At Canaan's Edge (11 page)

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ASHINGTON,
much relieved about Selma, President Johnson decided not to drop by a private dinner for departing Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon because the Metropolitan Club was strictly segregated. He turned full attention to the ninth of ten war briefings aimed to reach every member of Congress in groups of roughly fifty apiece. “The most important thing I can say to you about South Vietnam,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk told them in the Blue Room at the White House, is that “there are no tricks in it, nothing up our sleeves, no essential facts being concealed.” Defense Secretary McNamara reviewed operations, including a massive naval patrol that stopped 350,000 Vietnamese per year on the 72,000 junks in the coastal waters of South Vietnam, of whom 2,000 were removed as suspects and “about 150 have proven to be Vietcong.” The President praised McNamara for taking a 90 percent pay cut “just to come here and serve his President,” and launched an appeal for Congress to maintain the solidarity of its support resolutions on Vietnam, which had passed by combined votes of 502–2. On past eight o'clock, Alabama time, Johnson described himself as a man with few of the answers and all of the burdens—“you just got one President, whether you like it or not”—who “needs all the help he can possibly get, and all the sympathy he can possibly get.”

It was dark in Selma when two of the Unitarian ministers emerged from Walker's Café. Orloff Miller smoked a cigar on the sidewalk, waiting with Clark Olsen while James Reeb called Boston to tell his wife that he had decided to stay over another day. When Reeb joined them, Olsen pushed slightly ahead. Having arrived from California minutes too late for the afternoon's “turnaround” march, he wanted badly to honor the contributions of church members who had financed his cross-country travel, and was anxious to find out what was scheduled for Wednesday. Less than a block from the restaurant, footsteps sounded behind and a hard voice called, “Hey, niggers. Hey, you niggers.” Olsen hastened a few steps, then turned to see one white man rush from behind and bring a club to the side of Reeb's head with a left-handed baseball swing, felling him. Two others kicked Miller after he dropped protectively to the pavement, and a fourth pummeled Olsen about the face. The attackers vanished in seconds, one of them shouting, “Now you know what it's like to be a real nigger.”

Diane Nash called a doctor and Burwell Infirmary as soon as the three ministers stumbled through the door. Reeb appeared to be relatively unscathed compared with the bleeding friends who supported him on either side, but he was frightened and incoherent. Nash summoned one of the funeral home hearses that had served as ambulances for the two marches across Pettus Bridge. Dr. William Dinkins met them at Burwell, where Reeb spoiled X-rays from the portable machine by involuntarily jerking his head. From the look of his glazed eyes, Dinkins announced that Reeb must be transferred to an emergency neurosurgery unit ninety miles away in Birmingham, but a call to alert the hospital ran into notice that a $150 fee would be required for admission. Dinkins and the ministers did not have that much. Reeb vomited and lapsed into unconsciousness. Nash secured the money, and the ambulance roared off under siren until the right rear tire went flat a few miles north of Selma. Dinkins ordered driver Morris Anderson to ride the rim to a place where it was safe for a mixed group of whites and Negroes to call for a replacement ambulance.

This was not easy. Cars cruised ominously back and forth past the crippled ambulance in the parking lot of a radio station where Anderson used to work. One of Sheriff Clark's deputies stopped, shined a flashlight inside to question the racially mixed occupants, and refused Clark Olsen's desperate request to provide escort. It was too late for whites to retract or deny their protest, even to save a life, and Dr. Dinkins, who often soared above Negro status in his own Piper Cub, sporting a leather helmet and white silk scarf, could only wait trembling on the ground. Past 9:30, two hours after the attack, the driver of the second ambulance belatedly arrived. He abandoned an effort to hot-wire its balky siren to life, and sped north again in silence. Reeb's fellow ministers braced him around the highway curves because the stretcher stays were broken.

“T
HEY CAME
here from other sections of the country,” King told the hushed crowd at Brown Chapel, receiving whispered bulletins from grave-looking couriers. “I think two of them were from Boston, the Rev. Miller and the Rev. Reeb—and the Rev. Reeb was the one, I believe, who was very seriously injured—James Reeb, and I believe he's from Boston.” He paused in prayer for “these brothers who came here to be with us today,” recognized the pilgrim clergy, whose ranks had thinned so that all of them now fitted into the front pews, and saluted a delegation of “our brothers in the adjoining county, Wilcox—not a single Negro registered.” King said forces might “rearrange our plans a bit” but could never retard their determination to secure the vote. “Now next week we're going to the statehouse in Montgomery,” he declared, “but
tomorrow
we're going to the courthouse in Selma and we ask for your participation.” FBI agents recorded that he surrendered the pulpit at 10:30
P.M
. Of the remaining Episcopal seminarians, Judith Upham and Jonathan Daniels next found themselves recruited by eager young Negroes who escorted them to shelter with families in the Carver apartment project. Bone tired, they slept past the appointed march time of 9:15 and bolted up in panic, not yet savvy to the movement's padded timetable.

March 10–12, 1965

J
AMES
Reeb's name commanded national headlines on Wednesday morning, March 10. Details of the dramatic ambush—how the three ministers took a wrong turn in the dark past a reputed Klan hangout called the Silver Moon diner—eclipsed brooding controversies about the abbreviated march, and fresh cascades of emotion swelled the reaction to Sunday's televised violence. Of the many newcomers who filed into Brown Chapel that morning, one Catholic philosopher from Missouri's Fontbonne College was mystified to behold in the pulpit “a squat figure in blue jeans and a bizarre beanie,” then guessed from the ensuing shower of parables and entertainment that “one of Martin Luther King's most articulate spokesmen” must be concealing himself in an outfit of “local color.” James Bevel coached the crowd to sort through every proposed action for constructive purpose. “We are testifying,” he said. “Remember that. Some people have a hard time understanding nonviolence.” Bevel claimed an immense untapped power for the doctrine to break down barriers when people willing to suffer worked hard to frame questions of justice unambiguously. “If nonviolence can work in Alabama,” he declared, “it can work in South Africa.”

At 12:47
P.M.
, Rev. L. L. Anderson led the crowd of five hundred outside to a roadblock under a chinaberry tree less than a block down Sylvan Street, where Mayor Joseph Smitherman, backed by a line of policemen, declared a permanent blockade. “You can make all the statements you want,” added Public Safety Director Wilson Baker, “but you are not going to march.” Behind Baker, flanked by deputies and possemen, Sheriff Clark wore a white helmet and his trademark button pledging “Never” to abandon segregation. Behind them formed a loose reserve of one hundred Alabama troopers.

Thus began a marathon standoff. Sister Antona, a Negro nun from St. Louis, was the first to take a bullhorn to deliver a simple statement about why she had made the journey. One by one, more than thirty speakers stepped forward for nearly two hours—a rabbi from New Jersey, a student from Yale, a priest from Minnesota. At four o'clock, when members of an ecumenical delegation headed home to Missouri in two chartered airplanes, they were such an instant phenomenon that the powerful St. Louis radio station KMOX put Sister Antona and five other “nuns of Selma” directly on the air with stories that drew a flood of more than twenty thousand phone calls. Listeners from forty states variously praised them as national saviors and denounced them for perverting their image of a nun's cloistered purity. In Selma, Ralph Abernathy announced at dusk that the stymied marchers would keep vigil all night for the comatose James Reeb. Jesse Jackson, having arrived from Chicago in the van packed with divinity students, moved briskly among leaders of the weary veterans and new reinforcements, asking, “What do you want
my people
to do?” Wilson Baker strung a clothesline across Sylvan Street to mark a boundary line, and Selma teenagers swiftly improvised verses to the tune of “The Battle of Jericho”: “We got a rope that's a Berlin Wall, Berlin Wall…in Selma, Alabama…. We're gonna stand here 'til it falls…. Hate is the thing that built the wall…. Love is the thing that will make it fall…” Headlights from the state troopers' idling cruisers silhouetted them behind the long clothesline.

The pilot of a commercial flight radioed ahead for a Birmingham taxi to meet his airplane on the runway so as to spare Marie Reeb the ordeal of pushing through photographers at the terminal. Hospital escorts took her promptly to the surgical recovery room where her husband lay in the midst of life support machines with a tracheotomy tube in his throat. By evening, with the help of friends, she managed to compose herself to speak briefly with reporters arranged in three tiers around the hospital auditorium. They had agreed to minimize her stress by submitting seven questions in advance through ABC correspondent Edgar Needham, ending with the most difficult. “I told the children this morning as soon as they woke up that their father had been hurt,” she replied. “The younger ones did not fully understand, but the thirteen-year-old was quite upset.” Retreating to wait in a reserved space near the recovery room, she found a bouquet of yellow roses with a note of condolence from President and Mrs. Johnson.

The President, back in Washington from a day trip to Camp David, called Attorney General Katzenbach later Wednesday night. “This minister's gonna die, isn't he?” asked Johnson.

“Yes, sir,” said Katzenbach.

“Is he already dead?” asked Johnson.

When Katzenbach said it was a matter of hours, Johnson pushed for specific actions the administration could take to meet another crescendo of unrest. Katzenbach, having apologized profusely for recommending that the President make no public statement about Bloody Sunday until a legislative proposal was ready (“Forget it,” Johnson told him), presented measures that were not quite ready. That day's draft of a voting rights message was unsatisfactory. “It just doesn't sing yet,” Katzenbach said. He was consulting privately with Judge Frank Johnson (“I think the judge is going to be pretty good”), but could not say so. His feverish negotiations toward a voting rights bill with Senator Everett Dirksen, who again controlled the critical Republican swing vote, had irritated Senator Mike Mansfield to the point that the Democratic Majority Leader threatened revolt over being taken for granted. “He's too polite to say that,” Katzenbach reported, “but that's what he felt.” As to law enforcement, the Attorney General said he was eager to press federal charges for Sunday's violence against Alabama officials, including Sheriff Clark (“I'm a little more reluctant with Lingo because it touches the governor”), but the Department was struggling to identify specific defendants from FBI evidence. “I just sent seven more lawyers down there,” he reported. Johnson spurred Katzenbach forward on all these options, and resolved to “take the cork out of the bottle” by confiding his plans to civil rights groups and religious leaders in the Oval Office, before their protests could escalate. “I don't mind meeting with them,” he said. Katzenbach believed the somber reality of Reeb's impending death could help “keep the rowdies down.”

W
ILDCAT REBELLIONS
already were defying such hopes in Montgomery, where a supervised field trip shifted within hours into what the press called a “pee-in” outside the Alabama state capitol. Earlier on Wednesday, a convoy of cars and chartered buses arrived bearing seven hundred student members of the Tuskegee Institute Advancement League, with faculty chaperones and bag lunches packed by university cafeteria workers. Governor Wallace refused to see their representatives or receive their carefully drawn petition for Negro voting rights, which came as a shock to the delegation. The rebuff convinced one student leader that Tuskegee students were “no different from other black people—the country people, the people of Selma, anywhere.” Indignant speeches at the outdoor rally developed into a free-form debate about their condition, punctuated by clashes with the constricting rings of police and state troopers who pushed them back and forth between their respective jurisdictions at the foot of the capitol property. Against the pleas of the highly agitated dean of students, James Forman and other circulating SNCC leaders convinced about two hundred students to stage a sit-down strike for the governor's attention. Some hand-holding couples wrenched apart over the sudden option to extend a college day-trip into uncharted insurrection. The majority who returned as scheduled with the dean put the Tuskegee campus into an upheaval, and the dwindling number who held their ground into the night, prevented from returning if they left, eventually broke through inhibitions to relieve themselves where they stood—female students squatting within clusters of friends faced outward. They sought shelter from rain after midnight by breaking into the nearby First Baptist Church—Ralph Abernathy's old “Brick-a-day” church, built by ex-slaves, where the Freedom Riders of 1961 had been besieged. Forman resolved Thursday morning to “radicalize” the Alabama movement from a new SNCC base in Montgomery, animated by what the
New York Times
reported as “open contempt” for King's conduct in Selma.

Eight blocks away, in a federal courtroom swamped with reporters, King testified as the first witness in Judge Frank Johnson's hearing on the proposed march to Montgomery. Lawyers for Governor Wallace and Sheriff Clark made him admit that he marched on Tuesday in spite of Judge Johnson's injunction, “even after a marshal read you the order.” When they pressed him to acknowledge that he had denounced the order as “unjust,” King shifted uneasily. “Yes, I did,” he said. The judge interrupted the lawyers to claim the fight as his own, ruling that guilt for contempt was a matter “between this court and the alleged contemptors.” Removing his glasses, he stared down from the bench to question King directly about his conversations with Governor Collins and how far he had marched beyond Pettus Bridge. Most pointedly, he asked King about a “report I have received from the Justice Department” that after the march was confronted by troopers, “they were pulled away and that their automobiles were removed while y'all were still there, is that correct?”

“That is correct,” said King.

“And then did you go forward, or did you turn and go back?” asked Judge Johnson.

“We turned around and went back to Selma,” said King.

“After the troopers had pulled back?”

“That is correct,” said King.

“And at that point there were no troopers in front of you?”

“That is correct,” said King. Heads nodded in the courtroom. The contest turned on clashing interpretations of his behavior as compliance, defiance, or shame.

Judge Johnson sternly demanded silence from spectators and admonished both sides to maintain decorum through their badgering hostilities. To circumvent his orders requiring the use of courtesy titles such as “Dr.” and “Mr.,” lawyers for Alabama never referred to or addressed King by name.

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that same Thursday morning, Secret Service Agent Rufus Youngblood rushed into President Johnson's living quarters to inform him that twelve demonstrators had launched a sit-in downstairs. With security already heightened by the perpetual picket lines outside the gates, the alarm would be enough to generate two diagrams on the front page of the next day's
New York Times
showing how the six young Negroes and six whites had accomplished the first recorded penetration of the White House, posing as tourists. The President sought advice from his aides Lee White, Bill Moyers, and Jack Valenti, as well as Youngblood—the agent who had covered him famously during the gunfire into the Dallas motorcade—then vetoed the standing procedure to eject the demonstrators by force. Instead, he ordered Youngblood to keep them sealed off in the East Wing corridor where they had ensconced themselves, and divert all foot traffic elsewhere. Not even Mrs. Johnson was allowed the peek she desired, but White House maids could serve coffee to advance nature's encouragement for them to leave. With that, the President departed for the Cabinet Room to begin his civil rights audiences with a group of Negro newspaper publishers.

In Montgomery, before Judge Johnson recessed his hearing for the day, Willie Ricks reported to Atlanta over the SNCC WATS line that “Bevel and Forman almost came to blows in the church.” They were in Dexter Avenue Baptist, the prim little church at the foot of the capitol hill where King had been pastor during the bus boycott. Forman had led a tired remnant of the Tuskegee Institute Advancement League group there from First Baptist to join students newly recruited by Ricks from Alabama State, the local Negro college, along with some traveling students and clergy—mostly white—gathered up from the Montgomery airport on their way to Selma. Bevel barged in from Selma to challenge their clarity of purpose. “What did you set out to do?” he asked. He induced several people to say they were responding to publicity about Selma. “Then why are you
here
in Montgomery?” shouted Bevel. “Why don't you go to Selma and find out what people see as the next logical step in a nonviolent campaign to win the vote?” He said their “foolishness” in Montgomery could undercut the national drama building from Selma with an image of angry Negroes who broke into their own churches and urinated in the street. Bevel sat down in the front row and heckled Forman's efforts to refute him. Forman said Bevel was taking the same side as the hateful racists who had abused their right to demonstrate. “Demonstrate for
what?”
cried Bevel. He accused Forman of controlling the crowd by keeping it uninformed, which brought their dispute to a boil.

“I decided to stop trying to talk,” Forman later wrote of the moment. If he launched into “the whole history of King's actions in Selma,” he knew Bevel would dismiss his grievances as rivalry in the guise of strategy. Instead, Forman announced that he was resuming the demonstration at the capitol by himself if necessary. “Anybody who wants to come with me can do so,” he said. Four SNCC staff members and one student followed him out the door. A cordon of Montgomery police officers manhandled Forman and dragged all five to jail. Shortly thereafter, officers fell upon the others as they tried to slip away to Selma—seizing Bevel and the first few students, driving the remaining two hundred back into the church with billy clubs that inflicted several wounds. Forman and Bevel wound up in neighboring cells, their differences swallowed up until they posted bail.