Parting the Waters (125 page)

The extent of King's commitment was sinking in: he must change Birmingham, for otherwise Birmingham's past would be his future, in which case he was finished. To meet this challenge, he now seemed to have less than minimal support, plus a run of bad luck and more internal problems than usual. Various factions of lawyers were squabbling over the anticipated legal cases for Project C, and one disgruntled former staff member, who quit upon being chastised for unauthorized use of SCLC travel expenses, was making nasty public charges that King had “sold out to Governor Rockefeller” for personal gain. In short, nothing was falling easily into place, and all these deficiencies put King so much on edge that he spent the last two weeks of March exploring a backup amendment to the plan: if all else failed in Birmingham and the movement's momentum collapsed, he would appeal to outsiders to pour into Birmingham to help fill the jails. King felt the need for such a contingency force so strongly that he went as far away as Washington, D.C., asking trusted friends to recruit secret cadres of volunteers. Walter Fauntroy, Walker's old seminary friend, accepted the assignment. His reports on a growing list of reserves in the capital soon established him in King's mind as a figure of comfort.

From Washington, King flew home to Atlanta on March 27, just in time to take Coretta to the hospital for the birth of their fourth child, Bernice Albertine—the one conceived in Albany. He paused long enough to pose with the mother and infant for a photographer from
Jet
, then slipped back into Birmingham on March 29. From there he flew to New York City on the thirty-first. The secret meeting was partly Harry Belafonte's idea and partly Levison's. Noting King's habit of running to his Northern supporters in the midst of a crisis, they suggested that it might be wiser for King to take these supporters into his confidence by giving them advance notice of Project C. That way King would look more organized, and the supporters, feeling more a part of the drama, might respond more readily to appeals for help. Wyatt Walker, who stayed behind in Birmingham, belittled the plan as a “stroking session” for the celebrities, “a little razzmatazz,” but King was sparing no courtesy. With Shuttlesworth, Abernathy, Levison, and Clarence Jones, he pushed his way into Belafonte's jammed apartment past actors Anthony Quinn and Fredric March, past William and Lotte Kunstler, Governor Rockefeller's press man Hugh Morrow, James Wechsler of the New York
Post
and some seventy other reporters, dignitaries, friends, and strangers—all sworn to secrecy. King functioned well for his own speech that evening, but during Shuttlesworth's emotional description of the dangers before them in Birmingham his head jerked ever so slightly. Belafonte thought it was a nervous tic brought on by tension. He had not seen such physical signs of stress in King before.

It was not until almost morning, when everyone except Abernathy had gone home, that King began to relax. Julie Belafonte brought out his personal bottle of Harvey's Bristol Cream. Ever since she had introduced him to the sherry, King had kept up a running joke about how much he savored the nightcap of the most elegant New Yorkers. Whenever he came to the Belafonte home, he made a great show of inspecting the bottle to make sure that the sherry had not fallen below the line he had marked carefully on the label at the end of his last visit. That night, sipping his Harvey's, he conquered Birmingham by teasing his comrade. “Let me be sure to get arrested with people who don't snore,” he intoned, eyeing Abernathy.

Abernathy protested vehemently that he did no such thing.

King's eyes went wide with delight. “You are
torture
,” he declared. “White folks ain't
invented
anything that can get to me like you do.
Anything
they want me to admit to, I will, if they'll just get you and your snoring out of my cell.”

He and Abernathy guffawed and pantomimed until sleep came, as they had done back in Montgomery. Then they flew back to Atlanta, where waiting for King was a notice that all tickets for the newly integrated Metropolitan Opera tour in Atlanta were sold out. He brought Coretta and the baby home from the hospital on Tuesday, April 2, and left that same afternoon for Birmingham. Slipping into a city whose attention was riveted on the ballot-counting from that day's runoff election, King went unnoticed to the Gaston Motel to find Wyatt Walker waiting with his clipboard and all his lists—the jail list, the phone volunteer list, the transportation committee list, the food list, the mail-room list, plus his layout charts of the targeted downtown lunch counters and his street maps of the best routes to get there. To the second, Walker knew precisely how much longer it would take the average old person to walk to McCrory's for a sit-in than the average teenager, but all his mountain of lists and calculations seemed pitifully small next to the core identity of an American city. In the end, Project C was no social science formula, approximation of political risks, or rational exercise of any kind, not even one touched by genius. It was a cold plunge.

A transit strike made Birmingham quieter than usual on Wednesday, April 3, or “B-Day,” as Walker mobilized his telephone list to call his jail list—350 by his count, 250 by King's later memory—and of these, some sixty-five showed up to fulfill their pledge. In the basement of A. D. King's church, Walker briefed them like an air commander before a bombing mission, with the logistics sketched out on a blackboard. King and James Lawson followed with a final reprise on the philosophy of nonviolence. Then they set off to meet Shuttlesworth at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which sat just across Kelly Ingram Park from King's headquarters at the Gaston Motel. Shuttlesworth already had dispatched two of his sturdiest ACMHR officers to ask for a demonstration permit, face to face with Bull Connor himself, and they reported that Connor had thrown them out of his office, roaring, “I will picket you over to the City Jail!” Shuttlesworth himself distributed copies of his “Birmingham Manifesto” to reporters. “The patience of an oppressed people cannot endure forever,” it began. “…The absence of justice and progress in Birmingham demands that we make a moral witness to give our community a chance to survive.”

Then, stepping through the pane of normalcy, the sixty-five moved off in five groups to lunch counters at Loveman's, Pizitz, Kress, Woolworth's, and Britt's. They had steeled themselves for arrest, but well-rehearsed waitresses at the first four counters simply advised the white customers that they were closing and turned out the lights, leaving the Negroes debating what to do next. Only at Britt's did the management call in the police, who hauled off twenty-one demonstrators in paddy wagons. Bull Connor came out of his office, where, brooding over his defeat by Albert Boutwell, he was formulating a desperate plan to hang on to his job in spite of the election results. In public, Connor castigated the owners of the four closed lunch counters for failing to cooperate with his plan to incarcerate every Negro who challenged segregation. He repeated his public promise to “fill that jail full.”

King shared Connor's disappointment with the small number of people jailed. He had hoped to begin more impressively, especially now that the Easter deadline was so near. He and his aides perceived an alarming tide of opposition among activist Negroes, many of whom preferred to celebrate Connor's defeat than to talk of jail. At that night's special mass meeting, Shuttlesworth announced that they would meet every night until the end of the campaign. Abernathy joked with a crowd of four hundred about the urgency of time. “The white man can learn to do the Twist and the Slop in two weeks,” he said, “but it has taken us two hundred years to learn to live with each other…. Are you ready? Are you ready to make the challenge?” He coaxed some seventy-five new volunteers to come forward to join the jail list, but they managed to get only four of them into jail the next day. Everything seemed to be going wrong. The few reporters who were paying attention puzzled over the gaping difference between these meager results and King's promise of a “full-scale assault” on segregation. Of the handicaps early in the Birmingham crisis, perhaps the most serious was King's image as a reluctant and losing crusader. He had been largely out of the public eye for eight months, since his retreat from Albany. His name had faded. He appeared to be a worthy symbol from the 1950s who had overreached himself trying to operate as a full-fledged political leader.

It was like starting over. King had planned to go to jail himself by the third day, but he decided instead to shore up the internal strength of the movement. In painstaking remedial work, he met almost constantly with groups of ministers, preaching to them, answering skeptical and even hostile questions. With the sit-in plans complicated by the defensive tactics of the store owners, movement leaders switched to protest marches on city hall. Fred Shuttlesworth led the first one on Saturday, April 6, taking more than forty people with him into jail. This was a respectable number. Walker decided that what had been lost in clarity—the plain connection between the demonstration and the demands for lunch-counter integration—was more than offset by signs of life in the campaign. In the private strategy session, however, they had some difficulty finding preachers of stature to follow Shuttlesworth into jail the next day. King had been seeking volunteers from his own SCLC board since January, but the only one who was there and willing was James Lawson, who could not be spared from his workshops. Cutting through the dilatory talk of preaching obligations, King turned to “Fireball” Smith, Shuttlesworth's vice president in the ACMHR, and said, “Smith, I want you to go to jail.” He reluctantly agreed. King asked his brother A.D. to join Smith, and then he recruited John Porter to round out the team of preachers leading the next day's march toward city hall.

Bull Connor and his K-9 corps confronted the marchers on the sidewalk before a large crowd of bystanders. Unnerved by the sight of the dogs, a nineteen-year-old demonstrator named Leroy Allen pulled a clay pipe out of his pocket, whereupon two dogs swarmed over him, felling him to the pavement. When officers managed to pull the dogs off, they led Allen into the paddy wagon along with more than twenty other marchers and the three preachers. Primal tales of the police dogs raced through Negro Birmingham that night, contrasting sharply with stories about how grand the three preachers looked being led off to jail in their Palm Sunday robes.

Still, jail volunteers were scarce. All of Walker's cherished details did not save the campaign from the appearance of haphazard spontaneity. Compared with King's previous ventures, Birmingham was mired in a relative news vacuum. Even the local Negro biweekly treated King's campaign as a disturbing rumor and provided no firsthand coverage of the demonstrations. In an editorial, it attacked direct action as “wasteful and worthless” and looked to Mayor-elect Boutwell for solace. Some days later, with more than a hundred demonstrators in the Birmingham jail, the paper headlined a luncheon speech by Roy Wilkins in Kentucky. Walker and King expected such treatment from the Birmingham
World
, which, as a sister paper to the Atlanta
Daily World
, was owned by King's Ebenezer nemesis, C. A. Scott.

They did no better in other media. King launched Project C just as the city was bursting with optimism and civic renewal. Editorial cartoons showed the incoming city leaders eagerly rolling up their sleeves, and the white newspapers shut out the segregationists and King alike as blemishes on the civic reform movement. When Bull Connor and the other two city commissioners announced that they would refuse to leave office on April 15—thus posing the threat of a putsch, or a war between rival governments—they were obliged to buy an advertisement in the
News
to get their intentions published. Almost proudly, the
News
ran a small story about how both Governor George Wallace and Fred Shuttles-worth were complaining of a “blackout of news” on the sit-ins. Approvingly, the white newspapers passed along Mayor-elect Boutwell's declared policy toward King: “I urge everyone, white and Negro, calmly to ignore what is now being attempted in Birmingham.”

Notwithstanding King's name and the city's public image as the Bastille of segregation, outside observers ignored the showdown too. President Kennedy made no statement about the demonstrations, and answered no questions because Washington reporters asked none. The Administration's only move was a phone call from Burke Marshall, who, acting on a request from the publisher of the Birmingham
News
, called King to urge delay. Marshall told Walker that Robert Kennedy himself opposed the demonstrations as an “ill-timed” ambush on a reform city government that was not yet in office. National publications reflected the mood of the White House. Birmingham news played in the back pages of
The New York Times
, which headlined its first Project C stories “Integration Drive Slows…Sit-Ins and a Demonstration Plan Fail to Materialize…Demonstrations Fail to Develop.” King complained that never had his work received such negative press in the North.

Most people were in no mood for Birmingham, anyway. During the first exuberant spring since the brush with Armageddon in Cuba, established organs of the mass culture promoted almost anything that was optimistic.
Life
magazine celebrated the government's plans for using hydrogen bombs to blast out new harbors and a copy of the Panama Canal, and predicted that LSD, peyote, and other hallucinogens soon would be harnessed to make people “more productive and generally effective.” There was infectious awe over miracles—both profound ones such as the discovery of the DNA molecule, the “key to life itself,” and prosaic ones such as the invention of the pop-top beer can. Young Jack Nicklaus challenged Arnold Palmer in the Masters tournament, and the most popular song that April was the Chiffons' bubbly “He's So Fine.”

By the time King's volunteers finally began to trickle forward, a meager press appetite for civil rights had settled elsewhere. In the Mississippi Delta, SNCC registration leaders had managed almost unconsciously what King hoped to do by careful design: build a movement that could seize national attention. They succeeded so well that the Kennedy Administration's internal messages on civil rights focused on Mississippi, not Birmingham, even after King's followers began filling Bull Connor's jail. The dreamy grit of the Mississippi students framed an irresistible story of violence and innocence, such that Claude Sitton and other leading reporters stayed with Bob Moses in Greenwood.

 

To Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes, his initial recruits from McComb, Moses added some fifteen SNCC workers to a voter registration project now scattered over six counties of the rich plantation country of the Delta, between the loops of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. Group labels mattered little to the workers. Diane Nash Bevel worked for SNCC. Her husband James drew a semi-regular paycheck from the SCLC in Atlanta, which excited mild envy but no scorn. Amzie Moore and Aaron Henry, both of the NAACP, frequently joined their night councils as father figures.

After the discouragements of 1962, their realistic goals for 1963 did not extend much beyond survival. The ruling whites of Mississippi had demonstrated that they were hardly complacent about Negro voting, even in counties where less than 5 percent of eligible Negroes had registered. Ever sensitive to political danger, the Mississippi legislature added a requirement that names of new voter applicants be published in the newspapers for two weeks prior to acceptance. Another new law allowed current voters to object to the “moral character” of applicants. Facing these laws, plus the shootings and padlocked churches, no Mississippi Negro could hope to slip quietly in or out of the courthouse.

The registration movement lived in a tiny glass house. SNCC staff members commonly had no more than thirty dollars a month to cover all personal and office expenses for a county-wide pilot project. Payroll checks, which were sent out sporadically at best, often went to the wrong place or the wrong person. Poverty and internal disorganization severely curtailed movement operations, and, with the post office, the phone company, and all other public facilities in hostile hands, logistical frustrations reached humorous extremes. Sending a message was an art; getting a ride was an ordeal; finding a meeting place was a saga. Even when the volunteers could move and speak, fear among Negroes shut most doors to them. A turnout of twenty sharecroppers was considered a mass meeting. In December 1962, Moses conceded to the Voter Education Project that “we are powerless to register people in significant numbers anywhere in the state.” He listed three conditions for change: (1) the removal of the White Citizens Council from control of Mississippi politics; (2) action by the Justice Department to secure safe registration for Negroes; and (3) a mass uprising of the unlettered, fearful Negroes, demanding the immediate right to vote. “Very likely all three will be necessary before a breakthrough can be obtained,” wrote Moses.

Desperation drove him to take wild gambles. On January 1, with the endorsement of Martin Luther King and the support of the Gandhi Society, Moses filed a federal suit in Washington against Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover. Joining Sam Block, Hollis Watkins, and other young SNCC plaintiffs, he sought an injunction ordering Kennedy and Hoover to enforce six different sections of the federal code that made it a crime to harass or intimidate those trying to vote. They wanted examples to break patterns. Whether or not convictions ensued, they wanted white children to ask their parents why the FBI was arresting a sheriff or a registrar. Such enforcement would signal a marked change from the current practice in which FBI agents were asked only to gather information for possible use in civil suits that may or may not, some years later, result in a court order.

Naïvely, or perhaps disingenuously, Moses characterized the suit as a friendly demonstration for the benefit of its targets, Hoover and Kennedy. The litigation “does not reflect any antipathy toward the defendants or any lack of appreciation of the two-year record of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice,” he said in a statement. Instead, taking at face value all the Justice Department's disclaimers about the restraints of federalism, the plaintiffs sought to prove to Kennedy and Hoover that “their powers are immeasurably greater than they possibly realize.” Not surprisingly, Kennedy saw the lawsuit as a threat to the prestige of the entire Administration, founded as it was on the explicit premise that the Justice Department had “systematically refused to take action.” Justice Department lawyers maneuvered successfully to block the lawsuit as a crank scheme.