At Canaan's Edge (25 page)

M
ONDAY NIGHT
in Detroit, before Tuesday's televised funeral there for Viola Liuzzo, 1,500 people gave a standing ovation to James Leatherer. Wearing his orange marching vest, Leatherer told a memorial service that Liuzzo's sacrifice sent an enduring message to uncertain Americans: “you have to get off the fence.” The crowd stood for Rosa Parks, and cheered a demand for the resignation of Episcopal Rt. Rev. C. C. J. Carpenter. “As Bishop of Alabama,” Rev. Carl Sayers accused, “you have been to the flock of Christ a wolf and not a shepherd.” Sayers spoke of being turned away from St. Paul's Church on the public instruction of Carpenter. He announced that Suffragan Bishop Kim Myers, also rebuffed in Selma, blessed his demand as an act of religious conscience.

The Rt. Rev. Richard Emrich, Episcopal Bishop of Michigan, emphatically disapproved. He privately reproached both Myers and Sayers for attacking another bishop without his consent, and identified with the travail of Carpenter as a peer at the helm of an embattled institution. Sunday's breakthrough at St. Paul's had withered under siege. With Carpenter's assistant consoling Rev. Mathews about “what a bitter pill it was to you to have to do business with John Morris,” the visiting Episcopal clergy, including Morris, returned eagerly to the church house for follow-up consultation (after resolving among themselves, in Judith Upham's favor, a dispute about whether it was proper for a female to join negotiations over church policy). They were dismayed to learn from Mathews that many at St. Paul's understood the mixed service as the one-time price of a bargain for their departure. On the other side, even moderates in the congregation were distressed that the visitors hoped to build continuing fellowship on the divided vote to admit Negroes. Prominent segregationists already resigned from the governing vestry. Church lawyers picked at Carpenter's interpretation of the canon. Only bona fide Episcopalians were guaranteed worship, they said, and ushers were empowered to keep order as they saw fit.

Mathews reserved for his superiors the strength of internal rebellion. “Losing this family would be a terrific financial blow to the parish,” he confided to Carpenter's assistant. “They pledge $3,000 a year, and in the past three years have put an additional $7,500 in my discretionary fund…but I'll be damned if I'll be bought.” He complained that the wife of another resigned vestryman, whose extended family “make up the greatest part of the congregation,” was “absolutely ‘sick'” with certainty that integrated worship was a Communist conspiracy to enslave white people. “If she is cured,” wrote Mathews, “it will be a greater healing miracle than any recorded in the Gospels.”

Bishop Carpenter curdled against the movement for overlooking the progressive side of his heritage. His great-grandfather had conducted a pioneer ministry among slaves through four decades, virtually alone among antebellum Southern clergy. Carpenter never had espoused segregation. He saw himself fostering a middle ground between George Wallace and Martin Luther King, only to be rebuked on both sides, and he had been galled to be the first-named addressee on King's famed Letter from Birmingham Jail. As a founding member of the National Council of Churches, who defended the ecumenical body until it “urged the current invasion of Selma and Alabama,” Carpenter felt “in the position of having the limb cut out from under me.” He seized the victim's perspective to bemoan extreme punishment for sins against Negroes, which he said were “attributed” to the white South by outsiders. “After the nail has been driven all the way in,” he wrote Bishop Myers of Michigan, “it is definitely not right to keep pounding on it simply to make the scars deeper.” Ever more preoccupied with rulebook decorum, Carpenter denounced Myers to his superior in Michigan for intrusions he found “rude and inexcusable…. I do not want him in the Diocese of Alabama until he has learned the rudiments of proper conduct.” He disdained the call for his resignation by Rev. Sayers: “I have not answered him at all and would not think of answering him…. He obviously is a little fellow who wanted to get some publicity.” On this point, Bishop Emrich of Michigan endorsed official hauteur as sound church governance. “When we answer somebody who is in a lower position than ourselves,” he wrote Carpenter, “we give him an honor which he does not deserve.”

L
ATE
M
ONDAY
night in Washington, President H. E. Maurice Yaméogo presented state gifts from his newly independent African country of Upper Volta, including a red leather saddle and a model village with dwellings that converted to custom-sized holders for American cigarettes. He received an authentic Cochiti Indian tribal drum and a framed painting of the White House viewed from Lafayette Park. As Yaméogo was answering his host's toast of comity between their two nations, an usher crept in with a written note from the Situation Room. President Johnson handed it wordlessly to Secretary of State Rusk, who rushed out.

Minutes earlier, across the morning dateline in Saigon, a Citroën sedan stalled by the riverfront hotel that served as the American embassy. A Vietnamese policeman remonstrated with the driver to move on, then exchanged fatal gunfire when the driver fled instead on the back of a handily passing motorbike, just before an estimated 350 pounds of American-made C-4 plastique explosive—stolen or bought—detonated inside the car. The blast buckled buildings across the street, setting one ablaze, destroyed twenty vehicles, and sent a plume of smoke from the embassy three hundred feet high. Flying glass partially blinded CIA Station Chief Peer da Silva on the second floor, and lacerated Chargé d'Affaires Alexis Johnson on the fifth. Twenty Vietnamese employees were among the dead inside, with nearly two hundred wounded.

After midnight in Washington, President Johnson led a brief flashlight tour of the Lincoln Memorial for President Yaméogo, who praised Lincoln in a public statement that rejected the Cold War overtures to Upper Volta by Communist China. Johnson then returned to his office to monitor the bomb attack in Saigon. Not until daylight did the duty officer in the Situation Room spell out for him the names of the two American fatalities, Barbara Robbins, “R-O-B-B-I-N-S of Denver” (identified in wire stories as “a girl secretary”), and a Navy petty officer—“we're not sure if it's male or female…M-A-N-O-L-T-O Castillo, C-A-S-T-I-L-L-O.”

The President called Secretary McNamara, who found small consolation in the prior evacuation of vulnerable Americans—“it does look good that you pulled the dependents out.” McNamara proposed no immediate change in war policy. He reported that he had “cleared up the policy on taps and surveillance,” and had assured James Reston of the
Times
that his son was not a spy target. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy next told the President that the White House was preparing a statement of “firmness and shock” about the embassy bomb. He said that Henry Cabot Lodge, who was not yet announced as the next ambassador to South Vietnam, already had called that morning to urge construction of a new embassy compound in Saigon “with a high wall around it…and treat this as a, as a siege, which is what it is for working purposes.”

Johnson switched abruptly to worries about Bundy's family friend and fellow New England aristocrat. “Joe Alsop is, in my judgment, must be going crazy,” he said. “Do you think he is or not?”

“I think he's actually at the moment in better shape than he was,” Bundy replied, but he lamented the latest outburst at the White House about wiretapping and persecution. “I knew he was going to do this,” said Bundy. “I told him to shut up about it.”

S
OLEMNLY BEFORE
noon on Tuesday, timed to coincide with the high requiem mass in Detroit, a caravan left Selma consisting of an ambulance, a truck, twenty-six cars, and three hearses, headlights on, rolling east from the Pettus Bridge for twenty-five miles. Less than half the crowd of five hundred squeezed inside the tiny hillside church, Wright's Chapel AME Zion, a few hundred yards above the Liuzzo death site on Highway 80. Honorary pallbearers entered with ten empty caskets, each bearing the name of a movement victim killed in Alabama over the past two years, so far with scant sign of interest from state officials—seven during the Birmingham upheavals of 1963,
*
plus Jackson, Reeb, and Liuzzo from the voting rights campaign.

No local leader or famous orator spoke to the daylight assembly in Lowndes County, and most of the scattered organizers had come lately to steady witness. The children's demonstrations in Birmingham had transformed James Orange from hulking high school drifter to precocious minister of nonviolence. Willie Bolden, the main speaker, had worked as a longshoreman and hotel bellhop until the drama of solo demonstrations by Hosea Williams in Savannah pulled him to join Orange on King's SCLC staff. Rev. L. L. Anderson, who offered the benediction, had defied his own deacons to open Tabernacle Baptist to Bernard Lafayette for the first mass meeting in Selma. “Oh, God,” Anderson prayed at Wright's Chapel, “hasten the day when every man—even this hued, flung-down race of mine—can go from one side of this country to the other without being killed.”

With Silas Norman of SNCC, James Orange mobilized help to reload the caskets while local citizens, many of whom had heard Lafayette's Sunday sermon about small movement beginnings, refused to say goodbye to some two dozen SNCC workers. Some overheard debates—amid predictions that Mt. Gillard Church would be ashes before May—about assigning Lowndes among new trial projects across the Black Belt of Alabama. They gathered especially around Stokely Carmichael, who was marked locally for speaking “upright” to a state trooper before the great march, and pressed him not to abandon Lowndes for more promising hard cases. “Don't go to Greene County,” said Mattie Lee Moorer. “Some of y'all got to stay here.” Carmichael took soundings about where he might safely spend the night in the vast rural area of Lowndes County, to gain a foothold. Bob Mants joined him.

The caravan continued into Montgomery. Golden Frinks of North Carolina, at whose home Bevel and Nash had composed their blueprint for the Alabama voting rights campaign, led a brief procession to the capitol on foot. Blocked by guards, pallbearers laid the empty caskets on the marble steps. Bevel, saying, “I pay traffic fines here all the time,” talked his way around Governor Wallace's public ban on nonresident “outside agitators” to join the delegation of sixteen Alabamians—fifteen Negro men, plus Rev. Joseph Ellwanger from Selma's “white march” of March 6—who presented an anticlimactic freedom petition to the governor in person. Fifty women conducted a vigil on the steps outside, until black state employees in white servants' jackets hauled away the caskets.

March 30–April 7, 1965

F
ROM
San Francisco, by way of Los Angeles and Atlanta, King touched down in Detroit long enough to attend Tuesday's high requiem mass for Viola Liuzzo on the second day of mourning as proclaimed by Governor George Romney of Michigan. Forty photographers delayed the funeral to record him among the dignitaries, which featured a rare joint appearance by rival union presidents Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and James R. Hoffa of the Teamsters. Afterward, when the crowd filed out of the Immaculate Heart of Mary church behind Viola Liuzzo's maple coffin, one reporter tartly observed that “We Shall Overcome,” the recessional hymn, “soon died out because few knew the words.”

King and Bernard Lee broke away early to catch a midday flight to New York's JFK Airport. Observed from the gate by FBI surveillance agents, Bayard Rustin and Harry Wachtel rushed them to an afternoon speech in Manhattan and an evening event at Temple Beth El in Great Neck, Long Island. King's mental state alarmed his advisers to the point that Wachtel wanted him to consult a psychiatrist. Always vulnerable to depression at peaks and valleys, King suffered a letdown from Selma that collided with pressure to expand the movement. He displayed a bone-weary paralysis, confessing inability to discern what was important. The advisers found him still in possession of mementos he had promised to Viola Liuzzo's relatives. He had received a windfall gift of $25,000 for SCLC from his passing introduction to Hoffa, but seemed far more agitated about the Teamster president's pained unwillingness to support the call for a boycott of Alabama products.

Wachtel forwarded the papers to Anthony Liuzzo, covering with a note that King had been too upset to deliver them personally. Rustin maneuvered delicately to extricate King from a boycott strategy that he privately called “stupid.” On Wednesday, March 31, en route to Baltimore, Rustin blamed the impetuous staff—chiefly Bevel—for announcing in King's name a plan to remake Alabama with momentum from the Selma march. (Unless Governor Wallace acted positively on the freedom petition, said Bevel, “we want the federal government to come in here, register Negroes, and throw out the present government as un-Constitutional.”) King had felt obliged to endorse the boycott on
Meet the Press,
which loosed a gale of criticism. The White House issued a statement of nonsupport. The
New York Times
dismissed the proposal as “wrong in principle” and “unworkable in practice.” King's political goals “are of course admirable,” the editorial stated tersely. “But they can and should be reached by orderly, lawful methods.” Other newspapers decried the notion as “vindictive” and “dangerous.” Civil Rights leader Whitney Young, executive director of the business-oriented National Urban League, objected that a commercial boycott of one state would require union and business supporters to violate legitimate contracts elsewhere. Radio evangelist Solomon Michaux threw up a picket line around the Lord Baltimore Hotel, where the SCLC board met through the week, protesting that the economic weapon would “throw thousands of Negroes in Alabama out of work and into breadlines.”

The irrepressible Bevel denounced critics of the boycott, calling Whitney Young a stuffed shirt “with a fifty-dollar hat on a two-dollar head,” but he recognized fateful signs when implementation slipped late on the agenda. Andrew Young proposed instead that SCLC take the nonviolent movement from Selma into the cities of the North, as King himself had suggested, and the board's reluctant approval touched off a crossfire of grumbling. The board of Southern preachers fretted about trying to expand into Northern territory, where they had no base of churches and the established NAACP had bristled repeatedly against competitive intrusion. Bevel wondered what could trouble city Negroes compared with the woes of voteless Southern sharecroppers. Others emphasized a new SCLC program to get at the root of racial conflict through dialogue, separate from protest, by working with distinguished consultants such as anthropologist Margaret Mead and novelist Ralph Ellison. Rustin, who favored attention to issues of economic justice,
*
nevertheless stressed a gradual approach to preserve the movement's hard-won coalition. Much of the nation saw race as a matter of gross injustice peculiar to the South, he warned. Too rapid a shift of view would alienate supporters in the North, including the press, which in turn would undermine the historic mobilization of the federal government—“for the first time since 1867”—to support racial equality. “We must not split what we have got for the first time,” Rustin told the SCLC board. “No social movement has ever been successful in this country which did not involve as an ally the hard-core white middle classes.”

Hosea Williams seized upon Rustin's argument to promote his Summer Community Organization and Political Education, called SCOPE by its acronym, which would import two thousand college students on extremely short notice to register Negro voters across 120 counties of the Black Belt South that summer. King's blessing allowed the SCLC board to embrace the SCOPE alternative more heartily than the Alabama boycott, in a sign that Bevel's hasty proposal already damaged his high standing as a creative strategist. Control of fieldworkers shifted toward Williams, which escalated recriminations between the bitterest antagonists on the headstrong SCLC staff. Williams charged that Bevel tried to dodge the personal witness of nonviolence with grandiose schemes. Bevel countered that Williams had a stunted idea of nonviolence, and that the SCOPE proposal merely copied SNCC's Mississippi Summer Project from the previous year. Williams complained that Bevel campaigned to undermine him with King's executive staff. Loyalists of Williams predicted miracles from his dedication, while others worried about his possessed, domineering bravado. In Baltimore, Williams told FBI agents on the Liuzzo case that he had left all the transportation records from the Selma march in the trunk of a rented car parked somewhere at the Atlanta airport. He ducked subsequent interview requests with a message that the FBI had been nothing but a nuisance, and finally excused persistent agents with a parting comment that his staff had jumped overnight from three to thirty-one people, “and I am busier than Hoover, King, Johnson, or anyone else.”

Pressures of the world stage strained an organization steeped in folkways of the pulpit. Board members still made their customary late entrances, and many delivered the required personal donation to SCLC with an extended, self-centered homily. While Andrew Young reported that King was demanded as a peacemaker in London, Vietnam, and even South Africa, board members from Virginia to Florida complained of neglect during the Selma campaign. Rev. Roland Smith of Atlanta recommended that extra staff be assigned during crises to maintain liaison with the board. Rev. Walter Fauntroy of Washington warned not to take passage of the voting rights bill for granted. Historian Lawrence Reddick urged support for the upcoming launch of Head Start among trial federal programs to help poor children learn. Rev. D. E. King of Kentucky wondered when Negroes would be eligible to enlist in the National Guard units of southern states.

K
ING INTERRUPTED
the flow of business with a personal request to “consider seriously and carefully the matter of presidential succession in SCLC,” by formally designating an heir in the event of his demise. “I know of no one that articulates my ideas more thoroughly than Ralph Abernathy,” he said. Board members first recoiled in shock. Ministers devoted to funeral oration spoke instead about ways to amend the SCLC bylaws. Board members who preached often on the nearness of death—which King invoked for himself by the circumspect phrase “certain realistic actualities”—took refuge in practical details such as whether Abernathy should continue also as SCLC's treasurer. Daddy King channeled resentment of Abernathy into an impassioned speech about money. He scolded his colleagues over their failure to guarantee security for his four small grandchildren and Coretta in the event hatred snatched their provider, his dear son, at the age of thirty-six.

On emergency subcommittees, overwrought board members consulted feverishly about King's morbid surprise. Many knew he had been depressed before Selma, since the Nobel Prize trip of December and the realization that Hoover's FBI was blackmailing him toward suicide with surveillance tapes of his private life. Although King had resolved to curtail the risk of scandal against the movement by giving up his illicit consolations—vowing so to some friends with mortified confession, to others with sighs of resentment—he had succumbed already. Even in the vortex of twenty-hour days around the marches, he managed travel with a new black mistress of stylish discretion, who moved easily across the color line among prominent, mostly wealthy, men. Wild rides gave way to bouts of self-reproach. The pattern of King's life was exacerbated this time by his piercing failure to keep the high-stakes pledge for his own vulnerable cause, and by parallel discomforts at home. Settlement was imminent in April on Coretta's quest for them to buy a first home in Atlanta after five years as renters, but King still resisted. To him, even a modest house of $10,000 was a haunting luxury, unbecoming his commitment to the poor. His renunciations of material comfort and bourgeois ambition vexed Coretta, especially since his constant journeys most often left her behind with four children in a cramped space. She accommodated what she called the “guilt-ridden” barbs of a man whose “conscience fairly devoured him.”

In Baltimore, the
Afro-American
devoted an issue to the SCLC meeting as earth-shattering news and reported its glowing public events by the minute—tribute by Lawrence Cardinal Sheehan at 9:41
P.M.
, standing ovation for Daddy King six minutes later, entrance by Abernathy at 10:13. By contrast, the dominant
Baltimore Sun
covered the proceedings modestly on the back pages, next to an account of fraud arrests at a local barber school. In private, Rev. C. K. Steele admonished King for springing a chosen heir without prior notice to the board, and small factions stirred against Abernathy. Staff members of King's inner circle staff tended to discount the succession idea as a cosmetic truce between Abernathy and King. They had watched Abernathy mortify King by fits of jealousy at the Nobel ceremonies in Oslo, grasping for an equal share of royal treatment and half the prize money that King resolved to give away. Since then, King had been obliged to beg his sulking colleague to take part in the Selma campaign, and they did not begrudge his right to mollify Abernathy with an empty title, based on wishful presumption that SCLC had a future beyond King. What puzzled them was King's personal attachment. Rustin disparaged Abernathy as a sleepy-headed showboat, but conceded that King could not abide jail “for fifteen minutes” without him. Young, Bernard Lee, and others appreciated Abernathy as a gifted preacher, bonded to King through a base identity in the Negro church. King possessed all Abernathy's raw hunger, thrown against his own leveling obsession with stubborn, flawed human nature. The combination made a furnace of his prophetic voice at full throttle. In repose, it revealed astonishing breadth and beguiling good nature, tinged with depression.

King's aides fully expected him to snap back, as always, to the burden of his indispensable role. A few decided that his ordeals of personal despair and penance in fact were necessary, so that he could renew his inner drive to public sacrifice in the movement. Some advisers pressed him to hurry, and only one argued that they should leave him alone. “Who are we,” asked lawyer Harry Wachtel, “to say Martin must go on no matter what the cost?”

The board reconvened to adopt the succession plan. “We must by all means protect his symbolism,” said Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, urging his colleagues to unite behind King. New motions approved insurance and pension benefits for the family. Hosea Williams recommended that something be done to honor Abernathy on his birthday. Bolder members mandated a vacation for King's health, passed a resolution to pay for it, then provided a parallel trip for Ralph and Juanita Abernathy.

Leaving Baltimore, a distressed King sought out Stanley Levison to ask for perspective on his world after Selma.

“Dear Martin,” replied Levison, who was still technically in exile from King on the demand of the late President Kennedy. Although King had proclaimed a unilateral “pardon” weeks earlier, Wachtel and others slowly accommodated his full return to their ranks. Even if they could imagine their bosom friend to be a treasonous agent of Soviet influence, bent upon destruction of American freedom, it seemed absurd that the government's murky, lame response was to interdict his volunteer work for King. The separation made sense to them only as naked obeisance to J. Edgar Hoover, but they proceeded with abundant caution because Hoover survived Kennedy. Out of their sight, Hoover stayed on the political offensive by ordering FBI offices to scour future SCOPE workers for subversive backgrounds and to find out whether King had visited Highlander Center more than once. “If we can obtain information disproving King's claims which he recently made before ‘Meet the Press,'” Hoover instructed, “we would have some counterintelligence possibility.”

Since late 1963, Levison had read to fill hours long devoted to fund-raising and other practical services for King. He tried to make up for a weakness in liberal education by studying classical political literature, such as Cervantes, Zola, Hugo, and Tolstoy. He visited gyms in Manhattan to observe the “gentle arts” of jujitsu as a metaphor for nonviolence. He even analyzed popular films, adopting as a motto Humphrey Bogart's statement to predatory mobsters in
The Harder They Fall:
“You can't buy me and you can't scare me.” His favorite new author was Victor Hugo, for his ability to summarize “mighty” events in spare language. Hugo called Waterloo “a turning point in the universe.”