Parting the Waters (134 page)

By then the Birmingham police department had received an FBI intelligence report that leaflets were circulating in the Negro high schools urging all students to leave school at noon on Thursday. This threat of mass truancy was only a hint of the rumblings in Negro Birmingham. “Meatball” and other Bevel recruits were sounding the call in the elementary schools too. “Tall Paul,” a rock ‘n' roll disc jockey, was broadcasting a jived-up announcement about the “big party” Thursday at Kelly Ingram Park, and nearly every Negro kid in Birmingham knew what he meant. The night was filled with anguish and excitement, as some young people wrestled with plans to sneak in or out of the march, while others confided bravely to relatives that Martin Luther King wanted them to march to jail.

For King, too, the moment brimmed with tension. Eight years after the bus boycott, he was on the brink of holding nothing back. Eight long months after the SCLC convention in Birmingham, he was contemplating an action of more drastic, lasting impact than jumping off the roof of city hall or assassinating Bull Connor. Having submitted his prestige and his body to jail, and having hurled his innermost passions against the aloof respectability of white American clergymen, all without noticeable effect, King committed his cause to the witness of schoolchildren.

Birmingham police squads, anticipating a “D-Day” youth march on Thursday, May 2, reinforced their daily roadblocks along the routes downtown from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The usual crowds of Negro bystanders gathered directly across from the church in Kelly Ingram Park, watching the police officers. Both groups listened to freedom songs wafting outward through the brick walls and stained glass windows. When the front doors opened shortly after one o'clock, fifty teenagers emerged two abreast. Their high-spirited singing and clapping transformed “We Shall Overcome” from a wistful dirge into a ragtime march.

Jumping wearily to duty, the officers halted the line, gave notice of the court injunction against demonstrations, warned of arrest, and started directing the teenagers into the paddy wagons. Except for the absence of adults in the line, it seemed to be another day in the month-long siege until a second double line of marchers spilled out through the church's front doors. Shortly after them came another group, followed by another and another. Wyatt Walker, speaking to assistants by walkie-talkie, sent some groups veering off by different routes. Police radios crackled with requests for more paddy wagons. The dispatchers, swallowing the department's pride, called on Sheriff Bailey to send in county deputies. Still the marchers kept spilling forth, outnumbering and enveloping the officers so that one group of twenty teenagers was able to slip around the clogged arrest lines toward city hall. They had almost disappeared into the down-town business district before a police detachment took off in pursuit.

From the swirling mass of Negro children, blue uniforms, and picket signs, an anxious policeman spotted a familiar figure across the Sixteenth Street truce line. “Hey, Fred,” he called. “How many more have you got?”

“At least a thousand!” shouted Shuttlesworth.

“God Almighty,” said the policeman.

Reporters saw things they had never seen before. George Wall, a tough-looking police captain, confronted a group of thirty-eight elementary-school children and did his best to cajole or intimidate them into leaving the lines, but they all said they knew what they were doing. Asked her age as she climbed into a paddy wagon, a tiny girl called out that she was six. When city firemen came up to help contain the demonstration, one group of marchers dissolved in panic at the sight of high-pressure hoses being spread across Fourth Avenue; then they managed to re-form. An elderly woman broke away from the cheering observers in Ingram Park and ran along the arrest lines, ecstatically shouting “Sing, children, sing!” Four blocks away, police overtook the twenty students who had circumvented the blockade. They carried signs that read “Segregation Is a Sin” and “No Eat, No Dollars.” The very sight of them was a blow to the city's goal of confining the unsettling disturbances to the Negro sections of town.

On running out of paddy wagons and sheriff's patrol cars, police commanders called in school buses to take load after load of hookey-playing students away. It was all over by four o'clock. With the streets cleared, the energy that had created the extraordinary sights disappeared into the jails, where as many as seventy-five students were crammed into cells built for eight. And almost as soon as the lines stopped coming out of Sixteenth Street Baptist, early birds began filing into the mass meeting at Fred Shuttlesworth's old church some blocks distant. Rev. Edwin Gardner, the warm-up preacher, directed their overflow emotions into songs, prayers, and an offering. “If you are dead broke, see me after the meeting,” he said. There were a thousand people in the church by the time surveillance detectives took their seats at six, and nearly twice that number when Shuttlesworth and King arrived. “The whole world is watching Birmingham tonight,” said Shuttlesworth.

Like all the other preachers, Shuttlesworth was too distracted to give a normal speech. The church buzzed with rumors. The crowd's fervor rose with the disintegration of the usual program, as the loss of normalcy itself heralded a spectacular surge of emotion. “I have been inspired and moved today,” declared King. “I have never seen anything like it.” Using figures from Wyatt Walker's jail registry, he announced that precisely 958 children had signed up for jail that day, and that of these some 600 were in custody. For tactical reasons, he kept to himself the news that a flood of new young people was replenishing the jailed volunteers several times over. “If they think today is the end of this,” he said, “they will be badly mistaken.” He introduced CORE chairman James Farmer, who had flown into Birmingham for the CORE-SNCC Freedom Walk in honor of William Moore. “We are prepared and ready to unite behind you,” Farmer told the Birmingham crowd.

King revealed that Dick Gregory had just agreed to join the Birmingham movement on Sunday. Cheers went up for the comedian who had drawn national publicity to Greenwood. King also announced that Diane Nash and the other members of the Moore march had been arrested. Finally, he introduced James Bevel, who fairly sprang into the pulpit. “There ain't gonna be no meeting Monday night,” he shouted, “because every Negro is gonna be in jail by Sunday night.” In wild, boundless bravado, Bevel vowed to finish off segregation in Birmingham fast enough to be “back in Mississippi chopping cotton” by Tuesday. Preaching on the courage of the children, he burst into the freedom songs they had sung on their way into the paddy wagons. Some three hundred people rose spontaneously in anticipation of a march to jail. Unable to wait for the next day, they walked up and down the aisles as the church thundered in song.

 

The contest resumed with greater intensity on Friday, May 3. By noon, an audience of anxious parents and curious onlookers jammed Kelly Ingram Park, while more than a thousand young people received marching orders inside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Across from them, blocking the eastbound cross streets, Birmingham's uniformed authorities massed in front of school buses, fire equipment, and police cruisers. When the first group of sixty singing students marched out of the church, Captain G. V. Evans confronted them at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. This time there was no talk of arrest. With both the city and county jails bulging already, the goal was to keep the demonstrators out of the downtown business section without making arrests. On the orders of Bull Connor, Captain Evans pointed to the fire hoses behind him and told the sixty students to disperse “or you're going to get wet.”

The students kept singing, whereupon Captain Evans signaled the firemen to douse them with spray through fogging nozzles. Wetness shocked nearly all the marchers into retreat. Behind them, the bystanders in Ingram Park recoiled instinctively from the threat of being drenched. Through his bullhorn, Evans ordered an evacuation of the area, and the water seemed to enforce his commands effectively, until he and everyone else began to notice the holdout students. About ten of the original sixty stood their ground. Already soaked beyond any worry of lost dignity, they sang one word, “freedom,” to the tune of “Amen.” As the firemen concentrated the hoses upon the singers, the crowd surged back toward the contested borders. Then the firemen advanced toward the holdouts, pounding them with water at close range. The holdouts sat down on the sidewalk to stabilize themselves. It was a moment of baptism for the civil rights movement, and Birmingham's last effort to wash away the stain of dissent against segregation. For Captain Evans and the firemen, it was a mechanical problem of increasing the water pressure enough to overcome physical resistance on the pavement. Ideally suited for the task were special monitor guns that forced water from two hoses through a single nozzle, mounted on a tripod. The fire department advertised these attachments as miracles of long-range firefighting, capable of knocking bricks loose from mortar or stripping bark from trees at a distance of one hundred feet.

A. G. Gaston was among the first of millions to be converted by the monitor guns. The city's leading Negro businessman was talking on the telephone with David Vann, one of the architects of the city charter campaign against Bull Connor. As they often did, the two were singing a hymn of complaint against King's street demonstrations for undermining their delicate, mostly secret, reform alliance just at its moment of opportunity. If successful, King would force Gaston and other established Negro leaders to endorse his tactics, which would alienate the city's nervous white moderates. If unsuccessful, King would strengthen segregationists. Either way, the demonstrations were a curse to Vann and Gaston, who had been groping for a way to maneuver King out of town gently, so as not to give comfort to Bull Connor. That Friday afternoon, Gaston suddenly asked Vann to excuse him. Staring down from the window of his office in the Gaston Building, which overlooked Ingram Park, he saw something that yanked out the roots of his millionaire's bluster.

“But lawyer Vann!” Gaston gasped. “They've turned the fire hoses on a little black girl. And they're rolling that girl right down the middle of the street.”

The monitor guns made limbs jerk weightlessly and tumbled whole bodies like scraps of refuse in a high wind. One look made Gaston sign off the telephone. Outside, brave songs turned to screams, and bystanders threw bricks and rocks at the hoses. When the water drove them back out of range, some of them sneaked into buildings so they could lob their projectiles from above. Eventually, they hit two firemen and
Life
photographer Charles Moore.

During the noisy, sporadic duel of rocks and hoses, young marchers continued to spill out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Walker, Bevel, Andrew Young, and other supervisors directed the lines away from the conflict, avoiding both the hoses and the contaminating association with violence. Their maneuver confronted police commanders with a dilemma: the hoses were pinned down by darting, rock-throwing by-standers while the marchers escaped toward downtown from the other end of Ingram Park. There were not enough hoses to cover both flanks, especially when the monitor guns halved their number. Police detachments did manage to intercept the marchers and load them into jail-bound school buses, but this meant that the authorities were failing in their plan to repulse rather than arrest the demonstrators. Worse, from the commanders' point of view, the concentrated city forces were being split apart. In consultation with Bull Connor, they decided that they had to drive the Negroes back together. To do that, they needed an intimidating weapon more mobile than the hoses.

The police commanders deployed eight K-9 units at the corner of Ingram Park farthest from the church. First sight of the dogs brought shouts of fright and rage from the milling crowds. Many fled instantly; some threw rocks at the dogs and their handlers; a few reckless teenagers waved waterlogged shirts like bullfighters. On command, the officers handling the dogs rushed forward to gain close quarters. Where the crowd was too tightly massed to flee cleanly, the growling German shepherds lunged toward stumbling, cowering stragglers. They bit three teenagers severely enough to require hospital treatment. Other targets, screaming with terror and turning in confusion, either disappeared into the Negro section to the west or took refuge in the church. Most of the K-9 units kept up pursuit, but a few veered back to chase away clumps of Negroes who had drifted back into the vacant spaces to gaze on the full panoply of ambulances, billyclubs, paddy wagons, arrest scenes, distant marchers, and the thick ropes of water from the monitor guns.

On a street corner outside the Jockey Boy restaurant, two dog teams came up behind a group of awed spectators who did not notice them until one of the handlers seized a fifteen-year-old boy and whirled him around into the jaws of a German shepherd. An AP photographer standing nearby caught the sight that came to symbolize Birmingham: a white policeman in dark sunglasses grasping a Negro boy by the front of the shirt as his other hand gave just enough slack in the leash for the dog to spring upward and bury its teeth in the boy's abdomen. And most compelling was the boy himself, who was tall, thin, and well dressed, leaning
into
the attacking dog with an arm dropped submissively at his side and a straight-ahead look of dead calm on his face. The graphic power of the picture concealed a supreme irony. The victim, young Walter Gadsden, was not steeped in nonviolent discipline, nor had he intended to become part of the demonstration. His handsome cardigan sweater was an emblem of his standing in the prosperous family of C. A. Scott, who so scorned King's demonstrations that his
World
papers in both Atlanta and Birmingham still ignored Project C more resolutely even than Birmingham's white newspapers. Although the image of the savage attack struck like lightning in the American mind, the reaction of Walter Gadsden lay buried in the deeper convolutions of race. True to his family, he later said the German shepherd had shocked him into the realization that he had been “mixing with a bad crowd” of Negroes when he went to observe the demonstration. He resolved to get off the streets and prepare for college.

At three o'clock, a police inspector ventured inside the church to negotiate. From a military tactician's point of view, the engagement thus far was confined to a relatively mild skirmish in which the K-9 units had rotated on the controlling vector of the fire hoses, sweeping Negroes out of Ingram Park or across it into the church. Only half the Negro groups had stepped off on their jail marches, of whom some 250 were being arrested. The dogs and police units had reconcentrated outside, bottling up scores of wet, angry bystanders amid the five hundred demonstrators who were still trying to form their lines. In that precarious situation, King was only too happy to accept a truce for the day, as he knew that the political tremors had been set loose already. Seizing a moment in the chaos, he called Clarence Jones in New York with a long list of people who should be told personally of the day's events. At 3:57
P.M.
by the FBI wiretapper's log, Jones gave Stanley Levison a breathless summary and an emergency request from King that Levison draft telegrams for President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy “within the hour.” Levison, whose qualms about the decision to use child marchers had put him on edge already, became so rattled that he wrote an awkward, overly erudite telegram that King could not use, ending, “Will you permit this recrudescence of violence in Birmingham to threaten our lives and deny us our rights?”