Parting the Waters (140 page)

Perhaps intentionally, King gave no more than this hint that the heat of his negotiations had shifted from the Senior Citizens to the Kennedy Administration, and only a few people, such as Stanley Levison, were privy to the friction. FBI wiretaps picked up Levison's candid agreement with Robert Kennedy's position that the prisoners were a “secondary issue.” It was a “pity,” said Levison, that King wanted so much not to look like a privileged leader—he should take the deal and then worry about the prisoners. “Even if the people have to go to jail,” Levison said, “the other things that are won will just make them martyrs and make the victory even clearer. And I'm damn sure that for the kind of victory this represents, people will be delighted to serve a term, because this is the big victory. No question, if this comes, this is the big one.” On the other hand, Levison said he was pleased that King had scolded the Kennedy Administration for its aloofness. Levison figured that the Kennedys were adopting a “new policy” of private maneuver behind a public stance of sympathetic neutrality. “It's right, and it's wrong,” he said. While the movement “has to be prepared to do a job without relying on Washington,” it was “impermissible for Washington not to be involved.” In another call, Levison told Clarence Jones that he thought “the Administration made a mistake by not intervening” more forcefully in Birmingham.

King and Kennedy muttered about each other to their respective aides, who in turn muttered more harshly. But the Birmingham emergency did not allow either side to give in completely to hostility, as political disaster menaced them both. Kennedy, accepting that King would march again rather than leave people in jail, resolved to find the bail money. King, accepting that Kennedy's help offered the only way out, gave up hopes for immediate bail reduction or release. Together, they resolved to buy their way out of the impasse, and the tacit alliance spawned a frenzy of hidden cooperation. King called Harry Belafonte to say that he needed some $90,000 in cash, and that this time he was working with the Attorney General without reservation. Kennedy's first call was to Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, who was soon barking orders from Detroit to his Washington lawyer, Joseph Rauh. “Joe,” he said, “we need to get a hundred and sixty thousand dollars to Birmingham by morning.” Rauh laughed; then he gulped.

Robert Kennedy went to dinner that night at the White House, where the President pried out of his guest,
Newsweek
bureau chief Ben Bradlee, a tip that the subject of the next cover story would be Senator Barry Goldwater's chances to become the Republican presidential nominee in 1964. “I can't believe we'll be that lucky,” said Kennedy, who hoped to run against Goldwater. “I can't believe Barry will be that lucky, either.” The Attorney General missed nearly all the dinner gossip, being closeted with the telephone. From ALF-CIO president George Meany, he secured a promise for half the $160,000 out of two of Meany's departmental accounts. He obtained a quarter-share of $40,000 directly from David McDonald of the Steelworkers, and, with Walter Reuther's promise to send the final share out of Auto Workers funds, Kennedy turned to the feat of instant delivery. It was a matter of slush funds and satchels, of the sort that Kennedy himself had publicized in his war against unsavory union practices. No less than a national security crisis legitimized the transactions, and Kennedy discussed the logistics with Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg.

The Attorney General was counting minutes, waiting for confirmations of cash in hand. Fretfully, he called Harry Belafonte to make sure that the settlement was not falling through on King's end. While he was pressing for reassurance, Belafonte's doorbell rang, and when Belafonte said it might be a delivery right then, Kennedy anxiously insisted that Belafonte find out while he waited on the line. Obliging, Belafonte put the phone down and opened his door to behold a uniformed Negro deliveryman, who handed him a small black satchel containing $50,000 in cash from his boss, Michael Quill of the New York transportation workers' union. For King, this favor was in part a return on a speech he had delivered before Quill's workers several years earlier. For Belafonte, the quick circuit between Robert Kennedy's voice and the deliveryman's face remained a salient memory of his political life.

Racing home to New York, Jones followed King's instructions to report to Harry Belafonte, and then followed Belafonte's instructions to meet Governor Rockefeller's assistant Hugh Morrow at Rockefeller Plaza. By then the New York banks had closed for the weekend, but Jones soon found himself standing with Morrow and a punctilious vice president inside a cavernous vault of Chase Manhattan, the Rockefeller bank. Governor Rockefeller himself was in Venezuela, having just married Happy Murphy so swiftly on the heels of their respective divorces that the minister who performed the ceremony was subjected to ecclesiastical reprimand by Presbyterian superiors. In the Gallup poll on Republican presidential contenders, Rockefeller dropped thirteen points within a week of his marriage, instantly boosting the prospects of his rival, Barry Goldwater. These circumstances contributed to the atmosphere of secrecy inside the bank vault. Rockefeller wanted to avoid public charges that he had tried to “buy” the Negro vote, and King wanted to avoid publicity about Rockefeller's contribution to protect his relations with the Kennedys. For the bank itself, customs of confidentiality dignified the irregular transaction. In return for a promissory note by which Jones numbly promised to repay the full sum instantly upon demand, the vice president handed over a briefcase full of cash. Jones, feeling like a character in a spy novel, walked out of the vault to Belafonte's apartment, before heading back to Birmingham. On his return, he found in the mail a “blind” receipt notifying him that his loan had been repaid in full.

At the Gaston Motel, where the army of reporters had been promised a major announcement by noon, King stalled well into Friday afternoon. He was waiting first for confirmation that Joe Rauh had wired the union money from the UAW bank in Washington, then for the whites in Birmingham to fulfill their pledge to pay the money to city bond clerks, thereby setting free a steady stream of demonstrators. He was also waiting for word from Belafonte that Jones was heading South with more than enough money to free the last prisoners. With Burke Marshall and the white negotiators, King was exchanging last-minute modifications on how the various parties would behave when the great moment came—what they would sign, what they would say publicly, what they would truly mean. All the while, King was composing and rehearsing the performance on the Negro side. When finally the reporters threatened mutiny, King, Abernathy, and Shuttlesworth marched solemnly before the cameras. For reasons of internal diplomacy, King made sure who spoke the first words. Shuttlesworth said, “The City of Birmingham has reached an accord with its conscience.”

Although Shuttlesworth announced the terms of the settlement, the reporters would not be satisfied until they heard it from King himself, as most of their readers knew nothing of Shuttlesworth. King stepped forward to speak. Through his cautionary remarks—“there is still a strenuous task before us, and some of it is yet uncharted”—shone his first euphoric predictions of a national contagion. While he was speaking, Shuttlesworth collapsed in a dead faint. Shrieks went up about his exhaustion and his fire-hose bruises. Even so, the medical crisis diverted attention only briefly to Shuttlesworth, and the press conference resumed as soon as ambulance attendants bore him off to Holy Family Hospital.

At St. John's Church, a crowd of some two thousand people broke off a rollicking version of “Oh Freedom” when the preachers made their entrance to the first mass meeting that Friday night. Triumph inspired Abernathy to a rhapsody on leadership. “Amen!” he shouted. “Give me a big hand! Tonight is victory night, and you ought to stand up for me!” He said that if he were dying, he wanted King to be holding one hand and Shuttlesworth the other while his wife cradled his head. “All these preachers are great men,” Abernathy proclaimed, “but there isn't but one Martin Luther King! God sent him to lead us to freedom. Are you going to follow him? Is he our leader?” To great rhythmic shouts of “Yes!” Abernathy cried, “Then say ‘King'!” This served as the introduction for King, who took the pulpit amid a deafening chant of his name.

He quelled the adulation by reading the formal statement he had made at the press conference. Then, to establish a tone of intimacy, he gave the crowd an exclusive tidbit of the written agreement, details of which were being withheld so as not to alert the Klan. “The sitting rooms will be integrated by Monday,” King announced. He went on through the timetable of the phases: a biracial committee in fifteen days, integrated rest rooms and water fountains in thirty days, lunch counters and upgraded Negro clerks in sixty. All movement prisoners were “either out of jail or on the way out of jail,” he promised, and he told them “off the record” that the white businessmen planned to move faster than the timetable specified.

He warned them that the world would try to minimize, negate, and forget their achievement. Indeed, Mayor Boutwell already was announcing that he would not be bound by the settlement. Mayor Hanes was calling it a “capitulation by certain weak-kneed white people under threats of violence by the rabble-rousing Negro, King.” The Birmingham
News
was publishing a slanted farewell story, “Negroes End Desegregation Campaign: Not Able to Get Charges Dropped,” and, almost pathetically, the editors placed alongside it a graphic summary of spring rampages at Princeton, Brown, Brandeis, and Yale, strongly implying that the local upheaval was of no greater moment than panty raids up North. “Now don't let anybody fool you…” King told the crowd. “Do not underestimate the power of this movement! These things would not have been granted without your presenting your bodies and your very lives before the dogs and the tanks and the water hoses of this city!…”

“Then another thing,” he said, his voice now quivering with emotion. “The United States is concerned about its image. When things started happening down here, Mr. Kennedy got disturbed. For Mr. Kennedy…is battling for the minds and the hearts of men in Asia and Africa—some one billion men in the neutralist sector of the world—and they aren't gonna respect the United States of America if she deprives men and women of the basic rights of life because of the color of their skin. Mr. Kennedy
knows
that.” The President's worries gave the movement leverage to change the reality of a segregated bastion like Birmingham, King said, and now they had touched a nerve connecting conscience with power. He told them he had been flooded with phone calls offering support—not just from the rabbis and the most powerful Negro preachers, but planeloads from Denver and Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, and the head of the American Baptists, and Jackie Robinson and Floyd Patterson. And Harry Belafonte had called that morning to say that three thousand New Yorkers were ready to picket the White House if necessary to gain an agreement. “Now this is an
amazing
thing!” King cried. “And it should make all of us feel happy.”

 

As always, since the Montgomery bus boycott, the greatest danger followed closely upon a victory for civil rights, and the true measure of national support for the movement lagged well behind the early swells of enthusiasm. King knew this even before he reached home on Saturday. In Atlanta, both white and Negro newspapers sneered at the Birmingham settlement as a standoff of troublemakers. The
Journal
focused biliously upon King “and his flamboyant policy of inciting riot in the name of justice…Now having created a deadlock and enough ill will to last a generation, the time has come for him to hit the road and pass the hat once more.” On Auburn Avenue, C. A. Scott wrote a scorching editorial entitled “The Tragic Cost at Birmingham,” in which he dismissed the tenuous gains of the settlement against the “calamity,” the “terrible price,” and the “ugly picture before the nation and the world…. Not soon will the wounds be healed nor the tragic era forgotten.”

Elsewhere in the South's only Negro daily, Scott promoted an extraordinary event: that week in Atlanta, “Supersonic Attractions” featured in one concert a dazzling collection of Negro musicians, including Jimmy Reed, Dionne Warwick, Dee Clark, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Solomon Burke, the Drifters, Little Ester (“Release Me”) Phillips, the Crystals, Jerry Butler, and Sam Cooke—all for a two-dollar ticket. Ponce de Leon Park would be jammed not only with Negro fans but also with young white people, for whom the best Negro pop music reached beneath formal and worldly preoccupations to release elemental emotions of sex, frivolity, love, and sadness. The stars of soul music and blues stood with King as exemplars of the mysterious Negro church—nearly all of them had been gospel singers—but they were still ahead of him in crossing over to a mass white audience. They unlocked the shared feelings, if not the understanding, that he longed to reach.

The catalytic rise from Birmingham required a final jolt of chaos. Uncannily, two earnest young religious reporters from Radio Riverside, a station owned by the storied New York church of Harry Emerson Fosdick and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., drifted just ahead of each outburst. On Saturday night, they ventured boldly with microphones into a Ku Klux Klan rally at Moose Club Park, on the outskirts of Birmingham. More than a thousand hooded Klansmen burned a giant cross and raised a halfhearted cry of “Fight the niggers! Fight the niggers.” The Grand Dragon of Georgia revealed that Atlanta University was producing a stage play in which a Negro Cleopatra “gets kissed by a white boy at the end.” “That's what's happening,” he said gravely. The Grand Dragon of Mississippi denounced the federal government as “Hersheytown—ninety percent black and ten percent nuts…. We're with you. Don't worry about that.” The host Klansman, Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton of Alabama, exclaimed that “Martin Luther King has not gained
one thing
in Birmingham, because the white people are not going to tolerate the meddlesome, conniving, manipulating moves of these
professional businessmen
!” Like all the Klan speakers, Shelton spat out the word “businessmen” as a foul epithet. He introduced an anonymous Klan Kagle, evidently a kind of paramilitary chieftain, who shouted that they would prevail over “the greatest darkness that this nation has ever faced” by relying upon “the power of God along with some good stiff-backed men who is willing to shoulder the load and willing to go out to fight the battle for the Lord Jesus.” The Kagle led practice shrieks of the famed Rebel yell, which came out rusty and anemic.