Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  IN TALLAHASSEE, the nine clergy celebrated their release with an integrated breakfast Friday morning at the airport cafe where they had been arrested as Freedom Riders. (“Service—3 Years Later,” a newsphoto caption noted wryly.) Groggy and light-headed from fasting since Monday while lawyers scrambled to free them on bond, the former prisoners were immensely relieved to learn that jail rumors of outright war in Asia were exaggerated. They absorbed the headlines radiating from their lost week—Tonkin Gulf, Mississippi, War on Poverty—and shared what details they could glean on their own. Rev. Robert Stone learned that a judge in Hattiesburg was just then setting free with suspended sentences the two admitted pipe-beaters of Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld of Cleveland—one of the religious pickets Stone had been recruiting weekly since the original Hattiesburg Freedom Day in January—and that Lelyveld would deliver the principal eulogy for Andrew Goodman on Sunday in New York. Israel Dresner of New Jersey—one of the rabbis who had answered Martin Luther King’s jail summons to St. Augustine in June—missed word that King had returned there, just across Florida, because King had drawn less notice than the jailing of the Tallahassee prisoners themselves.

  King floundered in backwater behind two breaking waves. He praised Judge Bryan Simpson for ordering seventeen segregated or resegregated public businesses to comply with the civil rights law, saying, “Now the citizens of St. Augustine have an opportunity to live together in peace and harmony.” Hours later, however, the St. Johns County grand jury undercut Simpson by releasing a new presentment that rebuked King and the federal government alike as outsiders. In a reluctant concession to the St. Augustine movement, the grand jury established a biracial commission that never met because its white members promptly resigned. King reverted to critical lament, telling another audience that the presentment was “out of line with the mood of the age,” but he saw no timely role for his protest methods now that rival government powers were in conflict over racial standards. Judge Simpson already was displacing him as a focus of resentment and death threats. (St. Augustine mayor Joseph Shelley, who publicly accused Simpson of being “bought and paid for by Lyndon Johnson,” joined civic leaders from Trinity Episcopal church in a protracted but fruitless campaign to have the judge impeached as a federal tyrant.) Along with Jackie Robinson and Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, King offered encouragements to the local movement, which in turn supported Judge Simpson through the painful aftermath of the summer’s clashes at the Slave Market. Robert Hayling, who lost his dental business to the point of bankruptcy, struggled with bouts of depression and letdown, feeling abandoned by King. “On the surface, conditions have quieted down considerably,” he wrote in a newsletter with Henry Twine, “but a closer look reveals the same old trouble and discord seething underneath.”

  Swamped also by larger news, King made phone calls from St. Augustine about Johnson and the primeval drama in Mississippi. Both these tides—one becoming a colossal popular force in the White House, the other awakening millions of Americans to the meaning of the civil rights movement—were heading toward the Democratic convention in Atlantic City. Bayard Rustin reminded King that he foresaw a “terrific squabble” there between friendly forces, with Johnson and Mississippi’s Freedom Democrats each expecting King to control the other. King told Rustin he was thinking of an extreme middle course: a public fast through the convention, honoring his commitment to the Mississippi movement without undue public disruption.

  From St. Augustine, King called his lawyer Clarence Jones about drafting an article for him to temper a strain of “thinking now prevalent” in the movement: that by ratcheting up militancy in nonviolent protest, “you can somehow capture political power.” He returned to Atlanta long enough to ransack home and office for a lost passport, growing desperate enough to ask Harold DeWolf to search for it through the truckload of personal papers just shipped in boxes to Boston University. He asked for a meeting with President Johnson by telegram, tended church business on the side—arranging a guest pulpit appearance for Ralph Abernathy—then rushed to New York in time for newsmaking services on Sunday, August 9. To overflow crowds that backed up into the streets outside the separate funerals of Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, loudspeakers carried the voices of David Dennis, James Farmer, Arthur Lelyveld, and John Lewis.

  From his pulpit at Abyssinian Baptist, Adam Clayton Powell scolded King by name as an interloper during the recent riots—“…no leader outside of Harlem should come into this town and tell us what to do…”—while King himself reprised one of his standard sermons, “A Knock at Midnight,” a few blocks away at Riverside Church: “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.” At the “midnight” of personal or national crisis, King preached, the prophetic voice must raise hope of a just morning, as slaves once sang, “I’m so glad that trouble don’t last always.”

  After a speech on Monday at Amherst College in Massachusetts, King returned for long strategy meetings with his New York Research Committee. The imposing site—usually the library of Wachtel’s Madison Avenue law firm—suggested that King’s public business had outgrown the old days when the now-banished Stanley Levison had supplied most of King’s worldly advice from his head. Members debated far-ranging choices before King as a nonviolent leader of religious credentials—approving with reservations a proposed Playboy interview with King,* to be published among photographs of nude models, while painfully reprimanding one of their own number, Clarence Jones, for telling a reporter that King might cooperate one day with Malcolm X. In an atmosphere of shifting internal politics for King’s favor, the latter subject opened blistering contentions about loyalty and free expression, but the overriding issue of the time was the political crisis ahead in Atlantic City. King told the Research Committee on Tuesday of his request for a personal audience with President Johnson.

  Bayard Rustin undertook to run political interference at the White House. Getting through to a secretary in the office of Johnson aide Jack Valenti, he vouched for himself with details behind the telegram. “Mr. Rustin told me very confidentially that Dr. King’s family needs him,” the secretary recorded, “and they want to know what he is going to be doing.” Her memo circulated that night to Walter Jenkins among other top assistants, and Lee White called Rustin the next day to scout King’s purpose. When King himself later called White from the New York World’s Fair, where he was keeping a promise to spend a rare day with Coretta and their children, White told him that secrecy would be essential to any White House talks on the sensitive subject of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats. King agreed, but White recommended that Johnson duck him anyway. “If it looks like a secret meeting and is discovered, there are all sorts of implications that might be drawn,” he warned the President. “If he comes through the front door, it is simply an unnecessary affront to a large number of people at this particular time.”

  The awkward minuet continued through the week, with Rustin presenting himself as friend to each side. He told White that he detected “a sense of distress” in King, and perhaps in King’s other advisers, over an impression that Johnson did not want to offend white voters by meeting with King. When White countered that Johnson was eager to see King under proper conditions, Rustin tried to present King as a reasonable professional with constituent worries of his own, namely, that civil rights supporters would bridle at the White House “moratorium” on demonstrations unless assured that their issues were being addressed. Somewhere in Rustin’s fraternal incantation, however, White identified a nefarious intent: “…King has made it so crystal clear that what he really wants is the publicity of meeting with you,” he wrote the President. On instructions from Johnson, White put King off with polite schedule regrets.

  The President worked feverishly in advance to avoid a convention debate over the MFDP. He rejected as ludicrous the idea of seating both delegations. “We’d have more damn wars than you ever saw,” he told UAW president Walter Reuther. �
�Who’s gonna haul the [state] banner in demonstrations?” He told Senator Humphrey that “if we mess with the group of Negroes…we will lose fifteen states without even campaigning.” He instructed his political friend James Rowe to identify and target every MFDP supporter on the convention’s Credentials Committee. Saying he did not want to be “panicky or desperate,” he told Roy Wilkins that “the cause you fought for all your life is likely to be reversed and go right down the drain if you don’t…find some possible solution.” Wilkins apologized for the pressures, saying the NAACP was “in the Mississippi project just by being almost on a letterhead, you might say.” The President understood that political survival in the NAACP required Wilkins to support the MFDP, and shared Wilkins’s self-serving slurs against King as a security risk.* He disparaged the MFDP delegation as the artificial creation of “questionable people that met here in a Washington hotel,” and said the FBI reports on them were “shocking.” On the other hand, the President told Reuther, the convention would prefer the MFDP to the all-white Mississippi delegation in a roll call vote, and if such an openly destructive choice could not be avoided, “I ain’t much good as your leader.”

  The President confessed to Reuther some guilt about his facade of high government duty. “The country is going to hell while I’m talking about the Freedom Party in Mississippi,” he said. Lee White continued to stall the appointment request by Martin Luther King. “I did not detect any anger or annoyance or other sign of trouble in his voice,” he reported. “But I also did not detect any regret or apology for having said he would call and then failing to do so.” When King, having located his wayward passport, left on Friday, August 14, for a speaking tour in Holland and West Germany, White expressed hope that a long trip might solve the problem by delay. “He won’t be gone through the convention,” Johnson sourly predicted. “He’ll be back here on your doorstep.”

  THAT FRIDAY MORNING, after the final session of summer classes, volunteer teacher Sandra Adickes gave in to six students who clamored to act upon what they had learned at her Priest Creek Freedom School. She escorted five girls and eleven-year-old Curtis Ducksworth to the downtown Hattiesburg Library, where group leader Jamilla Stokes explained their wish to apply for children’s library cards. Eyes rolled in dismay, and a distraught supervisor whispered urgently that such a thoughtless request could backfire against readers throughout the city. Sure enough, on the hasty instruction of Mayor Claude Pittman, Police Chief Hugh Herring arrived twenty minutes later to close the library for an unscheduled inventory, then joined a gathering crowd that trailed Adickes and her resolute charges down Main Street to a hushed standoff over the integration barrier at the S. H. Kress & Co. lunchroom—with the manager claiming to fear imminent mob action by nearly a hundred frowning patrons. A waitress unhappily notified the Freedom School table of management’s improvised fallback policy, saying, “We have to serve the colored, but we are not going to serve the whites who come in with them.” When the students chose to leave rather than eat without their teacher, police herded the group into an alley and nipped any chance of another stop on the Freedom School excursion by arresting Adickes for vagrancy. The criminal charge did not last long, but the Kress Company of New York and Hattiesburg officials would defend themselves through civil litigation all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court* six years later on complex twists pertaining to the status of “a Caucasian in the company of Negroes,” arguing successfully that they did nothing to mistreat Adickes under federal law."

  Hours after the Adickes arrest, two of the world’s premier entertainers stepped from a small charter plane on a dark airstrip near Greenwood. Harry Belafonte, who clutched a black satchel, had recruited Sidney Poitier for the mission with banter—saying, “They might think twice about killing two big niggers”—but levity fell away at the sight of their Mississippi reception. Night bugs swirled around an outdoor light bulb dangling over a latched gate and a dirt road that led outward through wooded fields. SNCC leader James Forman drew aside several staff members to talk logistics over walkie-talkies, leaving the two arrivals with lead driver Willie Blue and two waiting cars that had been sanded for night travel—every inch of chrome or paint finish stripped to military dullness. Young Blue wore a big straw hat and a cast on an arm that he allowed had been broken in jail. When the convoy moved out through the gate, Belafonte expressed relief at a signal of headlights shining from a distant line of cars. “That’s the Klan,” Forman corrected him, and silence gripped the passengers through a swerving chase over back roads. Only one of the pursuing vehicles got closer than a threatening pass, and each time Willie Blue managed to interpose the SNCC escort car to absorb the ramming blow. The movie stars retained the image of a heavy piece of lumber strapped to the attacker’s front bumper.

  They escaped at a trot into jubilee bedlam at the Elks Hall, where Idella Craft achieved local fame by lowering herself from the balcony to drape her arms around Belafonte’s neck. Bob Zellner, one of the few white SNCC veterans, led the freedom songs, and Bob Moses delivered the welcome to a crowd that gasped with amazement, unfazed for once by the massed headlight flashes outside or the drone of the Klan leaflet drops overhead. Not even Martin Luther King had turned out Greenwood’s Negro schoolteachers in any number, but the veneer of show business rendered vulnerable prestige jobs safe or madly unimportant. Some had journeyed far to see the film Lilies of the Field, and everyone had seen or knew about the Academy Awards show on television that spring when Poitier broke the color line for Best Actor. “I am thirty-seven years old,” Poitier told the Greenwood crowd. “I have been a lonely man all my life…because I have not found love, but this room is overflowing with it.”

  Belafonte sang his signature song, “Banana Boat (Day-O),” with its sing-along choruses known to everyone, including the Klansmen posted outdoors. After a short speech about years of private dedication to the movement, he held up the black satchel to climactic cheers. Everyone knew there was money inside—Forman talked of “manna” gathered by Belafonte on emergency request, and Moses of a saving lifeline for the summer project—but it was well understood that the details were best left unsaid. Privately, Belafonte told Forman he had raised $10,000 beyond the $60,000 cash in the satchel, and that the extra money was reserved to finance a post-summer getaway trip as his own prescribed therapy for the cumulative “battle fatigue” of movement leaders.

  Gunshots cracked the windshield of a staff car parked outside COFO headquarters later that night. Inside, Poitier and Belafonte overheard two-way radio dispatches about a volunteer being followed in Tallahatchie County. They were spared background grumbling about their special beds and all-night sentries (COFO staff workers pointedly reminded Forman that he had criticized Martin Luther King for accepting celebrity treatment in Greenwood), but neither visitor slept much. Poitier did calisthentics on the floor.

  Saturday night, in the afterglow of the Belafonte mission, a farewell party for departing volunteers offered free tunafish salad until a cracking noise emptied Lula’s Restaurant into a steady rainstorm. Shouts led just outside to a familiar parked car with a freshly shattered driver’s side window, and Silas McGhee tumbled toward the pavement when someone opened the door. With Bob Zellner and others ripping off their shirts to bandage a gunshot wound below his left temple, a COFO caravan transported McGhee—still conscious—to the Leflore County Hospital. Segregationists arrived to resume the perimeter blockade from the theater incident three weeks earlier. When Zellner grabbed a gurney and wheeled McGhee past the emergency room standoff over segregation, fearful hospital staff tried to block him for failure to wear a shirt. When a nurse tried to administer a sedative during the paralysis of doctors and administrators, McGhee himself reared up and refused any shots until a Negro doctor arrived. A Negro doctor finally arranged ambulance transport to Jackson for a midnight operation to remove a bullet that had broken through McGhee’s upper jawbone on a slightly downward path—he had been leaning against the window, dozing through the rain on volu
nteer taxi duty—to lodge behind his nose near the throat. Sunday morning, having relieved breathing by tracheostomy, the medical team expressed confidence that McGhee would survive.

  The shooting put the Greenwood movement into a spasm of firsts—first daytime mass meeting, first attempted youth march against riot police, first stampede of newcomers armed with revolvers to guard Lula’s and many rumored follow-up targets. Volunteer Sally Belfrage nervously ducked home to hide one confiscated pistol under her bed, only to behold a shiny weapon out handy on the sink near the kitchen table where her host family was busily staying calm together, shelling peas. Both Silas McGhee’s brothers were in jail by Sunday night, but Moses, Forman, Stokely Carmichael, and other leaders withdrew from Greenwood and parallel crises elsewhere: a beating in Laurel, a bombing in Natchez, a Saturday night raid in McComb.

  Moses balanced his footing on charred brick ruins to address a memorial service under blue sky at Mount Zion Baptist in Neshoba County—exactly two months after the June 16 burning—then drove to a three-day COFO summit meeting at Tougaloo College. With Belafonte’s cash delivery, they could extend a presence beyond the summer to reassure new followers, many of whom knew nothing of the original timetable and expressed fear that the movement was shutting down in the face of violence. The COFO leaders wrestled with a host of consequent decisions such as which skeletal projects to keep, where to find volunteers during the school year, how to balance Freedom Schools with regular Mississippi classes, what levels of violence to anticipate, and whether they could muster enough support for training and security. They also resolved to send the entire MFDP delegation to Atlantic City immediately—in advance of the next week’s Democratic convention—to buttress their claim to seats representing Mississippi.

  Returning to New York from Europe, Martin Luther King maneuvered toward Atlantic City on a tandem course. On Monday, Rustin renewed by telegram King’s urgent request to meet with President Johnson. On Tuesday, Lee White said the meeting was set for Wednesday morning and tried to breeze over a few White House stipulations: first, that King’s audience would be “broadened” to include other civil rights leaders such as Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph, and also that the session was to be entirely off the record. King’s second, Bayard Rustin, tried to make sure that he would be among those invited, saying he could help the White House prevent trouble from the boisterous young people of Mississippi. When denied an invitation, Rustin reported to King that President Johnson was up to something fishy. King, for his part, perceived signs reminiscent of a White House move in June of 1963, when President Kennedy had sandwiched a crowd around him as a means of controlling the political agenda.