At Canaan's Edge (9 page)

FBI
AGENTS
recorded that at 10:30
P.M
. that same Monday, March 8, King entered Brown Chapel to address nearly a thousand people still gathered there in the nightly mass meeting. James Bevel was preaching again from the Book of Ruth about their unfinished quest to “go and see the king” George Wallace in Montgomery, insisting that yesterday's blood vindicated the practice of nonviolence. “Any man who has the urge to hit a posseman or a State Trooper with a pop bottle is a fool,” cried Bevel. “That is just what they want you to do. Then they can call you a mob and beat you to death.” A sudden hush ran through the church to announce King's unseen arrival, and Bevel stood aside in the pulpit for a five-minute ovation of welcome above a breakout rendition of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

King delivered a tribute to Sunday's march. He mingled an apology for missing it with a reminder of the travails that buffeted him, too, quoting poet Langston Hughes (“Life for me ain't been no crystal stair”), and vowing that the threat of death could not stop them now. “If a man is 36 years old, as I happen to be,” he said, “and some great truth stands before the door of his life…and he refuses to stand up because he wants to live a little longer and he's afraid that his home will get bombed or he's afraid that he will lose his job, he's afraid that he will get shot or beaten down by State Troopers, he may go on and live until he's 80, but he's just as dead at 36 as he would be at 80. And the state of breathing in his life is merely the announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.” King roused the crowd for the next day on Pettus Bridge. “We must let them know that if they beat one Negro they are going to have to beat a hundred,” he declared, “and if they beat a hundred, then they are going to have to beat a thousand.”

King recognized fresh hope in the first fifty traveling clergy who reached Selma and were ushered to seats in the front pews. One by one, he asked them to stand and introduce themselves. From the Washington charter flight, Methodist bishop John Wesley Lord expressed shock over the photographs from Pettus Bridge. “I hear that Dr. Martin Luther King was calling for white ministers to come and march,” he said. “And I am a white minister. You could say that I heard the Macedonian call.”

Toward midnight in Washington, President Johnson prodded one of his top assistants about frenzied efforts to prevent repetition of Sunday's violence. “The Negroes are still meeting in the church in Selma with Martin Luther King,” Bill Moyers reported. He said Governor Wallace had just proposed covertly through the intermediary Buford Ellington that the President assume responsibility in Selma by federalizing the National Guard. However, since Wallace undoubtedly would denounce that very move as power-mad tyranny against his state, Moyers added that Attorney General Katzenbach was concentrating on the alternative of getting the Negroes to cancel Tuesday's march. “The question is,” Moyers said crisply, “do you want to be informed when King calls back?”

“Yep,” said Johnson. “But I would take a much tougher line than we're going to with him.” The President was disturbed by news footage of Katzenbach kneeling in shirtsleeves to plead with the young sit-ins to leave his office corridor after business hours, and by shots later that night of them telling the cameras that they would gladly desist if the U.S. marshals hauling them out of the Justice Department were dispatched instead to protect constitutional rights in Selma. Johnson attributed the protest to orchestration by King. “I think it's outrageous what's on TV,” he said. “It looks like that man's in charge of the country and taking it over.” He told Moyers to remind King of Monday's bargaining and “take a very firm line with him.”

F
OR THE
remainder of a long hard night, Johnson's intermediaries wrestled earnestly with King over prospects for the voting rights movement. Each said the other could tip a precarious balance from disastrous collision just ahead to historic triumph. Johnson's side demanded a peaceful respite to shore up national consensus, while King insisted he was “too deeply committed” to call off the march without tangible signs of support from Washington. The balance of nerves seesawed as they exchanged blandishments, professions of respect, and outright threats, but only hints of their struggle seeped outside private councils. About two o'clock Tuesday morning, agents notified FBI headquarters that King reportedly had agreed to confine any march that day to the city limits of Selma—thus avoiding another confrontation across Pettus Bridge. Lawyer Harry Wachtel suspected from parallel talks that Attorney General Katzenbach did not “have his heart” fully in the pressure he applied, but advisers told King by telephone conference that the tenderfoot church elders could not walk far toward Montgomery, anyway.

An hour later, agents gleaned from wiretapped conference calls that King seemed resolved to lead his columns back into the maw of Alabama troopers after all, in spite of Wallace, Johnson, or his own admitted fear of snipers, saying he must keep faith with the marchers. He knew a host of new ones were careening toward Selma through makeshift points of transit, oblivious to his second thoughts. The Episcopal seminarians were mostly too giddy to sleep before catching a bus from Atlanta, having risen Monday morning for classes in Massachusetts and next coming to rest in King's own private office at SCLC, staring at his books and mementos, the males bedded down on the floor and Judith Upham of St. Louis on his leather couch. Some of the Boston Unitarians dozed in the Hertz rental office at the Atlanta airport until a connecting flight early Tuesday, March 9—Henry Hampton
*
on a chair, James Reeb on a divan, Orloff Miller on the floor.

President Johnson called Bill Moyers at home before breakfast. “What happened with Martin Luther King?” he asked. A baby cried in the background as Moyers explained that he had not awakened the President because he had heard from Attorney General Katzenbach only at four o'clock and again just now. He summarized the marathon negotiations by reporting that King was “very fearful for his life” and “really wanted” to cooperate, but “couldn't get out of at least a token march.” So the administration still faced a double bind. “Any effort to put a federal presence in there will only likely cause Wallace to feel that he's being pressured and confronted, and he might go in the wrong direction,” Moyers told the President. In case of renewed violence, however, the White House would face difficult questions about “how does it look if things go wrong and we've done nothing more” than on Sunday? Moyers described the situation as “very tenuous.” He said their intermediaries were working both sides to reduce the chances of conflagration—“Ellington is at this very moment talking to Wallace”—and “the best we can do now is hope.”

The President did not fulminate against King as he had done the night before. He had a politician's respect for pressure, and very likely realized that the tide of reaction to Sunday's march was beyond pushbutton control. Johnson had added political nuance to his “tougher line” on King by sending in former governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, the head of the new Community Relations Service created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Before dawn, Collins landed at Craig Air Force Base in one of the two-engine jets reserved for presidential use and proceeded to briefings from Assistant Attorney General John Doar, head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, who since Sunday had pulled nearly all his staff lawyers into Selma. Collins and Doar drove that morning in a white military sedan to the home of Selma's Negro dentist, Sullivan Jackson, and Jean Jackson knocked apologetically on the door of her front bedroom to tell King that “a man from the President” was there to see him.

March 9, 1965

K
ING
and Ralph Abernathy stumbled into the living room in Dr. Jackson's matching burgundy pajamas, followed by colleagues who had been trying to sleep on sofas, rugs, and even in the tub of the bathroom, which James Bevel called his crisis “suite” since the forced separation from his wife ten days earlier. King's inner circle had endured the night of emergency bulletins and fierce internal debate, briefly relieved by one loud bang that brought panicked sentries running to find the bed collapsed under a conclave and King convulsed with laughter, attributing the fall to the extra weight of his brother, Rev. A. D. King, who accused Abernathy, who pointed to Hosea Williams, and so on around the sprawled huddle of rotund preachers. Now groggy but gravely composed, King sat at the dining room table to hear John Doar disclose that U.S. District Judge Frank M. Johnson indeed was signing a federal court order to prohibit another voting rights march from Selma until further notice.

King sagged grimly. Only yesterday afternoon, his movement lawyers had filed their petition for Judge Johnson to do the opposite—to forbid Governor Wallace and other Alabama officials from repeating Sunday's violent interference. This stinging reversal went far beyond postponement or denial as the anticipated risk. While King could not claim to be surprised, he was depressed by the very fact that Doar had warned him of such an order and that Attorney General Katzenbach had invoked its likelihood to buttress President Johnson's demand for delay. Suspecting correctly that the President's lawyers and Judge Johnson were to some degree in cahoots, he complained that the order was blatantly unjust and political.

Doar did not try to defend the legal merits. Judge Johnson was issuing the injunction against King on his own initiative, without a motion or pleading from any party to the case, and he was suspending in advance a number of constitutional rights inherent to the march without a word of justification in law or fact. Like Katzenbach, Doar privately agreed with King's lawyers that the injunction would be overturned on appeal, but he knew the issue would be moot long before then. For now, the order carried the full authority of national law—even if Judge Johnson himself believed it was unconstitutional—and Doar stood on this practical advantage as an article of rectitude. “This is a
federal
order,” he repeatedly told King across the table. Never in all his civil disobedience had King defied one, in part because the federal courts remained the hope and refuge of the civil rights movement. Federal judges and justices had sustained its victories. Even now they were moving to enforce the 1964 law against entrenched segregation in the states, and Doar warned that King could alienate more than the federal courts if he disobeyed. The Justice Department would be obliged to defend and carry out an order to jail him for contempt, which inevitably would divide the administration and poison chances for voting rights legislation.

All these crushing points Doar could make painfully as King's frequent ally since the sit-ins of 1960. A Republican holdover who had stayed on at Justice to build the huge backlog of civil rights cases across the South, Doar was a pioneer of tenacity and innovation among government lawyers. He traveled endless hours beyond courtrooms and offices to remote areas of near peonage for Negroes, often alone and sometimes warily incognito, gathering evidence independently—to J. Edgar Hoover's everlasting annoyance—that the FBI overlooked or ignored. His newborn son had gone unnamed for six weeks while he followed the maelstrom after the Birmingham demonstrations of 1963, ending with King at the funeral of NAACP martyr Medgar Evers, and Doar, having personally escorted James Meredith through mobs into Ole Miss not on the first try, or even the second try, had earned standing to counsel patience. He spoke tersely in a calming style he brought from small-town practice in Wisconsin. Judge Johnson was a good judge, he said. As King well knew, he had cast the deciding judicial vote to vindicate the bus boycott. The judge was not dismissing King's suit permanently. He was just demanding a suspension of trouble in order to hear evidence. If King called off the march, Doar promised, the Department of Justice would join as a friend of the court to seek protection for the future. No one could say how the judge would rule, of course, but by obeying Judge Johnson's order King might win not only a court-protected march later but also the full backing of the executive branch for a voting rights bill.

King tried to engage Doar's points of law, but his arguments gravitated to moral anguish. He said Judge Johnson's injunction was like “condemning a man for being robbed,” and otherwise used language that discomfited government lawyers as overwrought. King saw moral dilemmas where they saw logical relief, and they questioned how he could speak of mere delay as condemnation, especially delay of a potentially suicidal protest. Since King attributed good will to administration officials from President Johnson on down, and readily agreed that the federal government was the essential instrument to establish new freedom to vote, Katzenbach had puzzled through the night about why King agonized about relying on trust for a few days. King, on the other hand, groaned against the convenient assumption that he would give way for a promise. It summoned up a contrasting heritage that made patriotism an act of faith and put a furnace in his troubled voice. “But Mr. Attorney General,” King said repeatedly, “you have not been a black man in America for three hundred years.” To Doar, as to Katzenbach, he said it was his “duty” to march, and he could not promise to obey the new court order.

Governor Collins waded into the impasse with a personal message from President Johnson. The President felt strongly that Sunday's violence disgraced the United States in the eyes of the world, said Collins. His overriding concern was to prevent more violence that would inflame racial hatreds and threaten stability far beyond Selma. Therefore, quite apart from legal mandates, the President wanted King's people to stay home to guarantee the peace.

This was too much for Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. “You're talking to the wrong people,” he interrupted from the background. Shuttlesworth, the irrepressible movement leader from Birmingham, said Collins was mixed up about who was beating people over the head and who was nonviolent. Did he see the pictures? Shuttlesworth suggested that Collins take up the issue of violence with Governor Wallace and Sheriff Clark. “They're the ones in the disgrace business,” he said with his matador's bravado.

Collins retreated from grand exhortation to explore compromise. What if King marched across Pettus Bridge but then turned around? How far could he go and still plausibly claim not to violate the judge's new ban on “attempting to march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, Alabama”? As King responded to various hypothetical options, John Doar squirmed with disapproval. In his view it was worse than improper for Collins to tinker with a court order, as such a course played into the proven strength of segregationist powers. Bitter courtroom experience convinced Doar that any temporary advantage of an “adjustment” to Judge Johnson's order would backfire a hundredfold in the discretionary evasions that the South had refined to minimize Negro voting nearly a century after the Fifteenth Amendment and to keep schools segregated more than a decade after the
Brown
decision. Because the overriding goal in civil rights compliance was to close off loopholes, not create them, many Justice Department lawyers resented the mediating role of the new Community Relations Service as a blatant invitation to political mischief.

Doar withdrew from the talks to avoid any appearance of tacit consent, and Collins left the Jackson home later Tuesday morning to search for Colonel Al Lingo among the state troopers massed on the other side of Pettus Bridge, this time behind an armada of 150 cruisers. His urgent goal now was to answer King's piercing doubt about compromise. “I don't believe you can get those people not to charge into us even if we do stop,” King kept saying. King's worst fear was to lose everything—to march just short enough to lose momentum and cohesion within the movement, just far enough to break the injunction and lose any chance of federal alliance, just blindly enough to reap blame on all sides for getting mauled gratuitously in defeat. Such was the accustomed lot of Negroes as recounted by folk wisdom and brash comedians.

T
HE MORNING
crowd at Brown Chapel was “ominously quiet, oppressively tense,” according to a theologian from Chicago. Speakers reviewed the Selma movement to packed congregations at Brown and at First Baptist a block down Sylvan Street, while buses, rental cars, and even taxis from Montgomery continued to spill newcomers into the overflow mass between the two churches. Suitcases and bedrolls were stowed in the Brown parsonage or shuttled to Good Samaritan Hospital, where the Edmundite Catholics alone of white Selma welcomed travelers to sleeping spots laid out on the floor of the maternity ward. Young Negroes of Selma recruited new arrivals to their family apartments in the Carver housing project nearby, some treating the collared white clergy as celebrities to the extent of asking for autographs, while weary and embarrassed clergy eyed bandaged veterans of Sunday's march as heroes. To one reporter, the “coolest cats in town” were scores of SNCC staff workers who patrolled in radio-equipped cars or sliced through clumps of people to conduct sidewalk classes on nonviolence. One who demonstrated shielding techniques vowed above all else to make sure that “if anyone gets whupped out there today, it ain't gonna be our women.” Another told cowed bystanders he had learned to cushion the expected licks by letting his hair grow.

U.S. marshals, arriving after an hour's high-speed drive from Montgomery, fanned out to search for Hosea Williams and the other parties named in the restraining order that Judge Johnson signed just before ten o'clock. Rumors of their mission swept unevenly through assorted demonstrators “numbering between two thousand and twenty-five hundred,” by FBI estimate. “Injunctions aren't legal until they are served,” James Forman cautioned one group that heard the march was canceled, “and we haven't seen any order.” Some who were steeling themselves to face the troopers and tear gas shrugged off any piece of paper as a minor nuisance. Others expressed dismay that federal authority could side with George Wallace. “As far as I'm concerned, the federal government
is
the enemy,” Diane Nash said bitterly on the fringes of one argument. The unseen order left James Reeb of the Boston Unitarians paralyzed by the “heavy responsibility deliberately to break the law,” as he told a Baptist minister who left him to meditate.

Willie Ricks of SNCC climbed the steps outside Brown Chapel to aim a pep talk at a corner of the milling crowd. “That is
your
bridge!” he shouted. The looming barrier at the Alabama River was fully theirs as a public possession, he declared, and they were free to march right past its memories, its fear—all the limits the Edmund Pettus span called to mind. Ricks sang out with a preacher's cadence in the street language of a seventh-grade dropout who had converted to the Chattanooga sit-ins from a life “stealing hubcaps.” Now twenty-two, he had proven himself a gifted motivator in SNCC's jail movements across the South, most recently in Moultrie, Georgia. “If Sheriff Clark tries to stop you,” he cried out, “what are you gonna do?” Ricks elicited a series of shouts vowing successively to march through the opposition of the major segregationists, then through Uncle Toms, various judges, “your mama,” and finally even fainthearted movement figures. “If Martin Luther King says don't march, what are you gonna do?” he shouted. Ricks had a section of the outdoor crowd so worked up to charge the Pettus Bridge that Andrew Young quietly asked SNCC leaders to tone him down in the interests of control. They refused.

Harris Wofford of the Peace Corps prevailed upon Young to take him to the secluded council in the Jackson home. Alarmed by the undercurrent of defiance in the waiting crowd, he pleaded with King not to let emotion divide the civil rights movement from the federal courts. The pilgrim clergy would understand the reasons for delay, he predicted, and would return to march in Selma whenever the court granted permission. “Do you think people really would?” King asked. Even if all the estimated eight hundred travelers from twenty-two states might forgive him for wasting their sacrifice, he wondered how to re-create the galvanizing jolt of events already being called “Bloody Sunday.” King remained noncommittal with Wofford, as with a SNCC delegation that pressed arguments on the other side. James Forman, Silas Norman, and others said Sunday's violence nullified their qualms about King's strategy. Now they rallied to the fundamental right of protest, telling King they could not give that up and hope to win the vote. Their chairman, John Lewis, had just left the hospital with a fractured skull and was outside Brown Chapel defending the people's right to decide. How could King bottle up these people who risked their lives to answer his call?

A
CROSS
S
ELMA,
the driver of one bus refused to approach the racial showdown being forecast in radio bulletins and discharged passengers at an open field almost two miles from Brown Chapel. The eleven Episcopal seminarians from Cambridge were among those obliged to trudge conspicuously with luggage past Selmians staring from front porches. They joined other latecomers at a staging area in the playground of the Carver housing project, where strangers eventually passed by to collect signed power-of-attorney forms in case of arrest or casualty. Jitters quickened and lapsed over a long wait. The seminarians assumed from a distant sighting of King's entrance that those inside the church must have learned the final plan, but King retreated to the Brown Chapel parsonage to receive a last round of telephone debate on the arcane but gloomy legal implications of
United States v. United Mine Workers
(1946), in which John L. Lewis had been treated harshly for violating an injunction not to strike the coal mines, along with more welcome legal advice not to hamper his defense by specifying his intentions in detail. King embraced ambiguity in discussions that ranged from destiny to personality quirks and political timing. Straddling the conflicts between movement zeal and national authority, he thrashed about for chances to bind them together.