Parting the Waters (114 page)

The reformers were waiting for a judge to verify the petition and set a special election date when someone reminded them that Martin Luther King was about to come to Birmingham. Under the circumstances, they regarded his visit with such foreboding that they sent an emissary secretly to Atlanta to ask King to cancel the convention. The situation was critical, said the emissary. It was no small task to abolish the office of Bull Connor, who had just received 61 percent of the votes for reelection as police commissioner, and nothing would drive the marginal voters behind Connor more decisively than a racial confrontation. King listened politely and referred the emissary back to Shuttlesworth.

These pressures generated Shuttlesworth's introduction to Sidney Smyer. Never before—in more than six years of sit-ins, boycotts, lawsuits, bombings, and Freedom Rides—had he been granted a meeting with the local “power structure,” or, for that matter, with Birmingham's leading white clergy. But a few days before the SCLC convention, A. G. Gaston, the city's top Negro businessman, guided Shuttlesworth to a secret conclave. As they went inside, Shuttlesworth joked that even Gaston with all his money never before had been permitted inside a white hotel in Birmingham. When they arrived, Smyer shook Shuttlesworth's hand, calling him “Doctor.” Alluding to the precarious reform movement in Birmingham, Smyer first asked Shuttlesworth to persuade King to stay away, and when Shuttlesworth turned that notion aside, he asked for assurances that there would be no trouble. Shuttlesworth could not help making a speech about how long and how much he had suffered to attract the honor of such a request, but then he denied that the honor itself was worth a truce. He said he had to show the city's Negroes deeds instead of words. So how much segregation would the downtown stores give up to avoid demonstrations? When Smyer parried this question by saying that he couldn't speak for the downtown merchants, Shuttlesworth headed for the door and said, “You all called me to the wrong meeting.”

Smyer reconvened them the very next morning, this time in the presence of grim-faced representatives from the major stores: Sears, Loveman's, Newberry's, Greene's, Woolworth's, Pitzitz. It began with an awkward silence, which was broken when Shuttlesworth said he was there to hear what they had to say. After another silence, the man from Loveman's said, “I don't mind desegregating my water [fountains].”

“Oh, no, gentlemen,” Shuttlesworth replied. “We're past water now. We have to have toilets. Women have to be able to refresh themselves in your stores.”

After pained silences, separated by terse outbursts on both sides, A. G. Gaston attempted to break the stalemate. “You know, your daddy and I got started in business about the same time,” he told Loveman. “And you know you got your start among the Negroes like I did. We got our money together. And most of our customers are Negroes. And it looks like you could do something. We don't want demonstrations either, but I don't have the power. I can't stop it. But this man here can stop it.” He said Shuttlesworth had the marbles.

Shuttlesworth stood up after another silence, saying they should all go pray that the best would come out of this. As he was leaving, he turned to Louis Pitzitz, owner of Birmingham's largest department store. “Mr. Pitzitz,” he said, “the last time, they arrested two students in your store. This time it's gonna be different. Martin Luther King and I are gonna sit on your stool, and we aren't gonna walk out. They're gonna have to drag us out. And the press will be there. And you'll be out of business all over Alabama. That's just the way it is.”

As Shuttlesworth and Pitzitz glowered at each other, Loveman rose hastily to his feet. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I can just call the maintenance man and just paint over that sign in the restroom.” He was referring to the “Whites Only” sign.

This was the beginning of a breakthrough. In exchange for integrated water fountains and restrooms, Shuttlesworth agreed to hold a convention without demonstrations. There was much backsliding and quibbling over seemingly trivial details. For example, the “Whites Only” signs must be painted over rather than removed, so that the store owners might more easily disclaim responsibility if Bull Connor thundered down upon them for violating the local segregation laws. In the end, a fragile bargain was struck. Each side worried that the other would renege.

Pressure was also building inside the FBI. Bureau officials, clearly alarmed by the repeated phenomenon of mass arrests in Albany, took note of a report from the Savannah office that the Negroes from the summer jailings “were all trained” at Septima Clark's Dorchester retreat. The report was grossly exaggerated, in that only a tiny fraction of the Albany demonstrators had been to Dorchester, and also misleading, in that Clark's classes focused on literacy and voter registration, not protest. Nevertheless, Bureau officials were inclined to credit the report, in the belief that such unprecedented upheavals must be fomented by cadres. This was the view of people far away, steeped in conspiratorial intelligence work, who never had gone near a mass meeting. It stripped the demonstrators of appreciable human motivation, leaving them more like robots and yet somehow more fanatical. In short, they became more like Communists to the Bureau, and it was seen as no small confirmation on that score that the man in charge of Dorchester was Jack O'Dell.

Bureau officials took word to Attorney General Kennedy that O'Dell, linked to Levison by the wiretaps, was a threat to Birmingham, and Kennedy undertook to handle the problem privately, through his aide John Seigenthaler. As former editor of the Nashville
Tennessean
, Seigenthaler had come to know Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, from whose church James Lawson, Diane Nash, and John Lewis had organized the first of the Nashville sit-ins. Smith sat on King's SCLC board. Before he left for the Birmingham convention, Smith received an official but confidential contact from Seigenthaler, who told him the government was gravely concerned about King's alliance with a man of known Communist associations. King should sever all contact with O'Dell, and in no case should he allow him in Birmingham.

Smith promptly relayed the message to King, who treated the matter as an intriguing nuisance. In context, King decided, the indirect warning meant that the Kennedy Administration was accommodating its own internal McCarthyite forces while hinting to King that there was a relatively painless way out: O'Dell should not go to Birmingham. He called O'Dell in to inform him personally. O'Dell chafed at the news. He was scheduled to lead several workshops at the Birmingham convention—indeed, he was at the center of the SCLC's voter registration drive, as well as its collaborative efforts with COFO and other groups, which were by far the biggest hidden successes of the past year. O'Dell grumbled that it was a ridiculous compromise to admit that he might be a threat to the nation's security and then respond by grounding him for a conference. King said he had seen much sillier things in politics.

O'Dell remained behind in Atlanta when the SCLC convention opened that Monday, September 24. Birmingham's downtown merchants delayed painting over their “Whites Only” signs until the last moment, but they did it, causing amazement among the Negroes. Adhering to the agreement, neither side trumpeted the change to the press, for fear of provoking Bull Connor. Still, the victory put Shuttlesworth into higher spirits than usual. At the Monday-night mass meeting in St. John's Church, he gave such a rousing introduction to Wyatt Walker as King's advance guard that Walker seized the pulpit and cried, “I have come to Birmingham to ride the Bull!” Jackie Robinson, recently elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, also arrived for the convention that night, but the Birmingham police refused to allow him a motorcade to the church. Shuttlesworth told the packed crowd to obey the police. “No one knows what's going to happen the next few days,” he said.

 

Publicly, the SCLC convention in Birmingham caused about as much stir as a Rotary luncheon. There were no demonstrations. The news was drenched that week with events in Mississippi, as J. H. Meredith's quest to enter Ole Miss reached its climactic stages. Already Governor Ross Barnett once had blocked Meredith in a dramatic physical confrontation. (The Mississippi legislature had made Barnett himself the emergency university registrar, in a ruse to circumvent the court order binding the regular registrar.) Promptly after that, the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals hauled the registrar and the university trustees into a hearing, threatened them with contempt, and secured a promise that they would register Meredith.

On Tuesday, September 25, as King was arriving in Birmingham, Chief U.S. Marshal James McShane and John Doar picked Meredith up at Dillard University in New Orleans. Doar was a volunteer courier for a sheaf of the Fifth Circuit's latest orders against evasion and obstruction. Meredith said good-bye to his wife and to Medgar Evers, who had been counseling him for his lonely walk into the maw of Ole Miss. At the New Orleans airport, Doar and McShane waited awkwardly while Meredith went downstairs to the colored snack bar and restroom. Then the three of them flew to Jackson, Mississippi, in a Cessna 220 owned by the U.S. Border Patrol. Mississippi Highway Patrol aircraft flew alongside them the whole way. In Washington, Al Rosen fed Burke Marshall a stream of FBI reports on the intentions of Barnett, the trustees, and a few local sheriffs who were threatening to arrest Meredith on any convenient charge.

The trio proceeded by car to the Federal Building in downtown Jackson, where Registrar Robert Ellis had agreed to perform his loathsome duty of admitting Meredith. They found no state officials present, however. When Doar reported this newest wrinkle to Washington, Marshall tracked them down by telephone at the Woolfolk State Office Building, some blocks away. The president of the trustees told him they were trying to comply with the order but were restrained—being practically in the custody of Barnett and the legislature, which had summoned them to testify about the university crisis. Another trustee told Marshall that the Fifth Circuit order no longer applied, because Meredith had been late reaching the Federal Building. Marshall short-circuited the dispute with phone calls to Judge Tuttle in New Orleans, by which he obtained a phone-relayed extension of the deadline. The trustees eventually relented on the time but held fast on the place, insisting that the extension did not apply to the part of the order that specified the Federal Building. By then it was almost dark. Robert Kennedy decided to give in and send Meredith to the Woolfolk Building.

“Can you clear the crowds so we don't make a big circus?” Kennedy asked Governor Barnett.

“You would have a big space,” Barnett replied. “They're not going to bother him.”

Soon the long wait was over. Doar, McShane, and Meredith pushed their way through a jeering crowd of two thousand outside the Woolfolk Building, then up the elevator to the tenth floor and through another crowd in the corridor. Barnett, bathed in television lights, blocked the threshold of Room 1007. Legislators inside climbed atop chairs and tables to obtain a better view. As Doar moved forward to explain the Fifth Circuit's orders to Barnett, television and radio stations transmitted the confrontation to Mississippians across the state. Barnett “interposed” Mississippi's sovereignty, as embodied in his own person, between Meredith and the university officials, who maintained an outward willingness to obey the orders.

“Which one is Meredith?” Barnett inquired, sparking titters of laughter, as the familiar and well-known Meredith, standing in front of Barnett, was the only Negro in sight. Barnett read to Meredith his second proclamation of interposition, ending that he did “hereby finally deny you admission to the University of Mississippi.” A Rebel yell went up from the crowds gathered around transistor radios ten floors below. When Barnett refused Doar's request to enter, some legislators chanted, “Get going! Get going!” One cried, “Three cheers for the governor!” They hooted the Meredith trio along its path of retreat, then filed back to their chambers in triumph. One state senator hailed Barnett's stand as “the most brilliant piece of statesmanship ever displayed in Mississippi.” Another vowed to persevere “regardless of the cost in time, effort, money, and in human lives.”

An angry Robert Kennedy called a cheerful Barnett as Meredith was heading for Memphis that evening. “He is going to show up for classes tomorrow,” said Kennedy.

“At Ole Miss?” replied the startled governor. “How can you do that without registering?”

“…I think they arranged it,” said Kennedy. “…It is all understood.”

“I don't see how they can,” said Barnett. “They're going to give him special treatment? They can't do that, General.”

Ten minutes later, Kennedy called Barnett again, after Marshall and the other Justice officials in his office convinced him that he must give Barnett precise notice of Meredith's arrival on the Ole Miss campus. Otherwise, Barnett could disclaim responsibility for any violence against him. Kennedy relayed the notice along with a stern lecture on the supremacy of federal law. He pointed out that all the judges of the Fifth Circuit were Southerners. “But anyway, Governor,” he added, “they will be down there at ten o'clock.”

“Ten o'clock will be all right,” Barnett said politely. Later that night, three judges of the Fifth Circuit signed an order commanding Barnett to appear before them on Friday in New Orleans for a hearing on whether Barnett should be held in contempt of court. The impending collision of races, and perhaps even armed forces, dominated the next day's news.
The New York Times
published three Meredith stories on its front page beneath a banner headline:
U.S. IS PREPARED TO SEND TROOPS AS MISSISSIPPI GOVERNOR DEFIES COURT AND BARS NEGRO STUDENT
.