Parting the Waters (109 page)

In Albany's Harlem, the joyous news from Atlanta collided with the reports of what had happened to Marion King in Camilla. The latter news carried more voltage. One story was about distant lawyers arguing over complicated things, while the other was about the brazen public beating of a very special woman in Albany. Marion King was regal but cheerful, accomplished but without airs—just the sort to drive all the way out to a country jail to visit her maid's daughter. It had been her surprise jailing that touched off the first mass marches the previous December. Everyone knew she was in maternity clothes, more than six months pregnant.
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Every detail—the fact that she was hit while pregnant, and that her little girl was literally knocked from her arms—magnified the hideousness of the affront. The effect of the news was so potent that the Negro leaders of Albany instinctively hushed it up. Normally, stories of brutality or intimidation were told and retold at the mass meetings to stir solidarity, but that night, to the dense crowds that overflowed from Shiloh to Mount Zion, only Abernathy even mentioned the Marion King beating. For Anderson, Martin King, and Slater King, the subject was too raw, passions too inflamed.

The leaders postponed plans for an immediate march. They wanted to give Mayor Kelley time to respond to their invitation to negotiate, they said, and among themselves they acknowledged that the crowd was disorganized, distracted, and extremely volatile. No sooner had they departed to seek an audience at city hall, however, than a prominent white visitor from New York, Marvin Rich of CORE, exhorted the crowd to embark on a night march of protest. Forty people followed him. As they walked along the familiar route through Harlem, they picked up stragglers and onlookers in large numbers, anticipating a showdown. And as the demonstrators filed across Oglethorpe Avenue to be arrested, some of the angry Negro bystanders flung beer bottles at the distant policemen.

What quickly followed, if not a riot, was a near riot. There was no fighting, looting, or gunfire, but flying rocks and bricks soon joined the bottles in a sustained pelting. The contagious excitement of sirens, battle cries, and breaking glass emptied the Negro beer joints and pool halls, while police reinforcements hustled up from the opposite side. Reporters converged from all directions, and from the churches, panicky and nearly sickened Albany Movement leaders plunged in among the swarming rock throwers, trying desperately to stop the attack. Andrew Young pleaded with them not to give the movement a bad name, not to ruin everything. When that failed to work, he taunted them almost hysterically, crying, “You're too yellow to march!” Other well-dressed church people joined Young in a thin line along the fringes, trying to push the skirmishers back out of range.

Chief Pritchett was a roving commander, sending squadrons of police and state troopers to clear the streets of Harlem block by block, under strict orders to use no clubs or guns unless attacked with such weapons. Behind his advancing men, Pritchett ordered Negro night spots closed and posted guard details. He, not King, was the master of nonviolence that night, and he made sure no slow-witted reporter missed the point. “Judge Tuttle ought to see this,” he quipped, and as the missiles flew he called out to reporters, “Did you see them nonviolent rocks?” When it was over, he announced at a hasty press conference that “there was no violence on our part—the officers never took their nightsticks from their belts.” One of his men had been struck by a bottle but not injured, he said, and a rock had knocked out two of state trooper Claude Hill's teeth. A photograph of Hill holding the rock appeared the next day on the front page of the Albany
Herald
. By then Governor Vandiver, from whom it had been difficult to pry any statement so long as Albany's whites were on the defensive, had all but taken to the rooftops. “I want all trouble-makers to know that I will do whatever is necessary to prevent violence at Albany, Georgia,” he announced. Vandiver pledged to send in all 12,000 National Guard troops if necessary.

A chastened King held a press conference too. “We declare a day of penance beginning at twelve noon today,” he said, calling for “all supporters of the Albany Movement to pray for our Negro brothers who have not yet learned the nonviolent way.” It was a public ritual of contrition and purification that echoed Gandhi's cancellation of huge protests in 1919 and 1922, and it proved no less controversial among King's colleagues. James Forman in particular was incensed that King was blaming Negroes, dividing their natural constituency, pulling back from the struggle. He argued that King should place the blame for the violence on the officers who had beaten Marion King, and on the stubborn city officials who maintained segregation by arresting nonviolent protesters. King replied that this was not good enough, and that the violence drowned out such explanations.

The grip of crisis on the Albany Movement was so strong that some SNCC leaders resolved to stand publicly behind King's day of penance. With Abernathy, Bernard Lee, and a clutch of reporters, Charles Jones set off behind King on a peacemaker's tour of Albany's Negro dives. Jones in blue jeans and the others in business suits, they popped into pool halls and beer joints such as the Beehive and the South Grand Terrace, like space travelers from another planet. “I have brought you the symbol of nonviolence,” Abernathy announced to startled, surly customers, and King labored to overcome the pompous effect. “I hate to hold up your pool game,” he said. “I used to be a pool shark myself.” Loosening his tie and taking a pool cue, King showed them a few of the shots he had learned at Crozer. Over this icebreaker, he told them that bottle-throwing played into the hands of the segregationists. “We don't need guns and ammunition, just the power of souls,” he said. Charles Jones took a more conspiratorial, low-down approach. He was well aware, he claimed, that whites had slipped money to Negro snitches to provoke the fight, and he warned against the treason of whispered deals. As he spoke, collapsing nerves told Jones that he was nearing his end in the movement. Still dazed from his intimate wrestling match over King's identity, he soon made arrangements for a long trip to Mexico.

 

That night of July 25, during the forced idleness of the twenty-four-hour penance in Albany, Charles Sherrod drove far out into the backwoods of nearby “Terrible” Terrell County to attend a voter registration meeting in a tiny wooden church called Mount Olive Baptist. The event attracted only thirty-eight Negroes and two white SNCC workers, but it produced perhaps the most remarkable news dispatch of the entire civil rights generation. Landing two days later on the front page of
The New York Times
, correspondent Claude Sitton's story began: “‘We want our colored people to go on living like they have for the last hundred years,' said Sheriff Z. T. Mathews of Terrell County.” Sitton went on to describe how Mathews had burst into the church ahead of several armed deputies, and then, while the deputies scowled and rubbed their guns and tapped their heavy flashlights menacingly in their palms, had lectured from the pulpit on why no more than the current 51 Negroes, out of the county's 8,209, need be registered to vote.

Almost entirely in narrative, Sitton's story interspersed the continuing hymns and prayers of the frightened registration workers with the threats of the lawmen. The car doors of a gathering posse were heard slamming outside in the darkness. Inside, Sherrod steadfastly prayed: “Give us the wisdom to try to understand this world.” Sheriff Mathews announced that he was closing registration until December. Sitton recorded snatches of dialogue: “‘I know you,' said one officer to a Negro. ‘We're going to get some of you.'” Veiled threats followed professions of friendship in a scene Sitton painted rich with foreboding. “Overhead,” he wrote, “swarms of gnats circled the three light globes and now and then one of the audience would look up from the pine floor to steal a fearful glance at the door. Mr. Sherrod then read from the Scriptures.” When Sitton and the other reporters finally pushed their way out of the church, they found that someone had slashed a tire on their car and spiked the gas tank with sand.

President Kennedy read the story, as did the Attorney General. The story was an outrage, splashed across the pages of the
Times
, and it made a mockery of the voting rights protections in the civil rights acts. This touched Robert Kennedy in two tender spots. He began shouting “Move!” at his chief lawsuit coordinator, John Doar. Within hours, a task force of Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents descended on Terrell County. They worked so rapidly and relentlessly, Burke Marshall soon reported to Kennedy, that the Justice Department filed a voting rights complaint against Sheriff Mathews “in less than two weeks after Claude Sitton's story.”

That Thursday morning in Albany, however—as Sitton returned from his ordeal, and as the day of penance came to its end—the political state of affairs was anything but vivid. None of the major news stories about the “nonviolent rocks” riot so much as mentioned the Marion King beating, or any other precipitating cause. To many readers, it appeared that the Negroes who should have been celebrating the victory they had gained in Judge Tuttle's courtroom had rioted instead. The leadership muddle only made things more puzzling: of the two marches in the past week, Martin Luther King had sat out the first and opposed—or not known of—the second. Now he was apologizing for the violence, and
The New York Times
published a laudatory profile of Chief Pritchett.

Ebenezer deacon C. A. Scott chose that Thursday to publish a scolding editorial in the South's only Negro daily. “Dr. King and others might help relieve the situation by gracefully retiring from the scene there…” he wrote, “and we hope no third party will allow his presence to delay or complicate matters in Albany.” At Shiloh, movement veterans were so emotionally gnarled that when Albany Movement leaders announced on Friday that city officials had flatly refused to negotiate any issue of segregation, and then called dramatically for volunteers to line up for a protest march to jail, practically no one responded. Exhortations failed. Andrew Young begged them, holding up a stack of pledge cards signed by volunteers for jail. Charles Sherrod shamed them for choosing comfort over freedom, and Reverend Wells tried his thunder: “Everybody that's got religion that'll do when the world's on fire, raise your hand!” But still they sat snugly in the pews.

Lacking the power to be heard over the babble of contrary emotions, King had only the hope that his image still spoke more forcefully than his tongue. At 2:15
P.M.
on July 27, by Claude Sitton's watch, he arrived at the sidewalk outside city hall with Abernathy, Anderson, Slater King, and seven female supporters to pray for negotiations. Wyatt Walker handed out press releases explaining King's decision, while Chief Pritchett said the tiny number of demonstrators proved that King lacked the support of Albany's Negroes. When a runner took Pritchett's grave charge back to Shiloh, Charles Jones managed to scrounge up fifteen volunteers for a small second wave of jail marchers. King was gone before they arrived. Two weeks after the intervention of the “well-dressed Negro male,” he reached the end of the long twisting path back to his cell, and the doors of Laurie Pritchett's jail clanged shut on him for the third time in eight months.

 

The arrest seeded cloudbursts in national politics before nightfall. Governor Rockefeller sent a telegram urging Attorney General Kennedy to “take immediate steps to assure the physical safety of Dr. King…and investigate whether Constitutional rights of peaceable assembly have been violated.” White House reporters badgered Press Secretary Pierre Salinger for a presidential response—what would Kennedy do now that King was arrested for praying against segregation?

King and Abernathy were leading inmates in freedom songs and personal statements of witness that night when Chief Pritchett unlocked the door and beckoned to King. Saying that King had a long-distance phone call from Lawrence Spivak, creator of NBC's “Meet the Press,” he promised King that this was no trick to eject him from jail. King soon found himself in a heated discussion with Spivak, who wanted King on “Meet the Press” that Sunday morning. Spivak was at first dumbfounded, then provoked to a sputtering rage, by King's reply that he might have to stay in jail rather than bond out for the program. Most public figures begged for the chance to appear on the most prestigious network interview show, and Spivak did not relish being turned down in favor of a jail cell. Only the bizarre contortions of racial politics explained King's modesty: he seized more of the limelight, and made a more powerful statement, by remaining hidden in jail than he could hope to make before millions on television. Chief Pritchett, who wanted King out of jail almost as badly as Spivak, kept promising that King could check back into jail easily, without hitch or chicanery, but King insisted that there were too many risks. Besides, to leave jail so soon after making such an effort to get in would make him look like some sort of luxury guest. These and other considerations recommended an ingenious solution: King would ask Spivak to accept Dr. Anderson in his stead. This would allow King to stay in jail, and he would be able to get Anderson out quickly with an unimpeachable excuse. The switch idea grew on King's advisers as a godsend, and Spivak, with the utmost reluctance, accepted Anderson as the only way to get the hot issue of Kennedy and King on the air.

Anderson bonded out the next day and went swiftly into emergency rehearsal for “Meet the Press.” Walker, Clarence Jones, C. B. King, and others, impersonating the panelists, bombarded him with hostile questions. For C. B. King this emergency was superseded by another when runners came from the county jail with word that inmates had beaten one of the Albany Movement supporters during the night. The victim was William Hansen of SNCC, the only white person who had gone to jail in the previous day's marches. All the runners knew was that cries were coming from the jail windows about a broken jaw and other grave injuries. No one had been allowed to visit Hansen.