At Canaan's Edge (2 page)

February 28, 1965

T
ERROR
approached Lowndes County through the school system. J. T. Haynes, a high school teacher of practical agriculture, spread word from his white superiors that local Klansmen vowed to kill the traveling preacher if he set foot again in his local church. This to Haynes was basic education in a county of unspoiled beauty and feudal cruelty, where a nerve of violence ran beneath tranquil scenes of egret flocks resting among pastured Angus cattle. Across its vast seven hundred square miles, Lowndes County retained a filmy past of lynchings nearly unmatched, and Haynes tried to harmonize his scientific college methods with the survival lore of students three or four generations removed from Africa—that hens would not lay eggs properly if their feet were cold, that corn grew only in the silence of night, when trained country ears could hear it crackling up from the magic soil of Black Belt Alabama.

Lessons about the Klan arrived appropriately through the plainspoken Hulda Coleman, who had run the county schools since 1939 from a courthouse office she inherited from her father, the school superintendent and former sheriff. After World War II, when Haynes had confided to Coleman that the U.S. Army mustered him out from Morocco with final instructions to go home and vote as a deserving veteran, she explained that such notions did not apply to any colored man who valued his safety or needed his job in her classrooms. Haynes stayed on to teach in distinguished penury with his wife, Uralee, daughter of an engineer from the Southern land-grant colleges, loyally fulfilling joint assignment to what their Tuskegee professors euphemistically called a “problem county.” Not for twenty years, until Martin Luther King stirred up the Selma voting rights movement one county to the west, did Negroes even discuss the franchise. There had been furtive talk since January about whether Haynes's 1945 inquiry or a similarly deflected effort by an aged blind preacher qualified as the last attempt to register, but no one remembered a ballot actually cast by any of the local Negroes who comprised 80 percent of the 15,000 residents in Lowndes County.

Despite ominous notices from Deacon Haynes, Rev. Lorenzo Harrison was keeping his fourth-Sunday commitment when the sound of truck engines roared to a stop outside Mt. Carmel Baptist on February 28, 1965. Panic swept through the congregation even before investigating deacons announced that familiar Klansmen were deployed outside with shotguns and rifles. Harrison gripped the pulpit and stayed there. He lived thirty miles away in Selma, where he knew people in the ongoing nonviolent campaign but was not yet involved himself, and now he switched his message from “How can we let this hope bypass us here?” to a plea for calm now that “they have brought the cup to the Lord's doorstep.” He said he figured word would get back to white people that he had mentioned the vote in a sermon. Haynes reported that some of the Klansmen were shouting they'd get the out-of-county nigger preacher before sundown, whether the congregation surrendered him or not.

Harrison kept urging the choir to sing for comfort above the chaos of tears and moans, with worshippers cringing in the pews or hunched near windows to listen for noises outside, some praying for deliverance and some for strength not to forsake their pastor even if the Klan burned the whole congregation alive. There were cries about whether the raiding party would lay siege or actually invade the sanctuary, and Harrison, preaching in skitters to fathom what might happen, said he had been braced for phone threats, night riders—almost any persecution short of assault on a Sunday service—but now he understood the saying that bad surprises in Lowndes could outstrip your fears. Deacons said they recognized among the Klansmen a grocer who sometimes beat debtors in his store, a horseman who owned ten thousand acres and once shot a young sharecropper on the road because he seemed too happy to be drafted out of the fields into the Army, then with impunity had dumped the body of Bud Rudolph on his mother's porch. There was Tom Coleman, a highway employee and self-styled deputy who in 1959 killed Richard Lee Jones in the recreation area of a prison work camp. Such names rattled old bones. Sheriff Jesse Coleman, father of Klansman Tom and school superintendent Hulda, successfully defied the rare Alabama governor who called for state investigation in a notorious World War I lynching—of one Will Jones from a telegraph pole by an unmasked daytime crowd—by pronouncing the whole episode a matter of strictly local concern.

Noises outside the church unexpectedly died down. Uncertain why or how far the Klan had withdrawn, deacons puzzled over escape plans for two hundred worshippers with a handful of cars and no way to call for help—barely a fifth of the county's households had telephone service, nearly all among the white minority. A test caravan that ferried home sick or infirm walkers ran upon no ambush nearby, and a scout reported that the only armed pickup sighted on nearby roads belonged to a known non-Klansman. The task of evacuating Harrison fell to deacon John Hulett, whose namesake slave ancestor was said to have founded Mt. Carmel Baptist in the year Alabama gained statehood, 1819. Hulett, a former agriculture student under deacon Haynes, was considered a man of substance because he farmed his own land instead of sharecropping and once had voted as a city dweller in Birmingham. He recruited a deacon to drive Harrison's car, put the targeted reverend down low in the back seat of his own, and by late afternoon led a close convoy of all ten Mt. Carmel automobiles some fifteen miles north on Route 17 to deliver him to an emergency way station at Mt. Gillard Missionary Baptist Church on U.S. Highway 80, where Harrison's father was pastor.

Celebrations at the transfer were clandestine, urgent, and poignant, being still in Lowndes County. Until Hulett pulled away to attend the stranded congregation back at Mt. Carmel, Harrison kept muttering in terrified regret that one of them had to follow through on this voting idea no matter what. “If I have to leave, you take it,” he told Hulett with a tinge of regret, as though cheating his own funeral.

Just ahead lay fateful March, with a crucible of choice for Martin Luther King and President Lyndon Johnson. The Ku Klux Klan would kill soon in Lowndes County, but its victims would be white people from Michigan and New Hampshire. Lowndes would inspire national symbols. It would change Negroes into black people, and deacon John Hulett would found a local political party renowned by its Black Panther emblem. Beyond wonders scarcely dreamed, Reverend Harrison would vote, campaign, and even hold elected office for years in Selma, but never again in the twentieth century would he venture within ten miles of Mt. Carmel Church.

February 28–March 1, 1965

S
OME
fifty miles from Mt. Carmel, on the other side of Selma, James Bevel was preaching against an outbreak of fear in Perry County that same Sunday. He recited from the twelfth chapter of Acts about how King Herod of Judea had “laid violent hands” upon the followers of the Jesus movement by killing “James the brother of John with the sword,” and how Herod, seeing that his vengeance pleased the public, “proceeded to arrest Peter also.” The modern Herod was Governor George Wallace of Alabama, said Bevel, and the modern martyr James was Jimmie Lee Jackson, whose name was bound in grief to the crowd at Zion's Chapel Methodist because he had walked with them from this same church in a night vigil that had been set upon by state troopers under Colonel Al Lingo. Even the segregationist
Alabama Journal
called the ensuing mayhem “a nightmare of State Police stupidity and brutality,” as officers first shot out streetlights, disabled news cameras for cover, and beat reporters into the hospital or distant retreat, which compelled a
New York Times
correspondent to report the ensuing rampage by ear: “Negroes could be heard screaming and loud whacks rang through the square.” An officer put two bullets into the stomach of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a twenty-six-year-old pulpwood worker whose application to register for the vote had been rejected five times.

“I'm not worried about James any more!” Bevel cried from the pulpit, two days after Jackson died as the first martyr of the current campaign for the vote. “I'm concerned about Peter.” Only twenty-eight himself, Bevel sang out in the spitfire tenor of a gifted Baptist orator—more original than King, believed many admirers of both—wearing the denim overalls common to those who came into the nonviolent movement as students, and on his head a yarmulke that marked him for an eccentric identification with the Hebrew prophets. By Peter, Bevel meant all those left behind “to be cowed and coerced and beaten and even murdered,” yet to prevail by spirit. He said he had gone out into the countryside only hours after the death on Friday and found Jackson's mother still bandaged from the attack and his battered grandfather, Cager Lee, still pronouncing himself fit for the next march. Bevel said that while he should be accustomed by now to such plainspoken courage, somehow the exposure to Jimmie Lee Jackson's family “is falling kind of hard on me.” He shifted his biblical text to the story of Esther, a Queen of ancient Persia who had concealed her Hebrew identity until a courtier's plot moved her to “go unto the king, to make supplication unto him, and to make request before him for her people.” Just so, said Bevel, voteless Negroes should honor Jimmie Lee Jackson by hazarding a mass pilgrimage of several days to petition the ruler of Alabama. “We must go to Montgomery and see the king!” he shouted. “Be prepared to walk to Montgomery! Be prepared to sleep on the highway!” He preached the congregation into full-throated shouts of call and response.

Bevel returned to Selma that evening and was repeating his challenge when Rev. Lorenzo Harrison burst through the doors at Brown Chapel AME. A commotion ran through the packed congregation of seven hundred until Rev. L. L. Anderson brought the fugitive into the pulpit to tell of being chased from his church in Lowndes County that day. Harrison clung to bravado on the edge of hysteria. He declared that he would have stayed on to face the threats—and would go back—except that his deacons had paid him three months' severance pay of a hundred dollars. “I said you ought not to be crying, you should be like men!” he shouted. “I told them I was not leaving because I was afraid, but because I can't fight white folks and black folks at the same time!” Then Harrison himself broke down.

Rev. Anderson reacted in a fury: “I want the world to know that in Alabama you are through running Negro preachers out of their pulpits!” He reminded the crowd that terror almost this extreme had paralyzed Selma itself until less than two years ago, during the national upheaval over King's 1963 demonstrations in Birmingham, when the young civil rights worker Bernard Lafayette had persuaded Anderson, over the strenuous objections of his deacons, to open Tabernacle Baptist for the first church meeting about the right to vote, and Sheriff Jim Clark had brought intimidating deputies right into the Tabernacle sanctuary. Despite this early trauma, the Selma movement had grown slowly into a thundering witness, with nearly four thousand demonstrators jailed since King arrived in January of 1965. Anderson vowed to carry this newfound courage into the harshest surrounding countryside.

In a cable to headquarters, FBI observers downplayed the excitement from Lowndes County as a dubious tale “inasmuch as Harris [sic] could furnish no description of any vehicle that the white people were traveling in and could not furnish any description of the whites that allegedly contacted the deacons in his church.” More accurately, agents reported from private sources that James Bevel was distraught over Harrison's flight. Recently, he and colleague Andrew Young had turned up glimmers of interest as they scouted into Lowndes County along Highway 80, ducking into makeshift sharecroppers' stores with low tin roofs and walls of rough-cut timber, where chamber pots and drinking dippers hung for sale, telling nonplussed customers that “Dr. King asked us to come down here like Caleb and Joshua, to survey the land and look for the giants.” Most contacts hastily vanished, and no church yet dared to open its doors for a meeting about the vote, but one deacon had promised “to do what I can.” A farmer had said he heard talk of Dr. King on his television, and others warily had gauged whether local whites might tolerate registration if Negroes confined themselves to small groups. Now the preemptive raid showed that such timid interest was betrayed already to the Klan, and shock threatened to reseal the most isolated part of Alabama behind its firewall of legend at the county line. One dire consequence for Bevel was that the pragmatic Martin Luther King might not approve his desperate new resolve to walk fifty-four miles from Selma to Montgomery, through Big Swamp and the expanse of Lowndes County.

K
ING WAS
returning to Alabama by way of Atlanta that Sunday, from a fund-raising excursion to California. “My few days here are a refreshing contrast to Selma,” he told a crowd in Los Angeles, trying to look past the bubble of crisis that traveled with him. Because of death threats from callers who identified themselves with a newly formed Christian Nationalist State Army, a hundred Los Angeles police officers guarded his appearances at Temple Israel, Victory Baptist Church, and the Hollywood Palladium. News stories tracked a manhunt for the cultish group's leader, who was said to have stolen more than a half-ton of dynamite. Reporters pressed King to confirm rumors that Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach had just warned him personally of other murder plots in Alabama, and they bombarded him with questions about the assassination of Malcolm X the previous Sunday in New York. Did King suspect a conspiracy? Had he made arrangement for succession if “something should happen” to him? Was he afraid that support for the doctrine of nonviolence was evaporating nationwide? In his sermon at Victory Baptist, King decried popular culture that made heroes of fast guns and raised even children to think of dissent by murder. “This disturbs me,” he said, “because I know violence is not the answer.”

A charged atmosphere both galvanized and polarized press attention. When King defined nonviolence in a Los Angeles interview as a leadership discipline for public conduct, and said he could in good conscience defend his family from attack in their home, a local Negro newspaper excoriated him as “the biggest hypocrite alive” for excluding his own loved ones from the suffering witness he prescribed, and declared that his nonviolence itself failed the Malcolm X standard of manhood. In New York, by contrast, the normally reserved
Times
reacted to Malcolm's death with open scorn for a “pitifully wasted” life marked by “ruthless and fanatical belief in violence.”

King made his way through Atlanta back to Alabama for a few hours of domestic refuge at the home of Dr. Sullivan Jackson, Selma's only Negro dentist, where he knew he would find the small guest bedroom stocked for him with Jackson's spare clothes in his size, including suits and underwear, plus matching pajamas and a twin bed for his movement companion, Rev. Ralph Abernathy. King regularly teased himself for failing to persuade Jackson to join the nonviolent demonstrations—“I flunked on you, Sully”—but he valued the respite of well-worn hospitality. Dr. Jackson's wife, Jean, was a childhood friend of Abernathy's wife, Juanita; her great-aunt had been one of Coretta King's music teachers. College ties and pulpit connections extended social bonds among the families that cushioned King's reentry to the Selma campaign. He knew of Jimmie Lee Jackson's death, which doctors had predicted before King left for California, but now he learned of the newly proposed march to Montgomery. He knew to expect danger on his scheduled tour of the outlying rural areas on Monday morning, March 1—one of only two days per month when Alabama law required courthouses to be open for voter registration—but now he learned of the Klan raid in Lowndes County. Aides argued that it was suicidal futility for King to venture there with personal appeals for white officials to accept Negro applicants, and some traced anticipated disaster on several fronts to the lunatic streak in James Bevel.

Doubts about Bevel were legion in King's inner circle. Bevel himself claimed to hear voices. His rival, Hosea Williams of Savannah, regularly denounced Bevel to King as unstable, even though Williams himself had pioneered night marches through Klan towns in a semitrance that inspired playful remarks about side effects from the metal plate still in his head, courtesy of war wounds in Germany. Wyatt Walker, chief of staff from 1960 until 1964, had resigned from movement service in part because King refused his insistent demands to fire Bevel for insubordinate mischief. King had indulged Bevel, saying the movement required a touch of madness—“maladjustment,” he called it in sermons—in order to crusade against the entrenched structure of racial caste in America from a base of powerless, nonviolent Negroes. Indeed, King was in Selma largely on a quixotic leap urged upon him since the Birmingham church bombing eighteen months earlier, when Bevel and his wife, Diane Nash Bevel, had concocted a grand design to answer the heinous crime by securing the right to vote for Negroes. Vowing never to rest until they succeeded, the couple had made a life's pact out of anguish intensified by their pivotal roles in urging King's Birmingham movement to use students, adolescents, and finally small children in great numbers—girls mostly, many even younger than the four victims in the church bombing—in the May 1963 demonstrations that at last overwhelmed the national and international conscience about segregation. While King knew that Bevel walked a thin edge between prophetic genius and self-destruction, the record of astonishing nonviolent breakthroughs made him slow to reject any of Bevel's schemes as crazy or immature.

King encountered new rumbles of amateur diagnosis about Bevel, who had been discovered wandering Selma's streets in the predawn hours on Friday, evicted by his wife from their lodgings at the Torch Motel. In one sense, friends considered the evident crackup a minor surprise compared with the mismatched wedding three years earlier between the unabashedly skirt-chasing Mississippi Baptist preacher and the reserved Catholic puritan from Chicago—Hotspur and Joan of Arc. Introduced in nonviolent college workshops, where Nash emerged from the sit-ins of 1960 as the iron-willed leader of Nashville's vanguard student organization, they had achieved by harrowing common experience a spiritual respect that overcame their sniping incompatibility. Through the birth of two children, Nash had remained oblivious to her husband's rascally effusions—blind to quips and rumors, dismissing one direct complaint from a movement colleague that Bevel had seduced his wife. In Selma, earlier in February, when Sheriff Clark had boiled over against the voting rights demonstrations and punched Bevel with his nightstick, then had him jailed, his cell stripped bare and hosed with cold water at night until Bevel ran a high fever from viral pneumonia, Nash mounted a telephone blitz to the Justice Department that prompted Clark to transfer the prisoner to a hospital, where Nash found him shackled and chained to the bed. Another round of calls and door banging by Nash secured Bevel's release, leaving friends puzzled anew over her ferocious loyalty and the mysterious personal chemistry of opposites.

Now King found the couple fractured, reticent in shock. Each insisted that personal casualties were incidental to the larger campaign for the vote, and other members of King's staff knew little as yet about the precipitating incident late Thursday night when Nash had found a baby-sitter for the children and slipped into the back of a nightspot to observe Bevel keeping one of his assignations rather than his promise to come home. Later, when she contradicted his alibi about car trouble, Bevel had struck her, in the face. “How dare you, lie to me and then hit me!” Nash shouted, so angry that she remained dry-eyed all night, which surprised her as a departure from her habit of crying privately through anxiety before demonstrations. She went instead to a lawyer, but the harsh realities of divorce made her hesitate. Nash remained partly under the spell of Bevel, who, always on the offensive, folded the conflict into a teaching tool for their ongoing commitment to answer the Birmingham church bombing. Citing Nash herself, ironically, he presented nonviolence as a kind of nuclear science by which truth properly applied could release stupendous healing energy in the larger society.

King knew there was calculated political strategy in Bevel's method, beyond his mystical exuberance and personal demons, and that the real target of the proposed journey to Montgomery was not Governor Wallace but the national government in Washington. For nine years now, since the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56, King's cohorts had experimented with the spiritual and political arts required to nurture a small inspiration, such as the arrest of Rosa Parks, into a movement of sufficient scope to make America “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed,” as he put it in his signature “dream” speech. For King, this meant steering a course that took account not only of Bevel's state of mind and the residual strength of the jailgoers in Selma, plus the likely effect of Lorenzo Harrison's flight into the mass meeting, but also the response from national leaders a world apart.