Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  So strong was word-of-mouth excitement that when a scheduling mix-up pulled the motorcade briefly to curbside in a Negro area of Cleveland, the enterprising principal of Addison Junior High School rushed out to knock on the window and ask King to address her students. Over heated staff objections about the folly of wasting precious time on nonvoters, King followed the principal inside to stand at a hallway corner as students and teachers spilled from stairwells and classrooms to sit packed along both corridors. There he delivered a spontaneous, commencement-style homily. “All of us have the privilege of living in one of the most significant periods of human history,” King said. “You’re at the age now where you will have to make some great decisions…and I want to say particularly to the Negro students here that doors of opportunity are opening now that were not opened to your mothers and fathers. The great challenge facing you is to be ready to enter those doors.” He encouraged students to look beyond their skills for worthy goals in the larger society, and recalled how children had come out of jails in Birmingham to canvass their elders with such effect that the registration of adult Negro voters doubled in three months. “The students did this,” said King. “This is what you can do.”

  He told the Addison students that they would be called upon to give their own answers to the hardest questions that philosophers had asked “over and over again” on the nature of evil and the highest good. “I think I have the answer, my friends,” said King. “The highest good is love, and he who loves has somehow discovered the meaning of life and the reality.…Start now keeping love at the center of your life, and start now keeping nonviolence…. I believe firmly that America will be a better nation. I believe firmly that Negroes and white people will be able to live together as brothers…. And so I ask you to work hard, study hard, to make the right decision and join us in the movement for freedom.”

  By the time King reached Los Angeles a week before the election,tour commitments piled up beyond endurance and quarrels festered over the disposition of the Nobel Prize money. Abernathy’s wife, Juanita, supported Coretta King’s compromise position—that $20,000 of the windfall be set aside toward the education of the King children—if only as an opening wedge for the argument that half the money belonged to the Abernathys anyway, as equal movement partners since Montgomery. Bickering so distracted King that he dropped out of several campaign stops, pleading exhaustion. At Cal State, Los Angeles, facing an impatient crowd, officials announced, “Dr. King can’t come today, but here is Jack Pratt.” The embarrassed church lawyer from the stand-in advance team introduced Ralph Abernathy with glowing praise, but the crowd’s disappointment yielded only slight applause for his salty speech that likened Goldwater to prison fare of bread and water. Abernathy ignored whispers and notes that it was illegal to make partisan remarks on a public campus, then stalked from the rostrum.

  King wrote notes to himself on the margins of speech outlines: “Proposition 14 is sinful….” He implored California voters to reject the constitutional ballot initiative that would repeal not only a new statewide fair housing law (the 1963 Rumford Act) but all local ordinances limiting “the right of any person…to decline to sell, lease, or rent [real estate] property to such persons as he, in his absolute discretion, chooses.” All through 1964, against prevailing support for the civil rights bill, the campaign for Proposition 14 had gained spreading recognition as a worrisome countertrend. “This is a strange year in which to push for even greater segregation,” declared a perplexed New York Times editorial.

  King’s tour reached Los Angeles on the same day Ronald Reagan emerged as the Goldwater campaign’s surrogate spokesman. Goldwater, although desperate for something to jolt the adverse election odds, had repudiated just before it was broadcast his own political documentary Choice, calling it “a racist film” and a “dirty movie” that blended scenes of drunken youth and violence with racial demonstrations. In a hurry to find a substitute for the slotted half hour on national television, some of his managers wanted to repeat Goldwater’s conversation with former President Eisenhower, and others pushed to air the popular stump speech of the movie actor who was heading California Citizens for Goldwater. The candidate bridled at the tacit concession, and he would always dissemble jealously about how and why Reagan came to represent him at his defining hour in history, but Reagan did fill in for Goldwater on October 27. In his nationwide NBC speech, which Time called “the one bright spot in a dismal campaign,” Reagan finessed the drawbacks of the Choice documentary by omitting direct commentary on race. Instead, he evoked stirring themes of liberty embattled (“Should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery rather than dare the wilderness?…You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.”), and defined freedom’s enemy almost interchangeably as totalitarian foreign enemies and the American government itself. “A perversion has taken place,” he said. “Our natural unalienable rights are now presumed to be a dispensation of government.” Reagan denounced the welfare state, foreign appeasement, and “the schemes of do-gooders” as a creeping threat, saying, “We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars.” Some commentators called his debut the best political oratory since William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896. Hundreds of local committees rushed to broadcast the film, and the Goldwater campaign bought a repeat national telecast for Saturday night, October 31.

  The King tour rolled back through Chicago and Detroit to Baltimore’s Faith Baptist Church, where he focused on the nominee’s pinched definition of the public space among citizens. “Brother Goldwater has presented me with such a dilemma,” he said. “Never before has a presidential candidate taken a stand against the prophetic insights of the ages.” From the back of a truck, with Bayard Rustin as sideman on the bullhorn, he urged waving admirers on the streets to vote. Mayor Theodore McKeldin built unusual press interest by joining King’s overflow stop at the Masonic temple on Eutaw Street. “My father followed Theodore Roosevelt into the Republican Party,” McKeldin announced, “but his son will leave that party for once at this time.” Like a candidate himself, King escaped the ensuing bedlam into an open-air motorcade that pushed through jostling, festive crowds dotted with Negro children in Halloween costumes. Bystanders leaned over the car and stretched to clasp his hand.

  The next day, November 1, King reached home in Atlanta just ahead of the DNC’s Louis Martin, who brought news of a campaign crisis: the sudden appearance in several cities of at least 1.4 million leaflets advocating a write-in vote for Martin Luther King as president. There were published reports (leading to one criminal indictment) that Goldwater officials were buying and distributing the material. Martin had no trouble persuading King to take action; on his way back to the Atlanta airport, Martin heard radio reports that King already had scheduled an emergency press conference at which he disavowed the leaflets and warned of a “venomous” plot to induce Negroes to waste their votes.

  In New York, an “emergency committee” of religious leaders—among them Paul Tillich, the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton, Abraham Heschel, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Gardner Taylor—issued an appeal against scandalmongering in the Walter Jenkins case, chiding those who would “cater to the prurient curiosity” about personal morals in order to “obscure fateful moral issues related to public life.”

  President Johnson defended the clergy from Goldwater’s charges of partisan meddling, in the midst of free-swinging oratory that propelled his campaign home to Texas. As a young boy, he told a final crowd on the Capitol steps in Austin, “I first learned that government is not an enemy of the people. It is the people.” And as a young New Dealer in the Depression, he recalled, “I learned that poverty and ignorance are the only basic weaknesses of a free society, and that both of them are only bad habits.” Secluded with Lady Bird and half a dozen friends, Johnson reacted to the first election returns of November 3 with a single outburst: “God, I hate for it to be over, because the hell starts then.” Befo
re dawn—with a landslide victory assured but helicopters grounded by storm winds and roads closed by floods on the Pedernales River—he hazarded the short jet flight to his ranch.

  Johnson overwhelmed Goldwater by nearly sixteen million votes and a popular majority unmatched in history,* with Goldwater carrying only five Deep South states and his home state of Arizona (by half a percentage point). The Democrats also picked up two Senate seats, including one in New York for Robert Kennedy, and forty-eight House seats in previously Republican districts. Support for civil rights was the keenest predictor of outcome: no representative who had voted for the 1964 bill was defeated from either party, while fully half the Northern members who had opposed the bill met rejection at the polls. Likewise, much to Johnson’s satisfaction, anti-civil-rights Republicans fell heavily in Texas—losing the only two Republican House seats in a delegation of twenty-three, along with the challenge of George Bush to incumbent senator Ralph Yarborough.

  The Republican minority fractured internally. Moderates blamed Goldwater for abandoning the Party of Lincoln, and were blamed in turn for abandoning the party nominee. Those who would survive, like Nixon, were left to pick a course through the ruins.

  Based on Johnson’s stunning 96 percent Negro majority, strategists from all quarters projected the presumptive Negro Democrat—an inversion of history—as a new fact of politics. “To the Negro,” said one, “Goldwater shot Lincoln in the head as surely as John Wilkes Booth.” Against a solid racial minority that accounted for Johnson’s large victory margins in Virginia and elsewhere, analysts detected no countervailing shift from the Democratic base. “White Backlash Doesn’t Develop,” announced the Times. “Backlash proved only a flick,” agreed historian Eric Goldman, and the Washington Post projected Southern defections to Goldwater as a “one-shot affair” like the 1948 Dixiecrat revolt, notwithstanding the election of the first ten House Republicans since Reconstruction in four Goldwater states: Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama.

  A warning sign was buried beneath election reviews. California voters embraced both Johnson and a constitutional right to segregated neighborhoods, as promoted by Ronald Reagan and the real estate industry. Proposition 14 carried California nearly two to one, winning fifty-seven of fifty-eight counties and nearly half a million votes more than Johnson. With its enforcement stayed, pending years of judicial review, and headed toward Supreme Court nullification in what the Justice Department called “the most important civil rights case of the decade,” the political import of Proposition 14 remained an asterisk to national election trends, as peculiar to California as the Goldwater spasm to the South.

  Not for the first time, the long-range racial determination of white voters was overlooked by the prevailing interpretations on a higher plane. It was inconceivable then, and later muted, that partisan realignment and commanding national leadership were being spawned in opposition to racial progress. (Reagan had opposed the 1964 civil rights law, and would oppose the Voting Rights Act of 1965). Contemporary analysts tried to bury the Goldwater option. Walter Lippmann called the Johnson victory “indisputable proof that the voters are in the center.” Eisenhower biographer Robert Donovan worried that Goldwater conservatives would make Republicans “a minority party indefinitely.” Two respected political scientists warned of outright extinction, predicting that persistent Goldwaterism would bring “an end to a competitive two-party system.” A slow incoming tide was mistaken for an ebbing ripple.

  PRESIDENT JOHNSON welcomed the imminent reward of an 89th Congress in which the Democrats would control better than two thirds of each chamber: 68 of 100 in the Senate, 295 of 435 in the House. From his ranch through most of November, he orchestrated twenty-two brainstorming task forces on “problems likely to arise by the year 2000.” Bill Moyers informed selected officials that Johnson wanted to emphasize conservation, education, and cities—“straightening out urban problems.” On instructions to avoid civil rights and foreign policy, the meetings explored ideas to overhaul the mining laws, eliminate agricultural subsidies, require “an exhaust cleaning device” in cars, study the major causes of death, and establish labeling standards for consumer products. There were schemes for “regional smashing plants” to cut down on automobile junkyards, and for assorted tax credits to specified industries. “I kicked this one pretty good,” recorded one participant, noting general agreement that “water pollution will be a tough one.” The task forces concentrated in detail on two of Johnson’s known ambitions: to establish federal aid to education and insured medical care for the elderly.

  On the day after the election, King told the New York Times that with the campaign moratorium now expired, he intended to renew demonstrations “based around the right to vote” in Alabama or Mississippi, where, in spite of sacrifices through the movement years, only 21 percent and 6 percent of eligible Negroes were registered, respectively. A week later, at a planning retreat in Birmingham, Wyatt Walker’s replacement, Randolph Blackwell, introduced an SCLC organization chart of thirty-four boxes arrayed from “Board of Directors” at the top down to “Citizenship School Teachers” at the bottom, connected by a maze of solid and dotted lines. King invited ideas to take the movement into “a new era” under general guidelines: “…never reach the point of building SCLC by tearing down another organization…remain nonviolent, Christian, accentuating the positive…. To redeem the soul of America, we must bear a cross in the South…[and] consider in these two days the staggering population shift [to] northern and western cities, Negroes are left there ill equipped…still hovering in slums….”

  Responses ranged from logistical minutiae—that King aide Bernard Lee should “carry pocket tape recorder when traveling with the President”—and syrupy prescriptions for dialogue on “the ontological need of each person,” to Andrew Young’s observation that, “We change history through finding the one thing that can capture the imagination of the world. History moves in leaps and bounds.”

  In the tactical sessions, James Bevel pressed the advantage of an established plan with a dual purpose. For more than a year, since the bombing deaths at Sixteenth Street Baptist (just across Kelly Ingram Park from the current retreat), Bevel and his wife, Diane Nash, had developed their “nonviolent army” blueprint to secure the right to vote throughout Alabama. In his holdover role as chief integration officer, heading the box marked “Direct Action” on the SCLC organization chart, Bevel noted that white leaders at one of the “hard core” voting targets had defied the new civil rights law by outlawing integration checks and even mass meetings. Accordingly, Bevel proposed Selma as “an effective testing ground” for a mass movement building from civil rights to voting rights, and Amelia Boynton, who still kept the honor roll of voter applicants on the wall of her Selma office, seconded him with a personal appeal for help.

  King also suffered a bombardment of proposals for the Nobel Prize ceremonies on December 10. His initial preference for a small accompanying delegation of six swelled to a planeload, mostly of prominent friends able and eager to pay their way to help greet the King of Norway. Advisers maneuvered behind King’s name. Through contacts in England, Bayard Rustin sought an audience for King with British prime minister Harold Wilson on the London stopover, saying he preferred “it not appear as though this is King’s idea,” and pushed to intercede with “certain elements” that reportedly were urging the Archbishop of Canterbury to shun King as a Baptist. With Harry Wachtel, Rustin conceived of a U.N. reception for King as a “real head of state deal,” seeking personal attendance by President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Johnson, and even Soviet chairman Leonid Brezhnev. (They decided King was too busy to meet with the President of Brazil.) Rustin drafted telegrams appointing himself to handle Nobel Prize details, and arranged for the pacifist leader A. J. Muste to send out a fund-raising appeal to cover Rustin’s expenses abroad. On receiving this letter, Stanley Levison complained to Clarence Jones that Rustin was taking advantage of Muste as well as King. Still, Levison returned a
small donation in order to dampen petty disputes among old friends, saying his reply to the appeal was sure to “loom large” in Rustin’s subsequent judgments about “who befriended him and who is trying to cut him down.”

  There was no such collegial understanding at FBI headquarters, where wiretaps funneled reports on the grandiose fits within King’s inner circle. Eugene Patterson, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, received a dose of its hostility when an agent appeared in his office to disclose that King was about to take a Caribbean vacation in the company of a mistress. The agent suggested that since the Constitution was portraying King in Nobel Prize coverage as a Christian leader, the paper owed its readers a photograph of the lovers on their departure from Miami. Patterson admitted to surprise as the agent, a man he knew from Lutheran church councils, offered to station Constitution photographers at the airport. In two days of aggressive lobbying, the agent pushed for a cooperative ambush on condition of absolute anonymity for the FBI—forbidding any mention of the Bureau, even the vaguest suggestions of verifying FBI information. Patterson rejected what he called “peephole journalism.”

  King left his Birmingham meeting to preach twice on Sunday, November 15. “Evil,” he told his congregation at Ebenezer, “carries the seed of its own destruction.” He recalled watching the splendor of the British Empire give way to independent Ghana in 1957. He said that societies built on war were headed for doom, which was one of the reasons he “couldn’t vote for Mr. Goldwater.” America’s power and wealth “have made us an arrogant nation,” King warned—not just white people but now Negroes within reach of a share. “I’m disturbed about the Negro,” he said, adding that no worldly success could calm a troubled spirit. “When you know God, you can stand up amid tension and tribulation and yet smile in the process,” he said. “When you know God, you go on livin’ anyhow. Nothin’s gonna stop you, ’cause you know that God is watching in your heart.”