Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Ironically, the most immediate choice in Atlanta was glamorous to all sides: the selection of ten SNCC guests for the Belafonte trip to Africa. Forman announced tentatively that John Lewis was going, along with Julian Bond and Ruby Doris Smith of SNCC headquarters in Atlanta, plus Bob and Dona Moses of the Mississippi project, Don Harris of Georgia, Prathia Hall of Alabama, and perhaps Forman himself. Moses objected to the privilege but was overruled. Marion Barry proposed that Matthew Jones be added as a representative of the Freedom Singers; Bill Hansen of the Arkansas project was included to integrate the delegation by race.

  When grumbles erupted against the choices, Forman explained that the idea was to choose a cross section of leadership. Some objected that list was weighted with sophisticates and French speakers suited to the language of Guinea, contradicting SNCC’s vehement protests in Atlantic City over the arbitrary exclusion of unlettered sharecroppers like Fannie Lou Hamer. They hooted down the excuse that Hamer lived too far in the backwoods to obtain her yellow fever shots and travel documents on short notice, whereupon she was hustled into an extra spot. Caretakers stepped forward to manage a host of deferred issues—a South-wide summer program for 1965, troubled projects, missing staff cars, business options to buy a building, the fall election and the MFDP, how to get a fellow staff member named Randolph Battle out of the Albany jail. Despite the misgivings of Moses and others about leaving SNCC on the blade of change, the delegation of eleven flew to Guinea by way of Senegal on September 11.

  Awed themselves by Mother Africa, her companions were fondly amused by Hamer’s wide-eyed exclamations over the miraculous sightings of black-skinned people in positions of authority: a pilot, customs clerk, protocol officer, bank teller, television correspondent. The delegation was scarcely in sight of Villa Silla, an elegant seacoast compound that had belonged to French governors before independence in 1958, when invitations came to a dinner at the presidential palace, and Hamer had just withdrawn to her cottage when President Sékou Touré’s car pulled up for an unannounced visit beforehand.

  Moses, Forman, and Julie Belafonte conversed in French while Harry Belafonte rushed off to summon Hamer, who shouted through the door that he must be joking. “I’m having a bath!” cried Hamer. “I’m definitely not ready to meet no president.” Rattled for once, she dressed in time to limp into the welcoming arms of Touré’s white African robes. She received his ritual kiss on each cheek, which amazed her more to see bestowed also upon men, and then broke happily into tears during conversation in another language. Imagine that, she told Belafonte. Having lived in Mississippi with no dream of meeting a president, then begged vainly to see one in Atlantic City, she was dumbstruck that this exotic head of state brought personal greetings before she could get out of the bathtub her first day in Africa.

  All through September, the American guests received banquets of fish around a huge table overlooking the African side of the Atlantic Ocean, with Belafonte presiding like a king. Forman’s executive side found the group unwieldy for political briefings—“I realized on this trip,” he wrote, “that three is the maximum number of people for a delegation that seeks to hold serious, intensive discussion”—but the others relaxed with fine wines and Scotch fetched by servants. Ruby Doris Smith alone consented to be braided in cornrows like Guinean women; Hamer refused the strange custom, being particular about her hair. On outings, they noticed grinding barefoot poverty as well as clothes and art forms of exuberant color, and one Guinean tempered their rhapsodies on ancestral brotherhood with a boastful claim that his great-grandfather “sold about three million of you.” Transformed, yet reminded how American they remained, all but two went home early because of telephoned alarms of impending rupture within SNCC.

  Don Harris, who had relatives working for an American oil company in Ghana, stayed on another ten weeks to escort John Lewis on a SNCC-style tour, alternating between red-carpet press conferences and pallets on floors. Arriving in Lusaka “with 1 pound ($2.81) between us,” they witnessed the tumultuous independence ceremony of the new Zambia (“a woman broke from the stands, ran onto the field, and embraced Dr. Kaunda’s knees…”), then managed from there to sample not only Ethiopia for the thirty-second annual coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie but also scattered hideouts of South African guerrillas or starry-eyed students—“debating the practicality of various kinds of daggers, learning where the best women on the continent were, and joking about the kind of white man that angered us most….” They trailed in every country the “fantastic impressions” left by Malcolm X over the past four months, and bumped into the Muslim exile himself at the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. Malcolm entranced them for nearly two days in a friendly fireworks of ideas and his electrifying sense of danger. “Always sit with your back against the wall,” he advised, “so you can look out and see who is watching you.” By way of Cairo and Paris, where Lewis visited the cabaret of Adam Clayton Powell’s ex-wife, jazz pianist Hazel Scott, they reached Atlanta in November with a plan to create an international division within SNCC.

  ON SEPTEMBER 11, when the Belafonte group had embarked for Africa, Martin Luther King departed for Germany shortly after a press conference at Boston University on the deposit of his personal papers. He offered only hints of disappointment over the ambivalence of his mentor Benjamin Mays at Morehouse, explaining that he had favored Boston because his postgraduate alma mater was “desirous enough of having these papers to give them the kind of attention that I think they will need….” News-hungry Boston reporters quickly baffled King by asking to hear the fabled recordings of his phone conversations with the Kennedy brothers. These questions were based on the erroneous inference that King—not the Kennedys—had controlled the eavesdropping vaguely suggested in news accounts of the Freedom Rides and the Meredith crisis at Ole Miss, and King could only say he recalled no such Kennedy intercepts in his collection. “Now there are certainly letters,” he added, to a noticeable deflation of interest. The reporters asked repeatedly about the extent of the white backlash, Communist or Black Muslim influence in riots, and whether King favored a “change of tactics on the part of the Negro perhaps to be less aggressive.” His replies were diplomatic—“Well, I don’t think we can afford to be less aggressive…. Now it may be necessary to change tactics here and there…. I still feel that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people…”—but King did startle those who wondered why “Southern Negroes were actually brought to Boston because of allegations about our school system.” He predicted expansion of the nonviolent movement because “racial injustice does exist in the North in a serious way.”

  With Ralph Abernathy, King flew to a German cultural festival at the invitation of West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt. On Sunday, September 13, again having mislaid his passport, he passed through the Berlin Wall on celebrity recognition to preach at Marienkirche in Communist East Berlin. From this austere city, from which Adolf Hitler had ruled Nazi Germany less than twenty years before, he sketched a biblical analogy about Israel’s quest. Americans were climbing from “Egypt” at long last through the “wilderness” of segregation, King said—“For the first time we stand on the mountain”—and he surveyed historic choice from an imaginary perch. “As we look back into the wilderness, we see our brethren who have borne the burdens of slavery and segregation much too long,” he said. “Many have not had the opportunity to get an education…. Many are hungry and physically undernourished…. Many bear on their souls the scars of bitterness and hatred, seared there by the crowded slum conditions, police brutality, and the exploitation they experienced on the rural southern plantations. Still others lack self-confidence and courage to compete in this new land, and they wallow in drunkenness and despair.”

  Looking ahead, King pictured intimidations in the “promised land” of interracial freedom, just as biblical spies once told Moses they felt “like grasshoppers” among the natives of Canaan. “We see the giants,” he said. “We see massive urban societies, dominat
ed by well-entrenched political machines that see new voters as a threat to their power. We see automation…slum landlords…and poverty far worse than the wilderness conditions we have just left behind.” Then, quoting to the East German audience the movement hymn “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” he preached. “We will learn to confront these demons just as we have those in the past,” he concluded, “and we shall overcome.”

  King stayed on to receive an honorary degree from the Theological Seminary of Berlin, unaware of the fury stirred within the FBI over his pending request to visit the Pope in Rome. “It would be shocking indeed for such an unscrupulous character as King to receive an audience with the Pope,” wrote an intelligence officer, warned two weeks earlier by the wiretaps on King’s telephones. FBI officials remixed the sabotage formula “we previously used in preventing King’s receiving an honorary degree from Marquette University”—and piped it this time into the Vatican. At Hoover’s instruction, Assistant Director John Malone visited Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York with the FBI’s dossier on “the unsavory nature of King’s character, both from a subversive and moral standpoint,” warning that the slightest sign of papal favor might even boost King toward a Nobel Prize.

  Malone followed two orders: to “stress of course the confidential nature of our briefing so that the Bureau would not be drawn into the picture,” and to make sure Spellman reached the Vatican directly, so that if he did not, the Bureau could use “other channels.” Afterward, reporting success, Malone notified headquarters that “the Cardinal was most pleased and gratified that the Director thought enough of him to take him into his confidence and to rely upon him to handle such a delicate matter.” Not only did Spellman telephone the Pontiff’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Cicognani, but he assured Malone that he would be in Rome personally to “further insure that the Pope is not placed in an embarrassing position through any contact with King.”

  Spellman did proceed to Rome among two thousand bishops who gathered for the third plenary session of the Vatican Council, and by coincidence, Rabbi Abraham Heschel slipped into Rome also to seek the Pope’s ear on a mission as secret as Malone’s but of mirror purpose, parallel to King’s, to rally ecumenical hope against divisions of faith and tribe. Since the second-year conclave had recessed the previous November, putting off a proposed statement of fraternal reconciliation with Judaism, traditional elements within the Church had “drastically watered down” Augustin Cardinal Bea’s historic text, according to information leaked to the New York Times. Behind closed doors, by scriptural exegesis and political maneuver, they first omitted the retraction of pre-Holocaust Church teachings that Jews were accursed as a “deicide people,” and by September they inserted a “conversion clause” that three times expressed “with immovable faith” an expected “reunion of the Jewish people with the Church….”

  Heschel reacted to the rumored alterations with vivid dismay: “I am ready to go to Auschwitz any time, if faced with the alternative of conversion or death.” Simultaneously, he upheld the lasting promise of the Vatican Council designed by the late Pope John XXIII: “We ardently pray that this great blessing may not vanish.” Only with trepidation did Heschel seek to lobby Pope Paul VI on Church doctrine, as few ranking Catholics and practically no Protestants ever did. For an Orthodox Jew the idea invited backfire on all sides—with conspiracists charging already that Zionist moles were bribing the Vatican for pardon in the death of Jesus, and Jewish leaders* of all three branches sealing themselves off from “Christian concerns.” Against entreaties that he not go, Heschel arranged a small measure of protection from Rabbi Louis Finkelstein of his seminary, then ventured alone on September 14 to plead face-to-face with Pope Paul VI, who ceremoniously scratched what he said was the conversion clause from the parchment before him.

  The third plenary session resumed titanic struggle “mostly with words,” a council participant recorded, “nevertheless, it was a war with all its wickedness.” Bishops from Muslim countries predicted pogroms against their Christian minorities if the Church moderated traditional antipathy toward Jews. Scandal sheets circulated in Rome. When Cardinal Cicognani stunned the council by announcing—ostensibly for the Pope—that the draft was withdrawn again from consideration, Bea’s European allies fought back with a heart-wrenching letter of appeal to Paul VI, beginning “Magno cum dolore” [With great sorrow], and eventually substituted for the conversion clause a balanced prayer that “all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and ‘serve Him shoulder to shoulder.’” While falling short of final passage, Bea’s signal revision of Church teaching on Judaism survived on the voting schedule for the concluding plenary in 1965. Anti-reform headlines bitterly lamented its escape from the brink of extinction: “Who Crucified Christ? The Vatican in the Year 1964.”

  Rabbi Heschel had hastened back to New York in time for Yom Kippur observance through sundown of September 16, the same day the Atlanta SCLC office announced that Pope Paul would receive Martin Luther King before King left Europe. The news struck hard at FBI headquarters, where supervisors ordered an emergency review “to determine if there possibly could have been a slip-up.” Aides to Cardinal Spellman retransmitted the FBI’s warning to the aged Cicognani, whose career in the Vatican labyrinth matched Hoover’s longevity at the FBI, but Paul VI greeted King in the library of the Apostolic Palace for twenty-five minutes on Friday evening, September 18, during the Vatican Council deliberations. King happily emerged to brush aside press suggestions that his overwhelmingly Protestant followers back home might disapprove of his contact with a pope. He described the Pontiff as well informed on the American civil rights movement and optimistic about peaceful compliance with the new law. Surely it meant “new days ahead,” King joked, when a pope met “a fellow with the name of Martin Luther.” Reports of the harmonious occasion moved Hoover to write his galled reaction to a news clip in Washington: “I am amazed that the Pope gave an audience to such a degenerate.”

  EXTRALEGAL SURVEILLANCE against King became so securely routine that Bureau supervisors took license with the required internal paperwork. To bug the eighth annual SCLC convention at the end of September, they first cited a need to monitor the subversive influence of Harry Wachtel, on what historian David Garrow later called “a new and transparently disingenuous concern” about two unverified informant reports that Wachtel and his wife had been leftists in the 1940s. Wachtel offered convenient symmetry as the substitute Stanley Levison: in reality, as King’s New York adviser, and on paper, as the all-purpose justification for FBI surveillance. When Wachtel dropped plans to attend the convention, clerks rushed to fill the gap with an old comment in the files that King’s father might be a Communist. Atlanta agents who knew Daddy King winced at using such casual nonsense, which came from an antagonistic Bureau source, but it sufficed as bureaucratic cover for the bug order.

  King returned from Rome by way of stops in Spain and England, jotting down scores of staff reminders and “executive orders” for the upcoming convention of some five hundred SCLC delegates. C. T. Vivian was to notify Aaron Henry that he would receive the Rosa Parks Award, make sure Parks attended as an honored guest, and “get program printed.” Andrew Young was to “send letter in my name” reminding all SCLC board members to bring the expected contribution of $50 as the price of their often pontifical remarks. King himself issued the usual crackdown restrictions against runaway travel expenses and staff telephone calls, saying costs had swelled even beyond the year’s receipts of $626,000. He departed in haste from a Research Committee meeting in New York, leaving behind a suit jacket in his room at the Ritz Hotel, preached for Fred Shuttlesworth in Cincinnati, begged off one engagement with a plea of exhaustion, and on September 28 arrived for his convention in Savannah, Georgia. King checked into one of fifty rooms reserved at the Manger Hotel, where, only a year earlier, Hosea Williams had recruited bellboy Willie Bolden to full-time movement work during demonstrations against the city’s rigid color line.

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nbsp; While participants celebrated their generally cordial reception through Savannah’s debut in mass integration, FBI cables praised the “extremely cooperative and reliable” hotel management for confidential favors, including the assignment of King to Room 902, directly beneath the rented monitoring station from which Bureau technicians had just dropped three bugging devices in the walls. Neither these intercepts nor the well-placed physical surveillance agents yielded any derogatory information on King through the week-long convention, and the only positive moment for the Bureau was a security relief that a segregationist bomb threat targeted not the Manger Hotel but an SCLC banquet being addressed by King and Jackie Robinson at the nearby DeSoto, sparing the microphone clerks in Room 1002 from being flushed out during bomb search evacuation.

  Closer to convention business, Chauncey Eskridge established a trust agreement for the new Southern Christian Leadership Foundation, which created essentially a Chicago-based alternative to New York’s nearly defunct Gandhi Society in the competition among King’s lawyers to obtain a permanent tax exemption for charitable fund-raising. Also, lionizers of Wyatt Walker joked that it took King no fewer than four promoted assistants to replace him: James Bevel, Andrew Young, Randolph Blackwell, and Hosea Williams. Daddy King, on hearing an oral report to the SCLC board that his son might be a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, jumped up to propose that the remarks be printed for public distribution.

  To five hundred delegates on October 1, King explored what he called “profound and revolutionary changes” since SCLC’s shell-shocked 1963 convention in the wake of the Birmingham church bombing. He tried to describe a trembling center, from which legal segregation was being vanquished and new meanings of freedom were spilling abroad. His formal address reprised sweeping Exodus themes: “It is true that, by and large, we have left the dusty soils of Egypt….” Pairing Jeffersonian foundations with prophetic ones, as usual, he reached for high-flown images of the American Revolution: “We will have our Valley Forges and summer soldiers, and even Benedict Arnolds….”