Parting the Waters (102 page)

Other civil rights groups did not fail to notice the SCLC's head start, and King tried to repair relations with SNCC as well as the NAACP. In March, he agreed to speak at a private SNCC fund-raiser in New York, hosted by Harry Belafonte. SNCC's financial distress was such that Bob Moses made one of his rare trips out of Mississippi for the event. Jones and Sherrod came up from Albany. Tim Jenkins came down from Yale Law School. SNCC chairman Charles McDew arrived at the last minute from Louisiana, where, on a visit to a jailed SNCC colleague, he had been imprisoned for a month himself on a manifestly contrived charge of vagrancy. Before King arrived, Belafonte had a long session in his living room with the SNCC delegation, trying to convince them that their criticisms of King's leadership were misguided. The students complained generally that King was too far above the battle, too cautious, too distracted by his fame. Moses said very little, but his immersion into Mississippi stood as the prime counterexample to King. Among themselves, the SNCC leaders grumbled that Belafonte's allegiance to King was grounded in an entertainer's rule that every show must have a star. To Belafonte's arguments that the real King was much less bourgeois than he might seem, they snickered about Coretta's pearls and pillbox hats, Daddy King's self-centered bluster, King's vacations and silk pajamas. “If it looks like it, acts like it, tastes like it, smells like it, and feels like it, you know, at some point you've got to say it
is
,” one joked.

They spoke with the conviction of those who had purged themselves of status attachments, but they did not press their sarcasm too openly upon Belafonte. They respected him as one of SNCC's prime benefactors, and they conceded his point that no other leader would tolerate their effrontery. At that night's cocktail party, King mingled briefly with the crowd, then stood next to Belafonte to make a glowing speech about what he himself had learned from the sacrifices of SNCC students. He introduced each of them for a statement about the nature of SNCC's ongoing work, urged the guests to support them, and departed without mentioning his own organization.

King plunged into another “People-to-People” tour on March 24. “Let's pull it, doctor!” Wyatt Walker shouted to his wife as their alarm clock sounded before dawn, and they pushed King's schedule up a notch to the frantic pace of a political campaign. By midmorning, Walker, King, Abernathy, Dorothy Cotton, and Bernard Lee had flown from Atlanta to Richmond, held a press conference, greeted a host of Negro dignitaries, and raced by motorcade to Petersburg for a luncheon speech. They canvassed door-to-door that afternoon, then drove a hundred miles west to a mass meeting of nearly three thousand people. The tour went on through Virginia, dragging behind schedule despite the prodding of Walker and his clipboard, so that some audiences were left waiting two and three hours. Walker dispatched preachers ahead to hold the crowds.

News of the VEP and the new registration drives did not escape into the white press at all. VEP officials actively discouraged publicity for fear of inciting a political storm against their tax arrangements. Whitney Young of the Urban League refused to join in a public announcement because he was dissatisfied with the anticipated allotment of funds. For diplomatic reasons, King urged that Roy Wilkins be the focus of any VEP announcements, but Wilkins declined to participate. These inhibiting factors kept the early successes of the registration drive a secret even from activists in the civil rights movement. Stanley Levison was shocked to hear Wyatt Walker report that Dorchester trainees already had founded 61 small citizenship schools across the South. This was fantastic, cried Levison, but where was the news? Press clips were vital to his fund-raising letters, which generated money to build the entire program. By the time King agreed to issue a low-key press release on the SCLC drive, the number of schools had grown to 95 and the Dorchester trainees to 930. The release attracted little attention among reporters, who had grown skeptical of drum rolls for Negro registration.

 

Levison was preoccupied with the SCLC's running battle against extinction. On March 9, he traveled to Atlanta for an emergency meeting about the
Sullivan
case. Prospects were grim. The Supreme Court, by rejecting a request that the case be transferred to federal court, had just killed the desperate hope of the four SCLC defendants to postpone the confiscation of their assets. As a result, the automobiles of Shuttlesworth, Abernathy, and Joseph Lowery had been sold at a state-ordered auction. Some of S. S. Seay's real estate was attached for quick sale. Sullivan had placed a lien on the land Abernathy had inherited from his father, and lawyers were moving to discover other property that could be seized. Fred Shuttlesworth, still growling about the incompetence of his lawyers in his Birmingham sit-in case, walked into the emergency meeting almost directly from the Birmingham jail. As King's appointed secretary for the occasion, he noted drily in the minutes that the discussion “centered on lawyers and their efficiency.”

There was subdued panic among the four SCLC defendants, for whom ruin was no longer merely a theoretical possibility. Mayor James of Montgomery had another $500,000 judgment in the appeals courts behind Sullivan; Governor Patterson had a bigger one after that. It was fine for them to portray themselves in fund-raising appeals as four lowly Negro preachers being crushed by state repression, but at stake were the family treasures of relatively prosperous men. Lowery disclosed to his colleagues that he stood to lose between $150,000 and $200,000. This was real money, the new birthright of preachers who had succeeded despite the millstone of a segregated economy. Together with jail and violence, such financial persecution was driving the SCLC's leadership from the toughest parts of the South. Shuttlesworth had moved to Cincinnati. Phifer, his cellmate, was taking a church in New York, and the recent bombing of his home had convinced C. O. Simpkins to move from Shreveport to Chicago. Adapting to harsh realities, King handled the delicate diplomacy of bringing in Northern white lawyers to supersede Southern Negro ones. Stanley Levison, sharp-eyed and practical as always, strongly supported the move on the grounds that the Southern lawyers were overpaid and ineffective, which made it more difficult for Levison to raise money. The crisis sent him back to New York with a renewed mandate.

From the beginning, Levison had seen the
Sullivan
case as both a threat and an opportunity. Because the lawsuit gravely jeopardized newspaper advertising as a fund-raising mechanism, Levison had helped pioneer the direct-mail method. Because the issues in the lawsuit threatened labor organizers in the South as well as Negroes, he and King slowly had built union support. The labor interest in turn helped King enlist labor lawyers and constitutional experts, and this, like the AFL-CIO speech, attracted the attention of professional politicians. When Theodore Kheel hosted a New York lawyers' luncheon in February, Nelson Rockefeller heard about it and sent King a friendly note “to assure you of my personal support.”

After the Kheel luncheon, King found himself alone in a hotel room with a Wall Street lawyer who had a large cigar in his mouth but remorse on his face. At forty-four, Harry Wachtel had made a name for himself as the legal architect for an Israeli immigrant named Meshulam Riklis, one of the inventors of the modern conglomerate. By perfecting a technique called the leveraged buy-out, through which he essentially bought companies with their own assets, Riklis had built a $500 million empire from what seemed to be an irrational combination of firms, ranging from the Playtex brassiere company to the Schenley distillery. Wachtel's reputation as a business predator made him an unlikely sympathizer for King, but he disgorged a capsule life history in a confessional tone. He was a Jewish shopkeeper's son, he said, and as a college radical in the late 1930s had vowed to use his law degree for the downtrodden. But things had not turned out that way, and he had worked, as he put it, “not on the side of the angels.” The cruelest irony for him was that his conglomerate, Rapid-American, owned several of the chains whose segregated lunch counters still were the targets of sit-ins in the South—Greene's, McCrory's, McClellan's. Wachtel's daughter had pummeled his conscience relentlessly, wanting to know what good was all his money and power if he was helpless to create elementary justice in the Riklis company.

Tormented, Wachtel said he had always admired King, but now, having heard him speak, he was resolved to recapture the idealism of his youth and the respect of his daughter: he would resign from Rapid-American. And he would make a splash. He would give a public statement denouncing the hypocrisy of the Northern variety-store owners. “If you say the word,” he told King emotionally, “I will fall on my sword.”

King hesitated only a moment. “I don't think you should do that,” he said quietly. “You can't leave a spot like that for a flare.” He said he was sure Wachtel could help the civil rights movement more where he was than out on the street, and Wachtel, immensely relieved to be spared from career suicide, soon offered as a first step to give King some money. “I'd like to make a contribution of $7,000,” he said, pulling out his checkbook. He asked for the name of the SCLC's tax-exempt branch.

“We don't have one,” King admitted. “We ask people who are worried to give through my church.”

Wachtel frowned in surprise. He explained why he thought this was dangerous, and listed some people he knew in Washington who could help King get an exemption. It would be easy. King should form a foundation to promote the less controversial aspects of the SCLC's work. Before Wachtel got very far, King asked whether Wachtel himself might undertake such a project. Not only would he be happy to do so, Wachtel replied, but he did not think any lawyer could do it better.

“You see there?” said a smiling King. “You've already found something you can do.” Wachtel fairly exploded with enthusiasm as he and King fell into discussion of the newly born project, talking of “the foundation” as though it existed already. When King asked whether it might safely raise funds for the
Sullivan
appeal, which he said was “floating between nowhere,” Wachtel replied that this would be an ideal purpose. In fact, he added, he had some ideas about the
Sullivan
defense as well, and if King agreed, he would be happy to have his firm work on the case.

Wachtel jumped swiftly into King's acquaintance. He and Levison were destined to be paired for years as King's twin Jewish lawyers. In later years, it became a running joke among the SCLC's Southern staff that no one could tell them apart. They went in and out of harmony with each other, but Levison actively encouraged Wachtel's relationship with King because he knew that Wachtel opened new and larger worlds. Whereas Levison knew a host of union officials, ideologues, and activists from the American Jewish Congress, Wachtel knew how to get high government officials on the phone and how to touch corporate officers for five-figure donations to B'nai B'rith. He was big time.

 

Twenty-four hours after Levison praised Wachtel in an April 10 talk with King, a summary of the wiretapped conversation was placed on the desk of FBI Director Hoover. “Who is he?” Hoover asked tersely about Wachtel, and his curiosity sent Bureau officials scrambling to investigate. This question and all that brought it to being—the wiretaps, the investigations, the acute political sensitivity that caused the FBI Director himself to spend time scanning these wiretap summaries—were products of a side to King's life that was clandestine even to him.

From the point of view of the technicians and supervisors on the Levison surveillance, the operation of the bugs in particular was a painful chore. Unlike wiretaps, for which recorders could be activated automatically by phone calls, the bugs required continuous human monitoring. The sounds could be loud or maddeningly faint, depending on how far away Levison happened to be from the microphones in his wall, and the monitors faced the disadvantage that his visitors, being in each other's physical presence, did not identify themselves the way callers tended to do on the telephone. It was tedious work. The Bureau's stringent reporting rules obliged the monitors to make time-keyed notations of every sound they heard—even coughs, rustling papers, and chairs scraping across the floor. If the office was silent, this fact itself had to be recorded at regular intervals. Nothing could be overlooked, as someone might find it to be a clue. Each shift of monitors had to distinguish the various voices customarily heard in Levison's office. They quickly learned to recognize Levison, his secretary, and the regular run of business visitors and gossipers. In time they learned that the “Clarence” who stopped in to talk politics on many afternoons was Clarence Jones, who had grown close to Levison in King's service since moving back to New York from California. They discovered that “Jack” was Jack O'Dell. The supervisors expressed special interest in what these two discussed with Levison, as Bureau records showed that Jones had a suspicious political background and that O'Dell was an outright Communist. These two names were investigative coups. Their conversations with Levison went to FBI headquarters by red-flag express for analysis of Communist Party influence.

The results were almost entirely disappointing along that dimension. Levison's conversations were full of real estate talk about ground leases, rental payments, and city tax appeals. What he discussed endlessly with both O'Dell and Jones was the SCLC's fund-raising. He talked of unions that might contribute to the
Sullivan
defense, of donor lists, test mailings, and other refinements of solicitation. With O'Dell, Levison lamented the inefficiencies and personnel shortcomings of the Atlanta SCLC office. With Jones, he debated how best to cultivate wealthy new supporters such as Harry Wachtel—not dreaming that within two days these comments would prompt action by J. Edgar Hoover himself—and he batted around the names of celebrities who might be willing to serve on the board of Wachtel's proposed tax-exempt foundation. The foundation had become a priority objective, and was tentatively to be named in honor of Mahatma Gandhi. The FBI monitors heard Levison telling Jones that he objected to the proposed name, Gandhi Foundation, on the grounds that potential union sponsors might find the word “foundation” too corporate in tone. It became the Gandhi Society.