Parting the Waters (138 page)

No executive repast was ever like this one. As the big mules descended toward their favorite downtown restaurants, choruses of “We Shall Overcome” first blasted their ears, and then they were swallowed up by what amounted to Birmingham's nonviolent Bastille Day. Not only had the young Negroes broken into the downtown enclave, they had jammed the sidewalks and streets in a wild celebration of triumph and possession, paying little attention to the august businessmen who were obliged to go around them or, coming upon a patch of sidewalk literally carpeted with sit-ins, to step over them. Turning the first corner, the Senior Citizens beheld what King proudly called “square blocks of Negroes, a veritable sea of black faces.” Newspaper estimates of their number would run upward from three thousand. Joyous, weaving processions burst out of segregated stores, then back in again. Here and there a policeman lamely tore up a picket sign or two. Wincing commanders explained to the business leaders that they were making no arrests because the jails would hold no more, and they could not otherwise clear the area without teargassing or shooting up the downtown sanctum itself, including the Chamber of Commerce.

All these sensations struck the mules with revolutionary force. One of them, publisher Clarence B. Hanson of the Birmingham
News
, rushed back to his office to compose a telegram to President Kennedy. Although he clung even then to the amazing local cabal of journalistic restraint—burying on inside pages a host of news stories, such as “Negro Mobs Break Through Police: Swarm Over Downtown Area”—Hanson splashed the crisis telegram across the top of that afternoon's final edition. His extraordinary appeal to Kennedy, which broke the five-week embargo against front-page mention of King, revealed that even powerful American whites conceived of themselves as helpless victims of race: “Mr. President, if these were white marches…we believe your Administration would have taken vigorous action to discourage them.” Hanson objected to Burke Marshall's call for self-responsibility on the grounds that it conveniently exempted President Kennedy himself. Having encouraged the aspirations of King and other Negroes, said Hanson, Kennedy was obliged to stop their demonstrations: “If there is to be order, and respect for law…you, sir, must be the one to bring it.”

A number of the shaken business leaders unburdened themselves as freely as the publisher that day, but when they reassembled at the Chamber of Commerce they thought better of his call for intervention by President Kennedy. Inevitably, that would mean federal occupation, force-fed integration, and protracted strife with Governor Wallace. Besides, how could the Army itself dry up the rivers of Negroes they had seen? As the emergency session consumed the afternoon, Burke Marshall kept supplying Robert Kennedy with the names of key executives to be lobbied by cabinet members or by President Kennedy himself. The President made several calls, arguing that there was no way out except settlement. These efforts remained private. While the President worked continuously on Birmingham—meeting at the White House with Ted Sorensen, Nicholas Katzenbach, Lee White, John Doar, Berl Bernhard, and Louis Martin—he instructed his press officers to stress that his powers were not engaged. The President was “closely monitoring events,” they announced, and “continues to hope the situation can be resolved by the people of Birmingham themselves.” The White House received the Hanson telegram as “part of our study of this thing.” “We are not sitting idly by,” said Assistant Press Secretary Andrew Hatcher. “We just can't say anything.”

 

At the Gaston Motel, King experienced the terrible exultation of a commander whose troops had just charged over the hill. Where were they, and what now? As always, the point of breakthrough was the moment of maximum danger. The emblems of the victory, such as the inability of the police to make arrests, shifted the burden of good behavior to the movement just as the dispersed, pell-mell attack severely reduced King's control. Worse, he knew that half or more of the Negroes now paralyzing the retail district were bystanders who had joined spontaneously upon seeing the demonstrators run wild without getting arrested. Many did not have the slightest training or interest in nonviolent discipline. How long could such a huge, motley crowd celebrate downtown, loosed from the fears of Bull Connor and segregation, without fights breaking out with police or each other—or riots, looting, or vandalism? On the other hand, if King tried to pull them out, only the nonviolent ones might follow his lieutenants, leaving the others more likely to run amok.

Chaos overran King's hopes of salvaging a complete, nonviolent triumph. Hundreds of demonstrators made their way back to Ingram Park when they ran out of adrenaline or nerve, and within an hour leaders and followers were chasing each other in all directions. Fred Shuttles-worth burst into King's room shouting, “Martin, this is it!” One more foray downtown would break the city's will, Shuttlesworth insisted. Just after he rushed off to lead a “second wave,” Forman burst in shouting that further demonstrations would be foolish and suicidally cruel. King reluctantly supported Shuttlesworth, but plans to retreat from downtown so as to return in better order were too complicated. Orders were modified, lost, delayed, disbelieved, or ignored. Miraculously, there was almost no violence from or upon the remnant who maintained the occupation downtown, but a pitched battle back near the church vindicated the news judgment of the stubbornest reporters, who had ignored the downtown stampede. Somewhere in the middle of the confusion, Wyatt Walker desperately tried to clear a path for the “second wave” by means of underhanded tactics that he had concealed from King. First swearing them to secrecy, Walker dispatched trusted runners to sound false fire alarms in distant corners of the city. Walker himself, in an unsuccessful attempt to drive off the intimidating K-9 corps, sneaked into an alley and blew on high-pitched dog whistles he had imported from the North.

Among the Negroes, thousands of joyful newcomers were in no mood to resubmit to the amassing phalanx of white firemen and police officers, who in turn were in no mood to suffer the Negro celebration or to allow another breach of their ranks. A duel of rocks and fire hoses escalated by three o'clock to what the reporters agreed was a riot. Firemen worked the hoses with such furious abandon that they accidentally cracked the ribs of a policeman. When Shuttlesworth appeared with his line of singing children, the firemen used a monitor gun to slam him against the wall of Sixteenth Street Baptist, pinning him there until he collapsed. An ambulance took him to the hospital, whereupon Bull Connor declared, “I wish they had carried him away in a hearse.” For another hour, the hoses battered not only rock-throwers in the park but also lines of children who sallied forth from the church under the gleeful urging of James Bevel. Wyatt Walker fumed that Bevel's madness had turned his climactic demonstration into a “Roman holiday,” but Bevel insisted that the playful submission to punishment represented a sublime and contagious form of nonviolence. “We intend to have the fire department pumping water tomorrow,” he announced from the pulpit that night. “Wear your swimsuit if you want to.”

At a three-church mass meeting, the day's fury at last subsided into the gentler passions of speeches and organ music. “This is a great movement,” said King. “We are not going to stop this movement until we have
moved
segregation from this city.” He preached nonviolence, as always, and pledged not to flinch even though “the Governor—bless his heart” was moving Alabama state troopers into Birmingham that very hour. Still, there was a hint of melancholy in his voice. Weary, King discarded his morning excitement about the ripe powers of the movement and spoke instead of a need for earthly help. “The hour has come for the Federal Government to take a forthright stand on segregation in the United States,” he said. “I am not criticizing the President, but we are going to have to help him.” Almost plaintively, King recalled his long, futile campaign to persuade President Kennedy to issue a Lincolnesque proclamation. He told the congregation of his encounter with the Kennedys in the Lincoln Room of the White House, and said that once he thought Kennedy “
wanted
to sign.” Although the sentimental opportunity of the Emancipation Day centennial was long past, King drifted back to his yearning for a simpler way. “We need to call on the President to sign a paper saying that segregation is unconstitutional,” he said.

Robert Kennedy joined his brother for dinner that night in the White House, where they anxiously awaited word on the “big mules” debate. When the call finally came through at eight o'clock, an aide considered the moment important enough to make notes on Burke Marshall's first, exhausted words to President Kennedy: “The meeting worked. The meeting of all the businessmen worked. Now if [it] holds w/ Negroes, we're over the hump. They've had a hell of a day—& we've got to make it stick.” With only a handful of dissenting votes, Marshall added, the Senior Citizens had empowered a committee to negotiate a settlement with the Negroes in their name.

The white committee, led by the board chairman of Royal Crown Cola, pitched immediately into negotiations with the Negroes, led by Arthur Shores, A. G. Gaston, and President L. H. Pitts of Miles College. At midnight, abandoning the fiction that they could perfect a compromise without the informed consent of King, they retired under cloak of secrecy to seek him out at the Drews' house. Mayor Boutwell's chief assistant, Billy Hamilton, was among the whites who dropped out at this critical stage; Boutwell simply could not risk public disclosure that his man had gone into a Negro neighborhood at night to barter away segregation face to face with the arch-villain himself. For the others, the midnight meeting was a personal and political watershed, such that the gruffly irreverent Sidney Smyer, who regularly boasted that he had been “called a son of a bitch plenty of times,” led the group in a prayer for divine guidance. Then they grappled with the details of segregation's demise. Generally, the whites wanted vagueness and delay in order to minimize the danger of reprisal, while the Negroes wanted precision and immediacy in order to minimize the likelihood of dispute or betrayal. As the night dragged on, both sides tended to credit the mild, unflappable Andrew Young with ideas that achieved overall balance by proceeding in mixed stages. For the Negroes, there would be immediate desegregation of downtown dressing rooms, which was relatively easy for the whites because there were few left. For the whites, the linchpin segregation of the lunch counters would be surrendered at the end of sixty days or upon the integration of the public schools, whichever came first. By 4:00
A.M.
, King, Smyer, Marshall, and all the others agreed that they had at least a blueprint for a settlement, and could do no more without sleep.

 

At almost exactly that pre-dawn hour, two firebombs crashed into Hartman Turnbow's farmhouse outside Mileston, Mississippi, between Jackson and Greenwood. Turnbow jumped from bed and tried to put out the fires, until his wife and daughter shouted to him that they could not escape because there were armed white men outside. Turnbow grabbed one of his rifles and drove away the intruders in a spirited gunfight.

Bob Moses arrived shortly after daybreak. The attack endangered his rural registration projects because Turnbow, only a few days earlier, had become the first Negro in the twentieth century known to have tried to register in Holmes County. Turnbow was a yeoman farmer like E. W. Steptoe, stout as an oak and owner of seventy acres “free and clear.” In return for his courageous, colorful folk wisdom, SNCC workers cheerfully overlooked the arsenal of firearms that he had concealed in at least a dozen places on his property and person. (“This nonviolent stuff ain't no good,” Turnbow later told “Martin Lufus King,” as he called him. “It'll getcha killed.”)

By the time Sheriff Andrew P. Smith arrived at the farmhouse that afternoon, Moses was taking photographs of the fire damage for his report, having taken his own statements from the witnesses. (“They come by here and shot all in my kitchen,” Mrs. Turnbow declared.) An FBI agent, dispatched by John Doar at Moses' urgent request, was pulling slugs from the clapboard walls. This sort of meticulous investigation put Sheriff Smith into a nearly insoluble political dilemma. If he accepted the Turnbow account and went after the white firebombers, he would be doomed as sheriff in Holmes County. If he stalled, or pronounced himself unable to solve the case, he would have to turn the investigation over to the FBI. These choices being unacceptable, Sheriff Smith accused Turnbow of firebombing his own house and shooting it full of holes to build sympathy for the Moses registration campaign.

Turnbow defended himself with a squirrel hunter's knowledge of ballistics. “Why, I ain't never owned a forty-five in my life,” he protested, pointing to the holes in his house. “Them's forty-five bullets and forty-five holes, and I never owned nary'un.”

Nevertheless, Sheriff Smith, his conspiracy theory reinforced by intense feelings of scorn and frustration, arrested Turnbow, Moses, and three SNCC workers for arson and related crimes. A jury promptly found them guilty. Moses was fined $50 on a separate charge of impeding Smith's investigation by taking pictures. The overall predicament, which was at once logical and patently absurd, obliged Doar to launch a protracted effort to void the state prosecutions. All this took place in the quiet obscurity of the Mississippi countryside, markedly in contrast with the tumult that had left Greenwood only a month earlier and passed on to Birmingham.

 

Fred Shuttlesworth exploded in dissent as soon as King sent word on Wednesday morning of a proposed one-day moratorium on demonstrations. From his hospital bed, though groggy from “three hypos” of sedation, as he said, Shuttlesworth reared up to tell his loyal preachers of Birmingham that the softhearted King was giving away their chance to finish off Bull Connor. “Ain't no use scalding the hog on one side!” he thundered. “While the water is hot, scald him on both sides and get him clean. If the water gets cold, you ain't
never
gonna clean off that hog!” Aside from this policy disagreement, Shuttlesworth made it clear that he was affronted as King's co-equal prince of the church. King should have visited him in the hospital. On something as important as this first break in their avalanche of street pressure, King should have convened the Negro hierarchy around Shuttlesworth's bed to make the decision.