At Canaan's Edge (28 page)

In downtown Birmingham, seminarian Judith Upham unwisely wore high heels to picket the Bishop of Alabama on Friday, April 30. She took off her shoes to finish four hours' walking with Daniels and three Episcopal priests outside the stone headquarters of the diocese, carrying placards against segregation. Most pedestrians avoided them. One matron icily wished all their children to be born black, and a few stopped to read or discuss their leaflet of grievance against Bishop Carpenter. He had pressed for “the exact wording” of abusive incidents mentioned in their petition, writing, “I cannot imagine the good people of St. Paul's Church, Selma, using obscene language in your presence.” When the seminarians reluctantly complied, saying in a private audience on Tuesday that insults were peripheral to the issue of segregated worship, Carpenter had maintained that they were the ones stuck on extraneous details. The rear pew and last Communion cup were trifles in themselves, he declared, to be embraced as tokens of Christian humility. He advised them to “go to church with eyes closed and just worship the Lord without looking for faults,” calling Upham “Old Girl” in a stream of jolly deflection, tinged with sarcasm, that bowled over the seminarians. They wrote him since with recovered grasp—“There is a difference between humility and humiliation…you remain in our prayers. Thank you for the good coffee yesterday!”—but Carpenter left them alone on the picket line. Back in Selma, they attended an integrated Catholic service with Jim Leatherer, whose conduct involuntarily repelled Upham as coarsely self-righteous, reminiscent of the bishop, in spite of her contrasting admiration for the one-legged marcher from Saginaw. She wrestled anew with the elusive discipline of brotherhood.

Also on April 30, FBI surveillance agents tracked the arrival of Clarence Jones at the Atlanta airport for the resumption of truce talks between King and SNCC leaders. Singer Harry Belafonte mediated after a ten-day break, and the two sides vented familiar disputes that had become “more dramatic,” Belafonte figured, because of attention from Selma. Their session wound up with a cooperative statement between King and Lewis, drafted by James Forman, and a public comment by Belafonte that “these things could not be allowed to fester.” Stokely Carmichael told SNCC colleagues that King confessed uncertainty about how to address economic issues ahead. “I think the cats are honest,” he said. “Bevel and Belafonte want the boycott. King doesn't.” Back in Selma, Carmichael and Scott B. Smith ran into the seminarians again Sunday night at the Elks Club. Smith borrowed $10, and Carmichael said they could be useful in Lowndes County for registration day on May 3.

Daniels and Upham managed to find the domed white courthouse in front of the Hayneville water tower, surrounded by police cruisers and U.S. government sedans in a jam of parked vehicles. They instinctively avoided the local crowds milling about the square for the Monday start of the Viola Liuzzo murder trial, and gravitated to a line of Negroes outside the Old Jail two blocks away. There they met John Hulett, one of the only two Negroes to have passed the registration test, along with a garrulous, electrified version of Carmichael that was scarcely recognizable to the seminarians as the existentialist they knew for offbeat theories of John Brown and Jesus. He pranced about with encouragement in a Caribbean lilt, making light of fancy test words and special intimidations for Negroes, handing SNCC buttons blithely to deputies, but he told Daniels and Upham in a quiet aside that the area was unsafe for white movement workers. They left within an hour. Armed registrars processed sixty of 150 applicants who waited all day, and later accepted nine as a splash in the thimble of new black voters.

Not a single Negro braved attendance at the week-long trial in Hayneville. Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, sat next to defendant Collie LeRoy Wilkins at the defense table, and Inspector Joe Sullivan entered with a heavy protective guard for chief witness Gary Thomas Rowe, now revealed as an FBI informant. Sparrows flew through open windows for aerial chases around the high-ceilinged courtroom, sometimes perching on the triangular relic of a prisoners' cage welded into one rear corner, but drama centered upon Klan Klonsel Matt Murphy, first cousin of Mississippi novelist Walker Percy. He bellowed, waved a pistol, and stomped on his hat. Skimming through a cursory defense case that lasted only twenty-one minutes, he pitched himself instead into lurid attacks on the prosecution. Murphy denounced victim Liuzzo as “a white nigger who turned her car over to a black nigger for the purpose of hauling niggers and communists back and forth.” He accused Leroy Moton on the stand of shooting Liuzzo himself after interracial sex “under the hypnotic spell of narcotics,” and, most heatedly, he impeached star witness Rowe as a liar—“treacherous as a rattlesnake…a traitor and a pimp and an agent of Castro and I don't know what all”—for violating his membership oath to guard Klan secrets.

“No one, prosecutor or defense lawyer, had a kind word for the dead woman,” reported the
New York Times.
The lead prosecutor acknowledged widespread sentiment to excuse Liuzzo's murder “on the grounds that this woman was riding in a car with a Negro man,” but warned against setting a legal precedent that might backfire against segregationist travelers including the jurors themselves. His closing argument—that a not-guilty vote would favor any potential bushwhacker who “sees you driving your Negro maid home, or sees your wife driving her cook home”—was regarded as a creative but futile stretch. With Attorney General Katzenbach privately braced to count even one prosecution vote as a moral victory, the jury made front-page news simply by extending deliberations overnight without reaching swift acquittal, and then on May 7 deadlocked 10–2 for conviction on a charge of manslaughter. Shocked prosecutors vowed to prepare for another trial.

Farmer Edmund Sallee said fellow jurors felt “insulted” by Murphy's courtroom antics, including his vicious diatribes against the deceased victim. By failing so far to convict a Klan defendant, the twelve white males did fulfill expectations of avowed segregationists from Lowndes County, but the jury box already had pushed them past visceral images that prevailed elsewhere. The editors of
Ladies' Home Journal,
surprised by poll results showing that 55.2 percent of American women believed Viola Liuzzo “should have stayed home,” convened a random sample of Northern women for a discussion forum that skittered tensely through misgivings—with participants objecting most commonly that Liuzzo forsook her children, or could not know enough about issues “outside her back yard,” or lacked “her husband's permission,” or should have “canceled her newspaper subscription” as a less extreme protest, but also saying, after one woman confessed leaving her children once with a sitter for a three-day club trip, that no family could resent an absent husband shot for something important, like resisting the Nazis, or that Liuzzo “might have thought her cause was stronger than her husband going to war.” The independent embrace of risk by a middle-class mother was yet an unstable new concept, which foreclosed broad interest in Liuzzo as a martyr of human scale.

As for Gary Thomas Rowe, the Hayneville jury took a more informed view than observers on either side of the civil rights struggle. Several jurors said they could have won over the two holdouts against conviction—hard cases from Fort Deposit—if only Rowe had pleaded guilty to something for his part in the crime. Sophisticated Southerners missed such nuance out of fear and contempt. No lawyer in Alabama wanted to defend Rowe when Klonsel Murphy, vowing to flush him from hiding to face revenge, sued in mid-May for legal fees he claimed Rowe had incurred before defecting from the Klan. Through the American Bar Association, Attorney General Katzenbach prevailed upon Paul Johnston (Harvard '30, Yale Law '33) to represent Rowe, whereupon fellow partners, including his own father and brother, summarily expelled Johnston from his lifelong practice at the Birmingham firm of Cabaniss, Johnston, Gardner & Clark. (“You presently refuse to abide by the unanimous decision of the other members of the firm,” stated the letter of severance.) Nationally prominent lawyers and judges commiserated with Johnston from afar. Alabama peers ostracized him to advertise their professional distance from Rowe, who radiated compound controversy as a turncoat Klansman working a race murder for the feds.

Prosecutors seeking justice for Liuzzo stressed the positive side of their linchpin witness, and FBI officials gladly cooperated by concealing Rowe's violent five-year career as a protected federal informant. Not until 1979 would a U.S. Justice Department task force discover that he lied repeatedly under oath about his role in sordid, faction-ridden Klan conspiracies,
*
and that FBI supervisors covered up all but the bare fact of his former employment. More than two decades later, Birmingham historian Diane McWhorter would examine the detailed mass of Rowe's FBI record, including his reported claim to have killed a black man in 1963, and find it difficult in retrospect to sort out what was understated, condoned, exaggerated, or sanitized. Only one contemporary reporter addressed the Liuzzo trial's glimpse of undercover work by Rowe. “What sorely troubles me, if we accept the prosecution's account of the slaying,” wrote Inez Robb, “is the moral aspect of Rowe's presence in the car…. Under what kind of secret orders did Rowe work?” Was he expected to join in crime, strictly observe, or try to prevent murder? “It is one woman's opinion” she concluded, “that the FBI owes the nation an explanation of its action in the Liuzzo case.”

Robb's May 17 column appeared in 132 newspapers and landed on J. Edgar Hoover's desk with a report finding “no information of a derogatory nature” about Robb. Hoover remembered differently. “Back in the '30s or '40s,” he wrote, “she vilified the FBI and me personally when I was in Miami.” His note sent FBI officials scurrying a quarter-century back through their files to unearth yellowed confirmation of Hoover's legendary antennae for criticism—a March 5, 1940, Robb column that scolded the top G-man of “the most wonderful brown eyes” for vacationing in mob-controlled spots along Florida's casino Gold Coast while vowing to fight crime. Hoover's deputies, chastened as always, came back with a steely recommendation that DeLoach contact Inez Robb to “set her straight” about Rowe.

“No,” Hoover scrawled, countermanding an order that might provoke further inquiry. “She is a ‘bitch' & nothing would be gained.”

“B
UNDY
I
S
Unable to Appear Because of ‘Other Duties,'” headlined a skeptical
New York Times
story on the principal debater's late scratch from the May 15 Vietnam National Teach-In. The
Times
reported that White House officials were “uncomfortable with the need for silence,” but “could not in any way discuss Mr. Bundy's whereabouts.” (Bundy slipped away for secret truce negotiations in the Dominican Republic, where President Johnson on April 28 had dispatched U.S. troops to quell incipient civil war.) Substitutes took his place before a live audience of five thousand at Washington's Sheraton Park Hotel, connected by patched radio feed to 100,000 listeners at 122 campus teach-ins over thirty-five states. Professor Eric Wolf of Michigan, speaking for the committee that had sprung up from the original teach-in seven weeks earlier, introduced the debate as a “life blood of democracy,” vitally needed to resolve contradictory claims that Vietnam policy was at once too complex for the average citizen and as simple as good versus evil. “We are here to serve notice that American citizens are not children,” he declared.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, speaking for the administration's policy, warned that it would be foolish to ignore “the very sure and very terrible consequences of either enlargement or withdrawal” in Vietnam. Enlargement invited World War III, and withdrawal betrayed the students, professors, and intellectuals of Vietnam—“people like ourselves”—who opposed the Vietnamese Communists. Famously, he observed that “if we took the Marines now in the Dominican Republic and sent them to South Vietnam, we would be a good deal better off in both countries.” Reporters emphasized the intramural critique of Johnson by a partisan Kennedy Democrat, but the predominantly antiwar crowd booed Schlesinger's overall support for the military commitment to Vietnam. He recommended supplementary moves toward a negotiated settlement that “doesn't promise a perfect solution,” and paused to add, “But life is not very satisfactory.” Boos turned to silence, then scattered applause. “I welcome this existential endorsement,” Schlesinger said wryly.

Like most of the parallel campus debates, the showcase National Teach-In continued for some nine hours after the radio feed. The format limiting speakers to professors and government officials set a muted, academic tone for what columnist Peter Lisagor called a “battle of the eggheads.” Daniel Ellsberg, destined to become a historic dissenter in 1971, argued for the State Department that the war could and should be won, while professor Robert Scalapino of Berkeley, standing in for Bundy, proposed a complex program “from the standpoint of maximizing the fundamental interests which you and the non-Communist world hold together.”

Across the continent at Berkeley, a more raucous panoply of speakers held forth through intermittent rain the next weekend for nearly thirty-four continuous hours. Professor Scalapino boycotted the largest and longest teach-in as a “travesty” on his home campus that “should be repudiated by all true scholars irrespective of their views on Vietnam.” Staughton Lynd of Yale denounced Scalapino for cowardly elitism. Baby doctor Benjamin Spock and British philosopher Bertrand Russell expounded on the threat of nuclear annihilation. Maverick journalist I. F. Stone fielded questions about colonial interventions from the Napoleonic Wars to the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and confronted the fear of “irreversible” Communism—noting from the pattern of police states that “it takes a hell of a long time to get a thaw,” but trusting in democratic engagement and free thought (“Jefferson for me is an ultimate and a far greater figure than Lenin”) to thaw tyrannies “instead of trying to strangle them with blockades and with hatred.” Novelist Norman Mailer conjured up florid images of Lyndon Johnson as a cornpone emperor drawn to Vietnam “out of the pusillanimities of the madnesses of his secret sleep,” then swerved through contrarian rhetoric of an isolationist utopia to an “equally visionary” cry for virile combat without high-altitude bombers—“Fight like men! Go in man-to-man against the Vietcong!”—that discomfited some imaginations he had tickled into flight.