Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  For King and Abernathy, the first promising break was agreement by several leading churches to house a forbidden mass meeting—not just Tabernacle Baptist, where the embattled Rev. L. L. Anderson rallied the deacons, but also First Baptist and Brown Chapel AME. Their congregations had divined that the ruling segregationists across town were divided enough to make the gamble worthwhile—so confirmed Jean Jackson for her Brown Chapel and Sullivan Jackson for First Baptist, where he and Amelia Boynton belonged. They also delivered a flash report from the interracial listening posts: Sheriff Clark was expected to spend the weekend in Miami, where the national champion Crimson Tide football team—pride of Alabamans, including many fans of archrival Auburn—lost Friday night’s Orange Bowl to the Texas Longhorns, 21-17, despite the heroics of the Alabama quarterback, Joe Namath. This news offered hope that Clark would not be rushing home to blockade or tear up a church in front of the reporters who followed King.

  Later, after elaborate grooming and goodbyes at the Jackson home, King and Abernathy made an entrance to the imposing, double-towered Brown Chapel, where a standing, cheering crowd of seven hundred heard King decisively challenge Judge Hare’s injunction with a reprise of his 1957 “Give Us the Ballot” speech on the Washington Mall. “Today marks the beginning of a determined, organized, mobilized campaign to get the right to vote everywhere in Alabama,” he declared. “If we are refused, we will appeal to Governor George Wallace. If he refuses to listen, we will appeal to the legislature. If they don’t listen, we will appeal to the conscience of the Congress…. We must be ready to march. We must be ready to go to jail by the thousands…. Our cry to the state of Alabama is a simple one. Give us the ballot!” When the thunder died down on his departure, James Bevel asked volunteers to sign on for work in the movement.

  TWO DAYS LATER in Washington, a pilgrimage of some five hundred Mississippians arrived in a convoy of Trailways buses, tattered farm vehicles, and straggling hitchhikers. Although rules did not permit them to carry signs or lobby inside the Capitol, they stood in silent vigil along the underground corridors between office buildings and the House floor, where the representatives-elect passed by to open the 89th Congress. During a standoff at the front door, as Capitol police blocked the three MFDP challengers—Victoria Gray, Annie Devine, and Fannie Lou Hamer—a member of the Nazi Party slipped by into the House chamber and ducked aside to paint himself in blackface with burnt cork. He burst in upon astonished lawmakers, dancing a jig and shouting, “I’se de Mississippi delegation! I wants to be seated!” before police hauled him away to pay a fine of $19.

  With order restored, ceremonies proceeded until Speaker McCormack called for the swearing in of Thomas Abernethy from Mississippi’s First District, whereupon Rep. William Ryan of New York called out an objection. More than fifty representatives-elect cried out for the Speaker to recognize Ryan, which he did. In the ensuing parliamentary crisis, House leaders countered with a move to seat the five Mississippi representatives on condition of a full House investigation. Rep. James Roosevelt of California, son of FDR, urged colleagues to hold out for vacating the contested seats during the inquiry, saying Mississippi elections manifestly excluded Negro voters. Rep. Edith Green of Oregon demanded and won a roll call vote. The bipartisan leadership prevailed,* 276-149, and the Mississippians were sworn in provisionally, but MFDP supporters deliriously celebrated the day’s accomplishments. Not only had they won a hearing, but more than a third of the House had supported them in a straw vote before they marshaled their evidence on Mississippi voting practices. “Back to work!” cried Lawrence Guyot at a victory rally.

  The commotion in the Capitol was a minor issue at the background press briefing before President Johnson’s State of the Union address. A White House reporter asked whether the President had any specific action in mind for the general endorsement of voting rights in his advance speech draft. Bill Moyers replied carefully. He knew Johnson wanted voting reform, and had long wished the Brown decision had been grounded in the right to vote rather than in school integration. He also knew that John Doar, Burke Marshall’s replacement in the Civil Rights Division, sought new legal tools after five nearly fruitless years in county-by-county litigation.* On the other hand, Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach wanted time to absorb the shocks of the 1964 law, and there were two obvious drawbacks to the constitutional amendment favored by Justice Department lawyers: the Southern states could block ratification, and the Fifteenth Amendment already guaranteed minority voting rights. Therefore, Moyers said, the administration planned “to do something.” He emphasized Johnson’s more specific urgency to send five legislative packages to Congress even before the January 20 inauguration, beginning with health and education, and to define a Great Society concept he knew was “corrupted in certain circles.” Outside critics viewed it as “a Communist five-year plan,” said Moyers, while some bureaucrats perceived merely an excuse “to raise postal rates.”

  For America, which he defined that night in his address as “the first continental union of democracy in the history of man,” Johnson proposed “a new quest for union” beyond 1965, a century removed from 1865 and the Civil War’s “terrible test of blood and fire.” The next day, Tuesday, January 5, White House officials basked in the impact of a record 75 million viewers, nearly triple the estimated audience for the 1964 State of the Union address. In Atlanta, a stricken Coretta King called her husband home that day, having routinely opened a piece of SCLC’s haphazard, accumulated mail. She had assumed that the reel of tape was another of King’s road speeches, which admiring collectors often recorded and mailed to Atlanta, until she read the accompanying letter from the FBI’s November 21 suicide package. She was accustomed to written threats, but this one conveyed the chill of an anonymous purported Negro spouting hatred mixed with flowery phrases: “You are finished…. Satan could not do more. What incredible evilness….” With apprehension, she played the tape.

  King himself listened to the tape three times before Abernathy was rushed in on summons. For his inner circle—Abernathy, Andrew Young, Joseph Lowery, Bernard Lee—King played the tape over and over. They examined the wrapping and Miami postmark for clues. They analyzed the muffled contents as a familiar mixture of seductions, sex cries, and raunchy, Amos ‘n’ Andy-style hotel banter,†which seemed chosen for its power to cause public humiliation. King heard at least three different background settings, which he accurately took to mean the sender had access to hotel bugs in scattered places. The group interpretation was unanimous: the package came from Hoover’s FBI, with a letter demanding that King commit suicide before Oslo or be exposed with the “highlights” tape.

  They were too rattled to reflect on the tactical ironies—that Hoover, assuming King would have opened the package before their December summit meeting, must have been undone by King’s calm demeanor that day, or that Hoover could not have counted on the extra sting of discovery by Coretta. Nor did they realize how quickly the Bureau could catch up with the delayed impact of the hostile message. Wiretaps provided enough advance notice for headquarters to have the New York office install bugs at the Park Sheraton before King and his advisers checked in for an emergency meeting over the weekend of Friday, January 8. Although King now worried about spies and microphones to the point of whispering, the surveillances rewarded headquarters with signs of his anguish. “They are out to break me,” King said. He raged against Hoover, but he also reproached himself that the tapes were a sign of his own failure.

  King kept word of the suicide package from Harry Wachtel. His minimal disclosures to Wachtel before the Barbizon meeting had been painful enough, and on the flight to Oslo he had solemnly promised to give up any affairs. There was too much at stake, he had told Wachtel, especially since the frightful warnings that Hoover’s spying might injure the movement. Now King did not have the heart to revisit the issue over the explicit, sexually focused revelation of the suicide package. He sought legal advice more comfortably from Chicago lawyer Chauncey Eskri
dge, with whom he had once shared a lover, knowing Eskridge was toughened in such matters by his work for Elijah Muhammad.

  In Wachtel’s presence, the Research Committee discussed the Selma campaign, and King abruptly announced his desire to restore a working relationship with Stanley Levison. The banishment was wrong, he insisted. He had submitted because President Kennedy and his Justice Department had repeatedly called it the price of the civil rights bill, which was now law, and President Johnson had never mentioned the preposterous spy charges. King wanted Levison back. Wachtel urged caution on behalf of the surprised advisers. His advice, for which he later felt foolish, was that King should be slow to upset the FBI now that Wachtel’s summit strategy had patched up relations with Hoover.

  Wachtel volunteered to assess the dangers of King’s proposal directly with Levison, who had been a decisive voice for his sacrificial banishment. King left New York to deliver two Sunday speeches in Massachusetts.When Harvard’s Memorial Church filled long in advance, technicians wired remote speakers into nearby Saunders Theater, which also overflowed. Some of those who applauded King’s work in the South were nonplussed by his announcement that he would return in the spring to address racial problems of the Boston area.

  On Monday, Abernathy and Andrew Young threw themselves against the FBI’s wall of innocence. They had asked on Friday to see Hoover, but settled for DeLoach and his assistant. Unaware that surveillances had forewarned DeLoach of their strategy, they demanded candor about scandalmongering and smear campaigns—only to hear an obliging DeLoach draw them out on their “trilogy” attacks over Communism, money, and sex. They danced around the rumors themselves; DeLoach shrugged off their attempts to focus on the source, saying that the FBI had no interest in King’s private life or finances. When Andrew Young pointed to signs of malicious, orchestrated leaks from the government, DeLoach assured him that “there were no leaks from the FBI [and] that the Director ran a tight organization….” King’s aides left fuming about being patronized. DeLoach’s written report, as summarized by historian David Garrow, “gloated to his superiors that he had tried to make the talk as unpleasant and embarrassing as possible….”

  That day in Baltimore, King spoke at Johns Hopkins on the obsolescence of war, and news elsewhere trailed scattered clashes around the movement. Leaked stories, which disclosed the existence of a second Klan confession in the Mississippi triple murder (without mention of Doyle Barnette’s name), framed hopes in the Justice Department to revive the federal prosecution. A federal grand jury indicted three Greenwood plumbers for beating Silas McGhee the previous July 16. In Los Angeles, two former secretaries failed to appear for a hearing in their paternity suit against Elijah Muhammad, which was a disaster for the survival scheme long constructed by Malcolm X. He had no doubt the women were petrified, as the Nation’s enforcements were rippling everywhere. A few days earlier, two lieutenants from Temple No. 7 had carried out instructions from Captain Joseph to tell Benjamin Brown, a New York prison guard, that he could not teach independent, nonpolitical Islam, even with an homage photograph of Elijah Muhammad posted on his window. Unsatisfied by his response, they shot Brown in the back with a rifle. On January 15, the New York FBI office closed an update about Malcolm with a note that he was using a new alias, “M. Khalil,” for hotel registration.

  IN SELMA, beneath the fanfare of announcements about King’s anticipated return, staff members passed out leaflets for recruits. By Thursday, January 7, the response justified separate night workshops in each of the city’s five election wards, and James Bevel stunned the fifty or so participants at the Ward IV session by shooing the sheriff’s deputies out of Brown Chapel.On Friday, at the first Selma youth rally, Bevel showed his well-traveled copy of the NBC documentary on the Nashville sit-ins of 1960, and Hosea Williams sent two hundred students home with provocative questions. “If you can’t vote, then you’re not free,” he told them. “And if you ain’t free, children, then you’re a slave.” Eight-year-old children went home to ask their parents whether they were slaves.

  By Tuesday, January 12, the first block captains were elected at nightly training sessions of up to a hundred people in each ward. From a downtown storefront, Diane Nash Bevel began to compile maps of voting-age Negroes by street address, tending the daily fears and afflictions of returning canvassers. Staff members worked the wards in pairs—one from SCLC and one from SNCC. The tandem approach was approved by Bernard Lafayette, who had flown in from Chicago to promote cooperation. Well remembered as SNCC’s pioneer organizer in Selma, Lafayette retained ties that predated and also bridged frictions between SNCC students and SCLC preachers. Together with Bevel and SNCC chairman John Lewis, he recommended that SNCC strengthen its Selma project. They recruited Silas Norman, the literacy volunteer from the previous summer, to join the SNCC staff as project director. They made Terry Shaw, one of the intrepid high school students who had canvassed for Lafayette in 1962, a co-coordinator in Ward III.

  Hungry for manpower, both SNCC and SCLC pitched their self-selected young newcomers into Selma. Charles Fager, a white journalist from Colorado, had moved from curiosity, which drew him to Atlanta, to absorption, after he attended his first mass meeting in December on the Scripto pen strike, then to awe, after he conducted an interview with Septima Clark. In January he joined SCLC’s Selma staff. Fay Bellamy, a Negro from Pennsylvania who had searched intermittently for “the movement” since the Birmingham church bombing, made connections to the Atlanta SNCC office independently of Frank Soracco, a twenty-nine-year-old white schoolteacher who drove his Volkswagen from California. Assigned to Selma, both wound up at the SCLC-SNCC joint morning staff meetings, the all-day canvasses, mass meetings, and integrated night socials at the Chicken Shack. “Things are starting to move here organization wise,” Soracco wrote his parents near Sacramento. “It has been calm because the city wants it that way…. Two guys tear gassed our house. No one was home. They got 6 mos.—unheard of 6 mos. ago…. Few things I miss—good food, or place to cook it, clean sheets, friendly girl or two. These here are friendly, but most of their dads would skin them alive if they were around with a white man.”

  On Thursday, January 14, cheers greeted King’s entrance to the mass meeting at First Baptist and then drowned out his shouted pledge to “be coming back again and again and again until….” He declared that the planned campaign called for parallel registration drives in ten surrounding rural counties, and he announced a triple challenge for Monday. They would march through Selma to the courthouse, he said. They would send volunteers to apply for white-only city jobs, and teams would make the first attempts to integrate Selma’s hotels and restaurants under the civil rights law. “You see,” said King, “I am trying to get over to you that Monday will be Freedom Day…. If we march by the hundreds, we will make it clear to the nation that we are determined to vote.” He emphasized the need to “desegregate our minds” and “remove the shackles of fear.” He said they would help the white people, too, “whether they realize it or not.”

  President Johnson called King on Friday, with greetings on his thirty-sixth birthday and requests for recommendation on several pending appointments. In Selma, recruitments intensified over the weekend. Ward captains were asked to speak at mass meetings, and block captains to stand. In Ward V, forty teenagers unexpectedly skipped Friday night’s Hudson High School basketball game to petition the staff for roles on Freedom Day, and James Orange, who had moved from the 1963 Birmingham children’s marches to the SCLC staff under James Bevel, was assigned to devise a program for “students that refuse to remain in school.” Meanwhile, Andrew Young and others continued negotiations with police chief Wilson Baker about what could be done peacefully.

  Baker, who confessed that he had petitioned the Justice Department to keep King out of Selma—“begging on my knees for my community”—quoted Scripture on the tests of life, having once considered the Lutheran ministry. While tacitly acknowledging vigilante pressures on the white side of town, he told
Young and his own officers that the Selma police would enforce the law as professionals. Staff minutes on the movement side recorded worry about poor organization for Freedom Day. In Ward II, block captains were asked to stretch final recruitments by an extra half block apiece, to cover shortages. In Ward III, on the other hand, “Mrs. Anderson has so many block captains and workers that she is going to help Mrs. Blevins in her block, which is in Ward V.”

  THE FIRST SKIRMISH began with a Monday morning song service of three hundred, roughly half of them high school students. King led a mid-morning march out of Brown Chapel one block south on Sylvan Street into a police blockade at Selma Avenue. Wilson Baker gave notice of the pedestrian traffic laws, and warned that he would arrest the entire column for violating parade ordinances unless they divided into clumps of five or fewer at intervals of at least ten feet. In compliance, the segmented column marched one more block, turned west on Alabama Avenue, then walked five short blocks to Broad Street, Selma’s main thoroughfare, and across toward the Dallas County courthouse on the right.

  Those waiting outside included Sheriff Clark, his deputies, his volunteer segregationist “posse,” scores of Selma bystanders, some sixty reporters, and Commander George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party. In the standoff, while Baker transferred jurisdiction to Clark, Rockwell accosted King as a Communist and challenged him to debate. King agreeably offered Rockwell fifteen minutes to address the mass meeting that night, plus directions to First Baptist. That settled, Sheriff Clark’s deputies herded the Negroes into the Lauderdale Street side entrance, past the registrar’s office and outside again down into a secluded back alley. Reporters, quarantined by the posse on Alabama Avenue, saw King when he emerged to pursue the day’s secondary goal of integrating Selma’s public accommodations. Seven of eight tested restaurants served integrated groups that day, and King broke the color bar at the celebrated, antebellum Hotel Albert, named for Queen Victoria’s husband but modeled after the Doge’s Palace in Venice. Once registered, beneath grand carved arches in the foyer, he tried to break the tension of the milling crowd by addressing the white supremacists he had met at the courthouse. “You’re still going to be with us tonight?” he asked.