upon the American airstrikes as a pretext for imposing a state of siege to stifle his political opposition. He enjoyed little support among Vietnamese in or out of his army, warned Ambassador Taylor, who predicted that “Khanh has a 50/50 chance of lasting out the year.”

  In the second pivotal vote, final House passage of Johnson’s War on Poverty hinged on the fate of a political hostage. More than a score of powerful Southern Democrats were demanding the ouster of Adam Yarmolinsky, Sargent Shriver’s deputy director on the poverty task force. While they complained formally of Yarmolinsky’s “suspect” background among Russian-speaking New York intellectuals—his father had translated Tolstoy and Dostoevsky for the Modern Library—their real grievance traced to his service at the Pentagon, where, as special counsel to Secretary McNamara, Yarmolinsky had spearheaded orders putting segregated rental quarters off limits to military personnel. This made him a bellwether symbol of controversy, especially for politicians sensitive to partisan upheaval in the South. With Goldwater sentiment running high among traditional Democrats, stalwart House segregationists treated the poverty proposal as another civil rights bill—picturing integrated job training programs, newfangled Head Start classes, perhaps even federal grants to the NAACP, with “nothing to stop them,” cried the theatrical Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, “from establishing a nudist colony in your community.” Against almost unanimous Republican opposition in the House, Johnson had begged poverty votes from a losing position for two weeks, one by one, saying, “This is my blood. This is it.” He focused mostly on Southern Democrats. “We’ve bled ’em to death and we’ve wrung their arms,” he told union leader Walter Reuther, “and twisted ’em and bought ’em and everything else.” Needing 218 votes to win, he had reached late Wednesday night the “magic 200” level of promised votes, and was teetering near the brink on Friday when two unwelcome controversies intervened from the South. In the afternoon, working with Attorney General Kennedy, the President delivered a scripted phone message to Louisiana Governor John McKeithen—urging state forces to protect Monday’s first court-ordered integration in St. Helena Parish, saying “it is my duty to enforce those orders if they don’t.” Shortly after this ordeal, Johnson reacted sharply to news coverage of the previous day’s MFDP convention. “Joe Rauh was on television just raising hell…on the Freedom Party,” he complained to Bill Moyers. “Now that’s gonna ruin us if you do that…because you run all the border states out.” More immediately, Johnson knew that such issues only emboldened moderate Democrats—those looking for a safe way to support the poverty bill so dear to their President—to demand the head of Yarmolinsky as proof to their constituents that they could curtail interference in racial customs.

  Shriver squirmed through a showdown meeting in Speaker McCormack’s office, protesting that only President Johnson could hire and fire executive employees. “That isn’t going to satisfy those people,” McCormack replied. From a phone in the hallway, Shriver pleaded with Bill Moyers and President Johnson to spare him the awful choice, only to be told that he must take care of the matter himself. Shriver hedged miserably. He told the holdout Democrats that he would not positively recommend Yarmolinsky for a job, which they accepted as a guaranteed purge. Their swing votes established the War on Poverty on the night of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and Shriver returned from Capitol Hill to face Yarmolinsky. “Well, we’ve just thrown you to the wolves,” he said, “and this is the worst day in my life.”

  Johnson endured final torments when Minority Leader Halleck refused to dispense with the archaic requirement that the House vote on an “embossed” copy of the poverty bill, which meant a night’s delay. The President exploded with rage on learning that several Texas representatives “really had the gall” to say they would stay over in Washington for the Saturday vote only if the administration supplied government planes to fly them home afterward. Early the next morning, Secretary McNamara called with threats from a different quarter. Because CIA Director McCone had disclosed too much to
congressional leaders about the secret commando raids on North Vietnam, he warned, Johnson might face questions at his Saturday press conference on whether the United States had provoked the Gulf of Tonkin incident. “This is a very delicate subject,” McNamara told the President. He said he and McGeorge Bundy had prepared careful contingent replies, because, while Johnson could not admit that the raids took place, “neither should you get in a position of denying it.” The North Vietnamese already had requested international inspection of the island targets, said McNamara, “and it would be very unfortunate if they developed proof that you in effect have misstated the case.”

  The President survived the day on both fronts. His poverty bill survived, 226-184, and he laughed when Walter Jenkins reported that Halleck’s formality allowed some straddling members to record a vote each way. Johnson sailed through the press conference at the LBJ Ranch without challenge on the Gulf of Tonkin, but there were questions about the reported sacrifice of Yarmolinsky from the poverty task force. Johnson cut them off by tersely denying that Yarmolinsky had ever left the Pentagon: “No, your thoughts are wrong…. He never left.”

  A worried Joseph Califano, who in fact had replaced Yarmolinsky months earlier at the Department of Defense, privately asked Secretary McNamara how Johnson could hope to lie so brazenly in public. McNamara replied that Califano was missing the larger point that power is not for the squeamish, and that the greater good as defined by the President superseded all personal concerns. “None of us is important,” he told Califano. “Everyone’s expendable.”