Parting the Waters (121 page)

Three nights later, on December 17, King and several other leaders conferred with President Kennedy about Africa. The Negro leaders requested a “Marshall Plan” of economic aid for the impoverished, newly independent nations there. They also pressed for American sanctions against South Africa's apartheid system and for greater diplomatic pressure to free the remaining colonies on the continent. Particularly at issue was a recent United Nations proposal to curtail armed suppression by Portugal of independence movements in its colonies of Mozambique, Angola, and Portuguese Guinea. The United States had cast one of only seven votes against the resolution, joining South Africa and five European nations.

President Kennedy put his guests at ease by sharing their sensibilities. NATO obligations made impossible a simple cutoff of arms shipments to Portugal, the President explained, but he was skeptical of Portugal's promises not to divert NATO arms shipments to suppress anti-colonial movements in Africa. In fact, Kennedy assured the Negro leaders that he did not trust Portugal's word on this point any more than they did. The task of effective government was to design safeguards that would support NATO without allowing Portugal to prop up its colonies by force. These were complexities that absorbed the President in every detail. Although his private conference with the Negro leaders was scheduled to last only half an hour, he slipped out briefly to light the White House Christmas tree and returned for another half-hour—then two more hours. For once, presidential aides found themselves juggling the schedule to benefit civil rights leaders, lopping off or abbreviating appointments with other dignitaries. The Negro press hailed the event as “the longest conference ever held by Negroes with a U.S. President in the White House.”

That night, President Kennedy taped a freewheeling interview with correspondents from the three major networks. He was at his best—candid, articulate, and witty. Repeatedly, and with obvious relish, he discussed turning points of the Cuban missile crisis. He stressed the vagaries of decision-making at the pinnacle of government, ticking off the historical “misjudgments” that had brought on each of the twentieth century's major wars. Only once did he bring up the race issue, in complaining that the Ole Miss crisis made it more difficult to pass an education bill.

The President was acutely conscious that his nation had dominated world politics since the war against the Axis. “I think it's a fantastic story,” he said. “We have one million Americans today serving outside the United States. There's no other country in history that's carried this kind of a burden…since the beginning of the world. Greece, Rome, Napoleon and all the rest always had conquest. We have a million men outside, and we're trying to defend these countries.” The American empire was coming of age as measured against its most awesome predecessors, and like those predecessors it conceived of its power as a benevolent force. Twice the United States had served as “the great means of defending the world,” he said—first against the Nazis, then against the Soviets. “Now I think that's a pretty good record for a country with six percent of the world's population, which is very reluctant to take on these burdens. I think we ought to be rather pleased with ourselves this Christmas.”

 

Early in December,
The Nation
had published an excerpt of the Southern Regional Council's Albany report in an article entitled “Kennedy: The Reluctant Emancipator.” This was a small public hint of the linkage between Kennedy and Lincoln that had been on King's mind throughout the disappointing year. On New Year's Eve, the descendants of slavery were to celebrate one hundred years of freedom. By proclaiming the slaves within the Confederacy “forever free,” Lincoln had made the Civil War a war of emancipation. Now more than ever, King wanted Kennedy to say something similar about segregation. It would give the movement a moral club to take to Birmingham.

He lobbied privately all month for a Second Emancipation Proclamation, together with organizations such as the African-American Heritage Association. Early prospects looked bleak, as the Civil War Centennial Commission declined to schedule any ceremonies honoring Emancipation Day. For “practical considerations,” which almost certainly centered upon the threat of protest by the Southern State Centennial Commissions, the Administration's Bureau of the Budget concluded that it would be “undesirable to use the Civil War Centennial Commission as a vehicle for the observance.” This omission—perhaps the most glaring of the government's withdrawals from the four-year centennial—left King without an occasion that beckoned for a presidential appearance. White House interest in his proposal seemed so puny that William Kunstler advised him to march to the White House on New Year's Day, to deliver his Second Emancipation Proclamation to President Kennedy a second time, through the gates if necessary. Kunstler thought he might persuade Lincoln historian Carl Sandburg to go along, but King had no taste for emancipation as a protest event.
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After his Africa meeting at the White House on December 17, he bubbled with renewed optimism, because he found the President sympathetic, obviously well briefed, and “so well informed.” King and his aides talked almost daily with Louis Martin, Lee White, Arthur Schlesinger, and Berl Bernhard of the Civil Rights Commission.

As usual, the decision bounced around inside the White House until the last minute. The Administration was preoccupied with Robert Kennedy's frantic efforts to raise Fidel Castro's ransom price of $62 million for the return of the Bay of Pigs prisoners from Cuba. In another marathon of wild renaissance government, Kennedy was sending his assistants scurrying in all directions at all hours, bending the tax laws, commandeering airplanes, amassing pharmaceuticals and medical supplies to Castro's satisfaction. An emergency call from the Attorney General to Boston's Cardinal Richard Cushing secured a last million dollars when the banks were closed for the weekend, and the 1,100 prisoners left Cuban jails in time to spend Christmas in Miami. Lee White submitted the draft proclamation to Pierre Salinger the next day, for final decision by the President in Palm Beach. King's frontal assault on segregation was gone, as were his suggested flourishes and frills, but the kernel of a new presidential commitment was preserved in the heart of the short document:

White advised Salinger of staff opinion that “not to issue some statement would be regarded as a minor disaster.”

In Washington, the civil rights cabal gathered in Berl Bernhard's office to discuss the reservations filtering back from Palm Beach. Those closer to the President were saying that something so historic as a Second Emancipation Proclamation was impossible to do halfway. Far better to do nothing at all, they said, especially since public expectations of Civil War commemoratives were practically nonexistent. Facing this reasoning, the advisers in Bernhard's office groped for an idea that would salvage something from their year's efforts, knowing that O'Donnell and the others with the President felt some residual sense of obligation. They trotted out and discarded many ideas before Louis Martin began musing that the key was to think of something that made President Kennedy feel that he was taking advantage of his personal strengths. In Martin's view, these were social more than political. Shackled to the Southern Democrats, President Kennedy shrank from the political implications of the draft proclamation. On the other hand, he and Mrs. Kennedy felt completely relaxed at social gatherings of Negroes. Here the contrast between Kennedy and his predecessor, Eisenhower, was stark. In no other aspect relating to race did he compare more favorably, Martin argued. They should think of something like a White House reception for Negro dignitaries.

Arthur Schlesinger perked up as Martin worked through his idea. “I think Louie's got something,” he said. They fashioned a proposal for a gala White House reception to be held on February 12—Lincoln's Birthday. The timing would head off much of the possible white criticism from both political parties by casting the event in honor of the hallowed Republican president. Martin was confident that such a reception would redound to President Kennedy's credit among Negroes—to whom the White House had been socially off limits except in token numbers. The presence of Negro celebrities in the White House would attract banner coverage in the Negro press—probably more than the proclamation would have. On this reasoning, Martin and the others struck a bargain with the Palm Beach White House to trade the proclamation for a reception.

President Kennedy visited the Orange Bowl in Miami twice over the next few days. On December 29, he and Mrs. Kennedy reviewed the newly freed soldiers of the Bay of Pigs brigade there. Mrs. Kennedy saluted them in Spanish, and the President delivered an emotional promise to return their tattered battle flag to them “in a free Havana.” On New Year's Day, the President was back at the Orange Bowl for a football game, puffing on a cigar as he watched young quarterback Joe Namath lead the University of Alabama to victory over Oklahoma.
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The President granted Tom Wicker of
The New York Times
a long New Year's interview in which, anticipating the overthrow of the Castro regime, he said the United States would impose no preconditions on the next government in Cuba.

In Havana, Castro attacked Kennedy's Orange Bowl pledge as the words of a “vulgar pirate chief.” Boasting of the Bay of Pigs ransom, he declared that “for the first time in history, imperialism paid an indemnification of war.” Che Guevara gave a much more sober speech on economic discipline, charging Cuba's managers to run their operations more profitably. Also that New Year's Day, North Vietnamese gunners shot down eight of fifteen U.S. helicopters in a troop transport convoy, and Nelson Rockefeller was sworn in for his second term as governor of New York. “This is an historic anniversary,” he began his address. “Just 100 years ago, on January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation became law.”

 

King moved immediately after New Year's, as there was nothing left to wait for. First he called in Wyatt Walker to ask if the blueprint for the Birmingham campaign was drafted. Assured that it was, King asked Walker to help him compile a small list for a secret planning meeting. For the first time in his career, King excluded the SCLC board, knowing that they would talk it to death. He did not invite Daddy King, nor any of the off-staff preachers except two whose Alabama experience was vital, Shuttlesworth and Joseph Lowery. Shuttlesworth was indispensable; it was his campaign as much as King's. In addition to three top SCLC officers from Atlanta—Abernathy, Andy Young, and Dorothy Cotton—he selected only four others: Clarence Jones, Jack O'Dell, Stanley Levison, and James Lawson. That made eleven in all, counting King and Walker. King called Clarence Jones to say it was time. He wanted Jones to arrange for the three New Yorkers to come to a retreat at Dorchester on January 10. Jones did not have to be told what it was about. Unwittingly, he alerted J. Edgar Hoover with his call to Levison.

After converging upon Atlanta, they all flew to Savannah on an early morning flight. The mood of the occasion was grimly practical, but the preachers among them appreciated that the Savannah region was a fitting site for revolutions grounded in religion. From Savannah, in 1738, the British revivalist George Whitefield had launched his first phenomenal tour of the American colonies, creating a mass intoxication—known as the Great Awakening—that swept from Georgia to New Hampshire. He drew 30,000 people to the Boston Common in 1740, when the city's entire population was less than two-thirds that number. From Savannah, where John Wesley first landed from England with his Anglican theology shaken by Whitefield's preaching on the voyage, Whitefield's influence spawned Baptist congregations and later Wesleyan (Methodist) ones. The small, malaria-infested seaport in Georgia became mother to the two mass-based Protestant denominations that captured early American churchgoers. In Savannah itself, the spirit of conversion was so strong that many of the whites accepted the idea of promoting religion among the slaves. First African Baptist was established there in 1788 as one of the first Negro congregations on the North American continent. A pastor of First African led the slave preachers who parleyed with General Sherman when his March to the Sea reached Savannah. Nearly a century later, Martin Luther King welcomed the honor of preaching the Emancipation Day sermon at First African. To the history-laden congregation, he had delivered an early version of his “I Have a Dream” speech just before the Kennedy inauguration.

The King party proceeded from Savannah to the old Congregationalist retreat at Dorchester, a town imbued with a peculiar variation on Savannah's rich history. It had survived for many decades as the only known Puritan enclave in the slave South, transplanted in 1752 by way of Dorchester, Massachusetts, after the original Puritan flight from Dorchester, England, during the reign of the Stuart kings. The town had retained such disciplined piety that post—Civil War visitors had been amazed to find not a single mulatto among the newly freed slaves. Northern families kept ties to Dorchester even after the plantations shriveled up. Theodore Roosevelt's mother was a native of Dorchester. The fathers of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Samuel F. B. Morse pastored the Midway Congregational Church there. Among the Southern pastors at Midway was the theologian C. C. Jones. A wealthy planter who conducted a lifelong ministry among the slaves, Jones was famous for his doctrines attempting to reconcile slavery with Christianity. He eventually became a tragic figure of American religious history. As a liberal slaveholder, he came under withering attack from Frederick Douglass. Their 1840s duel over the respectability of slavery as opposed to abolition foreshadowed the civil rights debates in both flesh and spirit. Jones's great-grandson, the Episcopal bishop of Alabama, lay across King's path in Birmingham.