Parting the Waters (107 page)

King emerged to hold a news conference at Shiloh late that morning. “This is one time I'm out of jail that I'm not happy to be out,” he declared. He denounced the “subtle and conniving tactics” used to engineer his release. He did say, by way of consolation, that Chief Pritchett had all but assured them that the cases against the other seven hundred demonstrators from the previous December would be dropped, and that a biracial commission would be appointed to settle the larger disputes. Across town, however, Pritchett was telling his own news conference that “there has been nothing of a settlement in reference to anything.” Mayor Kelley said he did not know who paid the fines. Then, possibly to make himself more comfortable, he modified his position to say he had “no communicable information on that subject.” Kelley held tenaciously to the pact of silence for decades thereafter.

In Washington, Robert Kennedy told reporters that “Dr. King's release should make it possible for the citizens of Albany to resolve their differences in this situation in a less tense atmosphere. Therefore, I am very glad that Dr. King has been released.” His phrasing subtly endorsed the perspective of leading Albany whites, who saw segregation as a local matter. Ed Guthman, Kennedy's press spokesman, assured reporters that Robert Kennedy had not paid King's fine—nor had President Kennedy, nor any other official of the federal government. To stress the parallel with the Kennedy performance after King's 1960 jailing, Guthman did disclose that Burke Marshall had made phone calls to Mrs. King and others, which he said might have facilitated the outcome.

In Albany, King's release surprised all but the most cynical observers. The
Herald
declared that rumors of an impending negotiated settlement were false (“City Will Not Back Down on Negro Issue”). To dispel suspicions of collusion with Washington, Mayor Kelley publicly denounced the Justice Department for “collaborating and conspiring with the leaders of the Albany Movement…to violate existing ordinances of the City of Albany.” His accusations produced a flurry of denials from the Justice Department. Privately, Justice officials were consumed by bureaucratic spats with the FBI over appearances and lines of command.

Out of jail, King swiftly lost his leverage. He appeared to be a stranger to the Kennedy Administration and, having been snookered, became fair game for barbs long stored by his critics.
The New York Times
published a profile suggesting that King was out of his league in politics. He was “woefully inadequate in organizational ability,” stated a
Times
source, and the correspondent added that King's “chief problem” was his determination to establish the SCLC as an organization independent of the NAACP. The nation's news outlets made sport of the mystery of King's anonymous benefactor.
Newsweek
called the case a “Georgia Whodunit.” The Albany
Herald
chortled over the rascally maneuver behind headlines such as “Mayor Stays Mum” and “Who Got King Out?” Most newspapers accepted the official version of the transaction itself and then proceeded to speculate about possible accomplices of the “well-dressed Negro male.” No one bothered to scrutinize the official stories. B. C. Gardner's name never surfaced, and Chief Pritchett's account survived as the working draft of the truth.

 

It took King two weeks to get back into jail. He regarded it as imperative that he return, not least because most of the thirty-two who had marched with him were still locked up. It appeared that he had led them into a trap and then escaped himself. But he did not seek jail immediately, as his Albany supporters were too numb to follow. A six-month lull in demonstrations had been followed by a sharp defeat, and local whites seemed tougher and less compromising than ever. The Albany Movement, James Gray declared, had done nothing more than to bankrupt the city bus system, cancel the Christmas parade, “cost Negroes jobs and money,” and cause “the jailing of nearly 800 persons, many of them children of long-established and honorable citizens of the Negro community…. They now have criminal records. Is this the way to teach the young about their America?” Some Albany Negroes, in the grip of discouragement or fear, were swayed by Gray's argument that King himself was the problem.

To recover lost momentum, the leaders of the Albany Movement first issued a document called the “Albany Manifesto,” declaring that during the past six months the Albany officials had dealt with them in bad faith. By day, the Albany Movement leaders sent small groups to test segregation at the city library and parks. All of them met a police blockade, and many were arrested. Each incident demonstrated to wavering Negroes that race relations were not as sweet as Gray and his colleagues claimed. The nighttime crowds grew toward the overflow numbers of the previous December.

King flew to Washington on July 19 to address the National Press Club. Reporters recorded the exact moment—12:35
P.M.
—at which he entered the fifty-four-year-old press club to become its first Negro American speaker. The capacity audience rose a second time, and then a third, in spontaneous ovations. Many of the members were proud to have broken the race barrier, and although King gave them a rather stiff speech on the merits of nonviolence, they were proud, too, to sponsor such lofty oratory. This was King's ironic trap up close: he could bring inspiration even to the National Press Club, but he could force his movement into the news columns only by bloodshed or political miracle. News accounts of the speech were spare, as there was little news in King's message itself. One story noted that not a single press club member had resigned in protest of King's appearance.

Cutting short a Northern fund-raising tour, King found Albany in a tense chess game, commingled of silliness and hate. A white man dressed as an exterminator had sprayed pesticide on Negroes testing the segregation of city picnic tables. Charles Jones had outwitted the police patrols who were trying to keep Negroes out of the whites' restrooms in city parks. And the air thickened with rumors that city officials aimed to stifle the movement with a court order. “I understand that the city attorney has gone to Atlanta to get an injunction to get the undesirables out,” King declared at the mass meeting on July 20. “Now I assume by the undesirables he's speaking of Ralph Abernathy, James Bevel, Bernard Lee, Andrew Young, Wyatt Tee Walker, Charles Jones, Sherrod, and I could name many others.” He told the crowd that the obstructions did not matter—not the courts, nor the mayor, nor the governor, nor even the federal government. None of these mattered, said King, if the people of Albany acted upon rights that were theirs: “The salvation of the Negro in Albany, Georgia, is within the hands and the soul of the Negro himself.” He told his favorite story from India: Gandhi's Salt March, of Gandhi beginning alone but ending with a million people by the sea, and how he changed history by the simple act of holding aloft a pinch of free, untaxed sea salt. “And the minute that happened,” cried King, “it seemed I could hear the boys at Number Ten Downing Street in London, England, say, ‘It's all over now'!” This run of oratory put the church into pandemonium. King joined to these emotions memories of another famous march to the sea, by Union General W. T. Sherman, whose fiery swath through Georgia had emancipated the direct ancestors of many in King's audience. “And so let's get our marchin' shoes ready,” King told them. “…For we are goin' to Albany's March to the Sea.”

They planned a march for the next afternoon, a Saturday, but that morning deputy U.S. marshals began knocking on doors with court papers signed by U.S. District Court judge J. Robert Elliott, a strident segregationist recently appointed by President Kennedy. Accepting the novel—critical lawyers said fantastical—arguments of Albany officials, Judge Elliott turned upside down the civil rights movement's cherished stand on the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead of ruling that segregation was a denial of Negroes' rights to equal protection under the law, Elliott ruled that Negro protest marches denied Albany's
white
people equal protection by draining police manpower and other public resources out of white neighborhoods. Therefore, pending a hearing on the city's request for a permanent injunction, the judge ordered Albany's protest leaders to desist from further marches.

A deputy marshal knocked that morning at the home of Dr. Anderson. He was promptly shown to the master bedroom, which was crammed with Albany Movement leaders in the midst of emergency consultations. There he served an order on Dr. Anderson, whom he knew by sight, after which he pulled another order from his sheaf of papers and asked whether Martin Luther King was present. An awkward silence followed. King was sitting on the bed in plain view, but the marshal did not recognize him. King and the others remained frozen in silence, so great was their panic over the consequences of the order. When the marshal withdrew to take up station outside Anderson's house, King and other named defendants escaped through a window and down a back alley. They soon reconsidered their instinctive flight. Although they shied from the order as a catastrophe for their cause—it put the Justice Department, the FBI, and the authority of the federal judiciary squarely in opposition to their protests against segregation—they decided on reflection that it did them no credit to hide. King drove to the courthouse early that afternoon and volunteered to be served.

Whether he should obey the order was a different and more difficult question, which was debated all afternoon and into the night. William Kunstler advised King that the restraining order was manifestly illegal. But should he act on that assumption or wait respectfully for a higher court to vacate it? To disregard the order risked a confrontation with federal judges—even those who agreed with King on the merits of desegregation—over the deference due to federal edicts, whereas to obey the order risked a permanent surrender on the critical issue of timing. The latter was a point hammered home by Charles Jones, Charles Sherrod, and James Forman of SNCC. Any federal judge could issue a restraining order, they said, and with a Democratic president now naming judges on the recommendations of segregationist, home-state U.S. senators, white officials would have restraining orders at their bidding. The SNCC leaders argued that it would take time, perhaps weeks or months, to overturn such orders, during which a ripe protest inevitably would decay. If the movement leaders conceded to the white opponents the power to quash protests at moments of disadvantage, they never would find an offsetting weapon. Protest was all they had.

These arguments were persuasive to King. As the expectant marchers began to trickle into Shiloh that afternoon, he told Robert Kennedy from Anderson's house that he felt “impelled” to march. Kennedy, who had initiated the call, was shocked to hear that the rumors were true. The Attorney General remained prickly on the subject of civil disobedience. How could King even think of violating this court order, he demanded to know, when governors and school officials across the South were praying for an excuse not to obey federal school desegregation orders?

King held his ground. While acknowledging the validity of Kennedy's points, he said that the whole point of the movement was to rise up against blatantly unconstitutional, segregationist laws. Always, King protested, somebody would find a way to make protest unreasonable and segregation reasonable for the moment. “We're tired, very tired,” he said. “I'm tired. We're sick of it.” Kennedy kept pounding home the argument that King could not afford to risk the goodwill of the federal courts, where the movement was winning its greatest victories. Contrasting King's recklessness with the Administration's steady progress in securing compliance with desegregation orders, Kennedy pressed the point too far for King. “Some of these problems you have created yourself,” King replied, “by appointing these segregationist federal judges.” By implication, King was painting the Administration rather than himself as the trouble-maker. Annoyed, Kennedy had the presence of mind to quell the shouting match by turning the telephone over to Burke Marshall.

Marshall debated King for nearly two hours that Saturday afternoon, with both sides breaking frequently for consultations with seconds. Marshall's strength was his patience and command of detail. He pointed out that if King marched in defiance of Elliott's order, he would go to jail for contempt of court. The segregation issue would be lost. King would put himself in a difficult corner—precisely where the Administration was trying to put Governor Barnett of Mississippi in the James Meredith case. To all this, King responded with some technical points of his own. Barnett's First Amendment rights were not being violated, he said, whereas the Elliott order plainly stifled his. Barnett faced an order that had been tested through many hearings and appeals, and which was consistent with both justice and Supreme Court law, whereas King faced a contrary order slapped together by one judge. Marshall, while granting many legal weaknesses in Elliott's order, stressed that the segregationists were watching, and if King were allowed to violate the first federal ruling he didn't like, “then the whole credibility of our even-handed position—that this is the law—goes out the window.”

They argued to an exhausted stalemate, by which time runners from Shiloh were bringing King urgent messages that the crowd was growing restive. King closeted himself briefly and then sent Clarence Jones circulating through the Anderson house with his decision: he would obey the order until the lawyers could get it overturned. Then he began to agonize over the fresh question of what he should say to the crowd at Shiloh. He knew from experience that their cheering would raise the roof the moment he showed his face, and it was painful to think of deflating their enthusiasm—so painful in fact that he began to reconsider his concession to Marshall. But no, he must stick to his best judgment, so perhaps he should stay away from the church altogether. Then again, no, he could not bear to have the mass meeting go on without him. With his thoughts lurching about, King took a walk in the night air and then decided to go to Shiloh after all, without knowing exactly how to inform the crowd of the postponement. Surrounded by lawyers, the Albany Movement leaders, and the SNCC students, he made his way into Reverend Boyd's study.