Parting the Waters (152 page)

From the FBI's point of view, the hidden events of early August were satisfying in spite of Kennedy's refusal to authorize the King wiretaps. While losing that skirmish, Hoover had shifted the terms of debate. No longer was the Bureau expected to prove that the KGB or the American Communists were controlling Stanley Levison, as King first demanded. Nor was it even required to show that Levison or O'Dell was conspiring with King to commit a criminal or subversive act. Those standards had vanished in concession to Hoover. Worn down by the FBI's commanding persistence and by corrosive uncertainty, King and the Kennedys gradually yielded to a new, simpler definition: the slightest contact between King and the banned people threatened U.S. national security. The FBI sought to follow up its advantage with a stream of new reports seeking to establish that King was receiving messages from Levison. On August 7, Burke Marshall wrote the Attorney General of one such report: “I think this is inconclusive to show any continuing relationship. The Bureau should keep on it, and we should wait.”

The issue became one of associations rather than crimes or deeds, in a world of contamination by word of mouth. Then the Jones tap picked up tantalizing hints of King's hidden sex life, enabling Hoover to suggest more strongly that the Administration was in league with a pack of guttersnipes. One character issue joined another, and the associations raised taboos that were chilling to most Americans, especially white ones, of Negro back alleys and cutthroats and faceless subversives and hellish perversions. For the FBI, the true nature of King's movement reduced to the issue of whether he did or did not have contact with undesirables—an elementary question suited to the Bureau's skills and tastes. All it needed to prove or disprove these associations was comprehensive surveillance of King. For Robert Kennedy, the test soon became whether previous retreats before Hoover left any ground to defend.

 

Reinhold Niebuhr perceived an entirely different sex scandal simply by reading the newspapers. “Your former choir boy, Barry Goldwater, is cutting a wide swath,” he wrote Bishop Will Scarlett. “Interesting how Rockefeller's lack of private morality has made him a dead duck and given Barry his chance.” Niebuhr thought Rockefeller's spicy divorce and remarriage might have the political effect of turning the Republicans into “a reactionary party” built upon white voters in the South and West. Jackie Robinson expressed similar fears in a newspaper column headed “Is the GOP Going Lily White?” So did King, who told Clarence Jones privately that “the Goldwater surge pushes Kennedy more and more to the right.” Although Niebuhr and King never became friends—never overcame disparities of age and stature, nor the barrier of Niebuhr's Cold Warrior phase—they were beginning to sound alike in their private communications. The civil rights movement helped revive the seventy-one-year-old theologian, who, despite severe depressions and failing health, was beginning a reprise on his pre-Depression days as a race radical in Detroit.

The racial crisis also helped lift Lyndon Johnson from the torpor of the vice presidency. For the first time since his formative experience as a New Deal congressman, an Administration was fighting for survival against domestic rather than foreign crisis. The fate of the Kennedy Administration unexpectedly hinged on a legislative program for the downtrodden, and Johnson, who had felt so superfluous and insecure among the fast-track Kennedy globalists, responded as though to a shot of adrenaline. Instead of cultivating the resistance among his fellow Southerners, he seemed to relish the chance to slough off his past as a regional politician. Suddenly he was in demand again as the Senate architect of the only two successful civil rights bills since Reconstruction. In private White House meetings, the Vice President changed from a sullen lump of self-pity into the gleefully rapacious arm-twister of the Johnson legend.

Johnson told President Kennedy how he had reacted when the city of Houston shut off dockside electricity to protest the Navy's new policies on off-base segregation. “The head of Houston Power and Light Company is [Senator] Eastland's cousin,” he said. “So I called up Albert Thomas and I said, ‘Shall I tell the President that you cannot supply power to a Navy installation there because of the Negro question? And…what are you gonna do about space?'” Thomas had gotten the message that his nasty little protest endangered millions of dollars in new federal contracts for a NASA tracking station in Houston, Johnson reported, and the Navy had got its power back immediately. When Kennedy suggested that it might be unwise to force showdowns with entire Southern states, Johnson said, “Yeah, but I want the governor of Texas and the governor of Arkansas and the governor of Georgia…to know that when they stand up there and come out for segregation, it may cost them the economy of that state. And they ought to think about it a good deal.” Johnson advocated a Southern-style program of bareknuckled sweet talk to condition Southern politicians to new realities, saying he knew why they were howling in public about segregation, and there were ways to make them un-howl. President Kennedy was wary of such Machiavellian zeal. “You could do all that on the phone?” he asked.

By early August, Johnson's enthusiasm for the civil rights scrap was attracting public notice, which vexed electoral strategists for the 1964 campaign. Newspaper stories suggested that President Kennedy was so worried that he planned to send Johnson on a tour of Scandinavia during the March on Washington. By exiling the Vice President to the blondest part of the globe, far from the anticipated convergence of Negro unrest, strategists hoped to preserve enough of LBJ's Southern image to salvage Texas and perhaps North Carolina for the Democrats. Such desperate schemes reflected the unsettled nerves within the Administration. Its officials were like sailors who, having leaned far overboard to grasp a new mooring, felt their ship slipping away to the rear.

With palpable relief, President Kennedy announced on August 1 that the long season of racial demonstrations was subsiding at last. He embraced this prognosis so firmly that he warned the nation not to “go to sleep and forget the problem.” Almost as he spoke, however, Chicago police arrested a racially mixed band of one hundred demonstrators, and the next day authorities in Gadsden, Alabama, conducted a mass arrest of nearly seven hundred young people who were trying to renew the William Moore march. Picketers went to jail that same weekend in places as far apart as Torrance, California, and Athens, Georgia. Upstaged again, the Administration groped for political balance. In a complicated, partisan maneuver at the National Governors Conference, it managed to abolish the resolutions committee in order to forestall a ringing endorsement of civil rights. Such a vote of the assembled governors would have dramatized the sharp splits among the Democrats while showcasing Republican unity behind Nelson Rockefeller, and under these special circumstances the Kennedy strategists decided to duck rather than to win. Meanwhile, in the Justice Department, Robert Kennedy made two difficult choices that comforted Southern politicians in their campaign to suppress racial dissent. Both choices involved Charles Sherrod's ongoing SNCC project in southwest Georgia.

In Americus, two counties north of Albany, a team of SNCC students had struggled through the spring to register Negro voters, and since the national outburst of direct action they also had tried to integrate the town's Martin Theater by pickets and sit-ins in the lobby. Nearly a hundred local teenagers went to jail in July. On the night of August 8, after a mass meeting at the Friendship Baptist Church, an overflow of energy and bravado led to a spontaneous one-block march through the Negro section of town by more than two hundred young people. The march irritated the Americus policemen on monitor duty. Their orders to disperse achieved nothing but a tight huddle of students and louder choruses of “We Shall Overcome.” Police reinforcements buttressed the white side of a standoff between authority and song, until Sheriff Fred B. Chappell finally issued orders to arrest them. This was easier said than done, as the officers were heavily outnumbered. They fired warning shots to scatter as many of the protesters as possible, then closed in on the holdouts, who braced themselves for arrest by lying down on the sidewalk. Sheriff Chappell stood over SNCC field worker Don Harris, a Negro graduate of Rutgers, and tried to make him get up by jabbing him with an electric cattle prod, known locally as a “hot shot.” The sheriff later testified that Harris lay “wiggling and twisting” on the ground but refused to tell his followers to stop singing. This vivid duel between the opposing leaders provoked anger on both sides. White officers fired more shots as they wielded their clubs; some Negroes threw bricks and broke windows. Seventy-seven demonstrators went to jail on the first night of a siege that soon left seven officers and twenty-eight demonstrators wounded. A state trooper broke one Negro's leg with a baseball bat, and a policeman shot another fatally in the back as he walked through a white neighborhood.

What raised the primitive dispute to the Attorney General's desk was a unique decision by local authorities to charge four SNCC leaders—Harris, two white students from the North, and a young Negro from Americus—with seditious conspiracy against local laws. The charges were grounded in what was known as the “Angelo Herndon statute,” after the famous communism/integration show trial of the 1930s, which had started Herndon's lawyer, Ben Davis, toward his career in the Communist Party. The statute made sedition a capital crime, and the Sumter County solicitor all but openly declared that he had filed these particular charges in order to jail the demonstration leaders indefinitely by fiat, as Georgia law permitted no pre-trial release in capital cases.

For his murmurs of dissent against the crudely injudicious prosecution, the Sumter County attorney was hounded out of his church and eventually out of the county. Most of the local white leaders kept silence, and from Washington the Attorney General swiftly closed off hope of federal intervention in the case. His press office announced on August 13 that the FBI had found no merit in complaints of police brutality. Kennedy also declined to challenge the sedition prosecutions on behalf of the United States. Until November, when a team of defense lawyers won a federal court order aborting the sedition charges as an unconstitutional abuse of police power—the first such order ever won by a private litigant under the 1957 Civil Rights Act—the four SNCC workers languished in jail under threat of execution.

Kennedy's second tack against the civil rights movement was more confrontational. He held a special press conference on August 9—the day after the sedition arrests in Americus, and only hours after his nephew, the President's newborn son Patrick, had died in a Boston hospital—to announce federal criminal indictments against nine members of the Albany Movement. To disinterested observers, this was an obscure though troubling case, illustrating perhaps that civil rights leaders could make errors just like cruel sheriffs. To those closer to the movement, however, “the Albany Nine” became almost a watchword for bitterness, a stark refutation of Pollyannish Camelot, and within the government the niceties of legal language masked ferocious internal struggles. This was the case that harked back to the gruesome, landmark
Screws
lynching case in Baker County, and to the point-blank shooting of another Negro prisoner by Sheriff Screws's successor, “Gator” Johnson, on a night clouded by alcohol and cross-racial sex at the annual barbecue on the Coca-Cola plantation, and to the miraculous survival of the prisoner, Charlie Ware, and to Ware's audacious civil suit against Sheriff Johnson that had been lost on the Good Friday, April 12, that Martin Luther King was locked up in the Birmingham jail.

Since April, special detachments of FBI agents had swarmed over Albany trying to establish that movement Negroes had picketed Carl Smith's grocery store in retaliation for his jury vote to acquit Sheriff Johnson. This had been no easy assignment, as there had been only a few hours of picketing on a single day, and the Albany Movement undeniably had been picketing that grocery and many other stores before the Ware verdict. Without hard evidence isolating vengeance as the picketers' motivation, the white prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's office found themselves in the uncomfortable position of Negro plaintiffs who long had struggled to prove subjective realities as obvious as intimidation or voter discrimination. As a last resort, the prosecutors brought to bear the full weight of their authority: they had a special federal grand jury impaneled to investigate the Albany Movement and sent U.S. marshals swooping through the Negro section of town to serve nearly sixty subpoenas, spreading panic in their wake. “These ain't no crackers now,” declared Sherrod. “This is the
federal government
.” C. B. King hastily scheduled a meeting in his law office to brief the subpoena recipients on their rights and duties as grand jury witnesses, but then he was called away to another county for a quickie mass trial of young people arrested at a library sit-in. In his absence, the meeting was a haphazard affair conducted by Elizabeth Holtzman,
*
a summer law clerk who had come South from New York to gain experience in civil rights litigation. Holtzman nearly got indicted herself.

The grand jury grillings turned up dry on the picketing itself, but the prosecutors forged success on a collateral issue. When one of the witnesses mentioned the legal briefing conducted by C. B. King, the prosecutors craftily recalled selected leaders of the Albany Movement and asked them if they had “attended any mass meeting or meeting where one or more people were in attendance, where it was being discussed about the fact that certain ones were going to have to appear before the grand jury?” Slater King and several others replied, “I don't recall.” Thus they met their downfall. When C. B. King learned of their testimony, he was distraught that they had equivocated about something so innocent and defensible as a meeting with their attorney. The chagrined witnesses could only explain that they had panicked, fearing a trap to indict C. B. King or to make the meeting part of some conspiracy.