Parting the Waters (161 page)

At first the taps missed King, who was enduring a new leadership schism in Detroit. Rev. C. L. Franklin had scheduled a two-day convention at Cobo Hall, scene of King's triumphant speech in June, for the purpose of forming a Northern organization comparable to the SCLC in the South. But the conference barely survived its planning sessions. Fistfights broke out between Franklin and other preachers, many of whom had resented his highhanded ways since the struggles within the National Baptist Convention. An unlikely combination of Muslims, militants, and J. H. Jackson loyalists walked out to convene an alternative Grass Roots Leadership Conference. What united them against Franklin was an aversion to nonviolence and to King's eagerness for fellowship with white people. “I'm sick and tired of singing ‘We Shall Overcome,'” declared one preacher. Conservative Baptists preached racial pride, SNCC veterans such as Gloria Richardson wondered what virtue of integration could induce black people to give up the right of self-defense, and keynote speaker Malcolm X declared that integration was a training exercise for Negroes, run by whites. “You bleed when the white man says bleed,” he said, scolding a delighted crowd.

At Grass Roots, a new sense of power ran into an old sense of injury, foreshadowing the separatist reaction a few years ahead. Much of the emotion was still personal and evanescent, but Malcolm X did preach one line that drove a deep wedge between King's movement and his church heritage. Malcolm revered Moses as a common prophet of Islam and Judaism, and also as the father figure of the Negro Christian church. “Nowhere in that Bible can you show me where Moses went to his people and said, believe in the same god that your slavemaster believes in, or seek integration with the slavemaster,” Malcolm said often. “Moses' one doctrine was separation. He told Pharaoh, ‘…Let my people go.'” Malcolm X challenged King to prove how he could reconcile the ecumenical spirit of integration with the tribal cohesion of a Negro culture that was joined at the hip to Moses.

After huddling with C. L. Franklin, King decided to duck an appearance at the fracas in Detroit. Back in Georgia for the second anniversary of the Albany Movement, he criticized the Justice Department for “unjust blows” and fired off another telegram urging Robert Kennedy to stop the prosecution of the Albany Nine. By then, a large staff was trying to “work up on a movement in Danville,” as Andrew Young put it, and Shuttles-worth was urging a renewed push in Birmingham. Frictions among local Negroes made King reluctant to go to either place, but he had no better idea how to overcome the battle-weary lull in the movement. He told Clarence Jones on November 16 that he was suffering from a case of perpetual hiccoughs.

At New American Library, King's editors were frantic about the fired writers and other messy delays on the Birmingham manuscript. King's literary agent in turn was “terribly uncomfortable,” and her anxiety fell mostly upon Stanley Levison, who was far more accessible than Jones or King. Levison and Jones finally arranged a crisis meeting at New York's Idlewild Airport, when King passed through on his way home from a conference of Reform and Conservative Jews. The various FBI wiretaps intercepted the plans well enough in advance to cover the airport rendezvous in heavy numbers, on a cold, rainy Wednesday. Agents managed to overhear some of the conversation, which indeed concerned the Birmingham book. Among other things, King asked Levison to try to rehire the woman who had worked on
Stride Toward Freedom
. Of far greater importance to the Bureau was an achievement that the Intelligence Division quickly trumpeted at headquarters: “Notwithstanding trying circumstances, both from a climatic and security standpoint, our New York Agents were able to secure a photograph of the aforementioned three individuals.” One of Sullivan's deputies, harking back to the Smith Act heresy convictions, speculated that the picture might one day become evidence in a Communist conspiracy trial.

That same day, Robert Kennedy was celebrating his birthday at a small party in the Justice Department. He stood on his desk amid joking friends and delivered a chipper little talk about how the fight would go on even if his own days on the job were numbered. At the White House, President Kennedy had called in Lee White to make sure that the local Washington barbers quit complaining about serving Negro customers, as was reported in the newspaper. Another, nastier bit of racial politics had reached his desk. Congressman John L. Pilcher, of Albany, Georgia, was lobbying to create wily new pork-barrel opportunities from segregation. If civilian hospitals near Turner Air Force Base remained segregated, and were thus unserviceable under new Pentagon regulations on equal opportunity, did that mean Turner would become eligible for construction of a new military hospital? Budget officials, keen to the ramifications of Pilcher's game, insisted that such an interpretation of the regulation would require presidential approval, but Kennedy made no final decision before leaving on a trip to make peace between quarrelsome Democratic factions in Texas. As soon as he left, an army of White House craftsmen stripped the Oval Office for a quick remodeling in his absence.

 

Stanley Levison rode the train to Washington for the Kennedy funeral. He came back talking of “a whole city in which no one talked in a normal tone of voice.” People were whispering, moving in slow motion. In all the eerie mass pain he saw only one hopeful turn of emotion: the news commentators were not hysterical, but instead were talking about how much hatred there had been. “A feeling like that covering a country can be more important than anything else,” Levison told his secretary. He called King's literary agent to say that the Birmingham book must be postponed yet again. “This book always seems to be in the shadow of tragic deaths,” he said—Medgar Evers, the four girls, and now President Kennedy. At times Levison gushed, calling Kennedy the first intellectual president since Jefferson, and he offered wobbly speculations on the murder of the assassin by Jack Ruby. Once he said that Ruby was a Communist who killed Lee Harvey Oswald because he thought Oswald was a right-winger discrediting the left. Another time he said Oswald himself must have been from the “Chinese wing of the ultra-left.” Then he said Oswald was the sort of person who could be influenced by extremists from either side. Struggling to regain his political realism, he remarked that he was “not at all pessimistic” about Lyndon Johnson on civil rights, because he saw Johnson as a liberal New Dealer at heart. King liked Johnson, which was good, and in certain areas Johnson had more ability than Kennedy.

King also attended the funeral, though neither he nor Levison was aware of the other. He traveled alone, without even his constant road man Bernard Lee, and stood unnoticed on the street. Like Roy Wilkins, he was deeply hurt not to have been invited to the funeral Mass at St. Matthew's. King still identified with both Kennedys, especially the President. They had many things in common, such as coarsely overbearing fathers and a penchant for noble romance. Each was a closet smoker, catnapper, and skirt-chaser. Between them they delivered most of the memorable American oratory of the postwar period.

What King had envied in President Kennedy was his self-esteem and his lack of perceptible angst. Although politically on the defensive nearly every time King communicated with him, Kennedy always possessed an independent sense of well-being. By contrast, King was personally self-conscious. He worried about his looks, his tough skin, about what people thought of him and whether they might find out that he had ghostwriters for his books. Race accounted for much of the difference, but President Johnson was a worrier like King, and for that reason King never looked up to him personally. From their first meeting in the White House, when the new President nervously refused to be photographed with King, Johnson seemed to be insecure in ways that aroused only occasional sympathy and no admiration from King.

Kennedy's best qualities remained his alone, untransferable to King, but the reverse was not true. In death, the late President gained credit for much of the purpose that King's movement had forced upon him in life. No death had ever been like his—Niebuhr called him “an elected monarch.” In a mass purgative of hatred, bigotry, and violence, the martyred President became a symbol of the healing opposites, King's qualities, which had been much too earnest for the living man. President Johnson told the nation that the most fitting eulogy would be swift passage of his civil rights bill. By this and other effects of mourning, Kennedy acquired the Lincolnesque mantle of a unifying crusader who had bled against the thorn of race. Honest biographers later found it impossible to trace an engaged personality in proportion to the honor. Because the best spirit of Kennedy was largely absent from the racial deliberations of his presidency, the issue remained an exogenous factor to the most intimate, admiring accounts of his life. In his seminal history,
A Thousand Days
, which was written and published during the peak of the national movement, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., introduced civil rights in the thirty-fifth of thirty-seven chapters.

As for Robert Kennedy, King's travail with him was largely over. The two of them had stumbled through relations from camaraderie to contempt. Kennedy had been more of an ally to the movement during the Freedom Rides than during Birmingham, which contradicted common notions of steady growth in his character. His experience as Attorney General, and specifically with King, may well have begun to reverse his theory that the way to engineer social change was to minimize the discomfort of politicians, but for the time being he was simply too dispirited. His admirable, underappreciated campaign to reform the fundamental structure and purpose of the FBI came largely to grief, and Kennedy suffered much for that. Hoover abruptly severed all but the barest pretense of professional obligation or courtesy on the very day of the assassination in Dallas. Without the intervening power of President Kennedy, a state of mutual hatred quickly set in. From the standpoint of personal injury to King, Robert Kennedy did perhaps his greatest disservice by remaining a caretaker Attorney General for another ten months, when the FBI ran unchecked.

The Bureau wasted no time describing its target as “King's unholy alliance with the Communist Party, USA,” and King as “an unprincipled opportunistic individual.” Sullivan summoned Agent Nichols and others to Washington for a nine-hour war council, the result of which was a six-point plan to “expose King as an immoral opportunist who is not a sincere person but is exploiting the racial situation for personal gain.” All the top officials signed a ringing declaration of resolve laced with four of the usual pledges to proceed “without embarrassment to the Bureau.” The underlying hostility did not make the officials that unusual among Americans of their station. Nor was it unusual that an odd man such as Hoover would run aground in his obsession with normalcy. Race, like power, blinds before it corrupts, and Hoover saw not a shred of merit in either King or Levison. Most unforgivable was that a nation founded on Madisonian principles allowed secret police powers to accrue over forty years, until real and imagined heresies alike could be punished by methods less open to correction than the Salem witch trials. The hidden spectacle was the more grotesque because King and Levison both in fact were the rarest heroes of freedom, but the undercover state persecution would have violated democratic principles even if they had been common thieves.

For King, the rise of American liberalism was both a gain and a loss. Many of his admirers were quick to thank the movement for bringing religious homilies to national attention, and just as quick to dismiss him now as a Baptist preacher out of his depth. He reaped recognition and condescension hard upon each other. As a result, newcomers to derivative freedom movements programmed themselves to run amok, because they grossly underestimated the complexity, the restraint, and the grounding respect for opponents that had sustained King, Moses, and countless others through the difficult years. The antiwar movement and others would be child's play compared with the politics of lifting a despised minority from oblivion.

 

SNCC's annual conference was held in Washington in the week following the Kennedy assassination. Innocence thought lost was lost again many times over. John Lewis was among those who wanted to lead an official SNCC processional to the grave at Arlington Cemetery, but the idea was voted down. Some objected that such tribute would be hypocritical, given their differences with the late President. Others said they should pay their respects through the movement.

More so than usual, Bob Moses spoke as though in a trance. “The white people in the country, by and large, have not as yet made up their minds whether they're willing to grant freedom to Negroes,” he said. That month's Freedom Vote had been designed to give Negroes a means of building the movement without threatening whites unduly—a mock vote parallel to the official election, a full-scale pretend vote with ballot boxes and live candidates, just to implant the
feel
of what it would be like to vote, together with a hint that the exclusionary regular election was illegitimate. Some 90,000 Mississippi Negroes had “voted.” Many of them had since expressed interest in trying to register, and national publicity about the Freedom Vote had spread the idea that Negroes would vote in great numbers if allowed. Still, said Moses, the only hope was to force a confrontation between federal and state authority, in which the states would have to give ground toward equal rights. “It is true, the Negroes are blackmailing the Federal Government,” he said in a partly confessional tone.

One way to force the confrontation was to extend the notion of the Freedom Vote to a parallel school system, Freedom Schools, which could teach literacy skills and constitutional rights on a mass scale. Eighty Yale and Stanford students had come down as volunteers for the Freedom Vote, and if they returned for the summer in greater numbers, they could help staff the schools. This proposal nearly tore SNCC asunder. Projects outside Mississippi complained that it would drain resources from them. Most Negro Mississippians were enthusiastic about any help, including that of Northern white students, but veteran SNCC staff workers objected vehemently to the deference and attention the white students inescapably would command. Across weeks of raw debate, Moses himself refused to express a firm opinion for or against the summer project. Always opposed to fiat by leaders, he added that this idea also carried special responsibilities. White volunteers would be beaten severely or killed, he said, and their race and status would magnify the national reaction. To the extent that SNCC consciously used the students as white lambs of sacrifice, they must bear the burden of that moral and political choice.