Parting the Waters (32 page)

Like Rustin, Smiley had traveled on the FOR staff since his own imprisonment for pacifist resistance to service in World War II. By appearance and temperament, however, the two friends were utterly different. Smiley was a mild-mannered white Methodist preacher from Texas, who looked and sounded like one until he spoke on the subject of violence or race. His first act was to trade in his New York license plates for Georgia ones. His first advice to King was to get rid of the guns around his house. Smiley thought King's most striking quality was his stubbornness—how he would give in to fears and then almost angrily sweep them aside as irrelevant to the choices at hand. “Don't bother me with tactics,” he said more than once. “I want to know if I can apply nonviolence to my heart.” At such times, Smiley was much burdened by the inadequacy of his Gandhian advice. For four years, he would go in and out of Montgomery on call, often arriving for midnight MIA strategy sessions. Invariably, King would jump up at two or three o'clock in the morning to say that the work of the Lord could not go forward unless they sent out for some soul food, and Smiley, to the astonishment of himself and his relatives, learned to love pig's-ear sandwiches. So did the Lutheran missionary, Robert Graetz.

 

Within a week of King's second arrest in Montgomery, cabinet secretary Maxwell Rabb summoned E. Frederic Morrow, the first Negro professional ever to serve on the White House staff, for an old-fashioned chewing out. Rabb was tired of getting Morrow's memos urging the President to speak out in favor of desegregation, he said, and what galled him most was that Negro voters still seemed to prefer the Democratic Party of Eastland and Byrd in spite of all Eisenhower had done in civil rights, such as the desegregation of nearly all public facilities in the nation's capital and the official support for the NAACP position in the
Brown
case. Negro voters were ungrateful, Rabb charged. He said he was disgusted with the whole issue and would not stick his neck out anymore.

Morrow swallowed his disagreement in retreat, as he often did. A public relations expert on leave from CBS-TV, the son and grandson of preachers, Morrow had obtained a secretary from the White House pool only after a tearful woman from Massachusetts volunteered, citing the obligations of her Catholic faith, and now staff women were under strict orders to enter and leave his office in pairs, so as to allay suspicions of sexual misconduct. Morrow walked softly. He had been working at the White House nearly nine months but had not yet been sworn in for duty. This was another uncomfortable subject. Morrow and everyone else knew that the Administration had already gotten credit in the Negro media for his presence, and that the traditional ceremony would only generate negative results among white voters. (Morrow would not be sworn in for another three years. A private, unannounced ceremony—without the President—made his prior service retroactively official.)

A few days after being lectured by Rabb, Morrow was called into the office of the man who hired him, Sherman Adams, Eisenhower's chief of staff and alter ego. Adams was worried about race again. The previous year it had been Mississippi—the sensational Emmett Till lynching and a rash of lesser atrocities that had generated political pressure to hire Morrow. This year it was Alabama. A federal judge had revoked Autherine Lucy's suspension from the University of Alabama, only to have the trustees expel her permanently the next day. The case was a bundle of lunacy; Lucy had been suspended and expelled before she had ever enrolled. What worried Adams was the prospect of violence. Alabama whites were crowing about how the riot had “worked”; it had restored segregation. As for the Negroes, the latest FBI intelligence reports revealed that the Communist influence was pervasive, Adams said, and the Negro leaders were not sophisticated enough to control planted insurrectionists. Morrow did not argue. He valued Adams for his personal kindnesses, not for his advanced views on civil rights. In fact, Morrow knew that Adams was the most powerful figure among those urging that Eisenhower do as little as possible in civil rights.

Practically speaking, the fight within the Eisenhower Administration over civil rights was a contest for the President's ear between Sherman Adams and Attorney General Herbert Brownell. The President asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to present a classified briefing about race on March 9, 1956, for the cabinet meeting at which the Administration would decide whether to approve, modify, or cancel Brownell's plans to ask Congress for a new civil rights bill. No such legislation had passed since Reconstruction.

Hoover arrived with a brace of aides, easels, and display charts. His peek into the inner world of Negro protest, though couched in the language of secret revelation, was superficial and riddled with error. Cursory remarks on Montgomery, for instance, misstated several dates and laws while distorting the nature of the bus boycott. No one in the Cabinet Room knew better, however, and the facts were of secondary importance anyway. Politically speaking, Hoover cut masterfully along the fault line of the Administration. He expressed no sympathy for civil rights and painted an alarming picture of subversive elements among the integrationists. As an example of a clearly subversive development, Hoover informed the cabinet that Chicago mayor Richard Daley had come close to public criticism of President Eisenhower for not taking stronger action in the Emmett Till lynching case. “I hasten to say that Mayor Daley is not a Communist,” Hoover added gravely, “but pressures engineered by the Communists were brought to bear upon him.” These comments hinted at political danger, but Hoover stopped short of saying that Republican civil rights legislation would reflect Communist influence. Instead, he put the imprimatur of the FBI upon some of the worst allegations of anti-Negro brutality by militant segregationists, particularly in Mississippi. He described the White Citizens Councils ambiguously as new organizations that “either could control the rising tension or become the medium through which tensions might manifest themselves.” Overall, his performance left just enough political room for Brownell's program, minus any anti-lynching legislation. One of the FBI charts showed that the number of lynchings had dropped from twenty to less than three per year since the FBI had begun informal investigations in 1939. Hoover wanted no formal legal responsibility in this area.

Brownell promptly gave the cabinet a speech defending his plan to submit legislation to create an independent Civil Rights Commission to gather facts about voting rights violations and economic reprisals against Negroes. Also, the bill would create a Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department, and strengthen the Attorney General's legal standing to seek enforcement of voting rights in the federal courts. When Brownell finished, Secretaries Ezra Taft Benson of Agriculture and Marion Folsom of Health, Education and Welfare spoke up in opposition. Benson wanted to wait until there was a Republican Congress. Folsom said that anything beyond the fact-finding commission would be imprudent because it would “anticipate” its results.

The President interrupted. “Where do you think that the Attorney General's suggestions are moving too rapidly?” he asked. “They look to me like amelioration.” As always, his word shifted the tone of the debate. A few objections as to the practicality of the legislation followed, but Brownell soon asked permission to proceed. “Okay,” said Ike. “But put into your presentation a statement that what is needed is calmness and sanity. The great mass of decent people should and will listen to
these
voices, rather than to the extremists. Make your statement like your brief to the Supreme Court. Don't take the attitude that you are another Sumner.”

The most Sherman Adams could win at the cabinet meeting was a delay: Brownell must bring the historic legislative package back to the White House for final clearance. In the interim, Adams benefited by the release of the “Southern Manifesto,” which equated integration with subversion of the Constitution and pledged the entire region to fierce resistance. The document was signed by some ninety Southern congressmen and all the senators except the two Tennessee mavericks, Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore, and the Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson of Texas. Johnson was saying privately that the manifesto's only effect would be to push Negro votes into the Republican column in key swing states of the North. In the White House, Adams was hoping just that. He managed to weaken a few of Brownell's proposals and to make sure that when the bill was submitted to Congress, it came from the Attorney General and not, as was customary for major bills, from the President.

Advertiser
editor Grover Hall pronounced the mass indictments “the dumbest act that has ever been done in Montgomery.” From the standpoint of local whites, the move backfired immediately by recharging the boycotters' morale and severely weakening the time-honored stigma of jail as a weapon of social control against Negroes. This was just the beginning of the miscalculation. As days went by, the hordes of reporters attracted to town by the mass indictment wrote stories that stimulated a great shower of public support—and money—upon the MIA from across the nation and even from distant lands. The city fathers, showboating as they delivered what they believed would be a crushing blow, had blithely ignored the possibility that their show would not play well to audiences beyond the horizon. “Everybody now concedes that this was dumb,” Hall wrote.

For the puckish editor, who found himself serving as “duenna and Indian guide to more than a hundred reporters of the international press,” the media influx caused an intense, personal exposure to the vagaries of the race issue on both its grand and prosaic stages. One early effect was that Hall ventured inside Dexter Avenue Baptist to meet King, in his role as escort to reporter Peter Kihss of
The New York Times
. To Hall, King was “largely inscrutable,” a self-possessed man without humor, in whose statements about death, suffering, and violence Hall found a “conspicuous thread of thanatopsis.” Still, Hall admitted that King was an “authentic intellectual,” and not a polysyllabic charlatan with cereal-box degrees. King's discourse on philosophy, Hall found, was “comprehending, forceful exegesis.” He committed these judgments to print, along with many others that offended his white readers. When he asked one frantic caller how she knew that the Communists were running the boycott, she replied, “It just stands to reason.” This comment amused Hall enough to publish it too.

By the time the boycott case went to trial, the encampment of Negro reporters and domestic “war correspondents” had been augmented by journalists from more than ten foreign nations, including Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and Australia. There was M. K. Kamath of the Press Trust of India and Daniel Morgaine of
France-Soir
. From England came Keith Kyle of the London
Economist
and, eventually, the distinguished Alastair Cooke of the
Manchester Guardian
. (Ironically, in view of that paper's leftist perspective and Rustin's invocation of its name, Cooke may have been the foreign journalist most sympathetic to the local segregationists. He wrote of King as “the cat's-paw of the NAACP.”) Of these, Hall's favorite seemed to be Morgaine of France, who once called just before a scheduled cultural briefing at the
Advertiser
saying, “I am so soree, Meester Hall. I must break ze appointment, for I have achieved an appointment with the Reverend King.” For Hall, this fawning attention made King like yesterday's bee sting—a tiny, throbbing thing that tickled and hurt at once, and above all that he could not leave alone. Local prosecutors concentrated the attention into an exclusive preoccupation by announcing that they intended to hold eighty-nine of the indictments in abeyance. They prosecuted King alone as a test case.

Eight lawyers sat around King at the defense table when the four-day trial opened on March 19, 1956. One part of the legal team guided King and other MIA witnesses through a line of defense testimony that flirted with perjury. The minister of Holt Street Baptist could not recall seeing King at his church on the night the boycott began. Graetz testified that he could not remember ever hearing King urge people to boycott the buses. Fear and legalism combined to produce a defense based on evasive denial that King had anything to do with any boycott, if there was one. Other King lawyers tried to establish that the boycott was “not without just cause” by summoning a stream of Negro women to the stand to testify about cruelties they had seen and endured on the buses.

Neither of the legal strategies mattered very much to the outcome of a trial that had become symbolic to all sides. The judge, who taught a men's Bible class at a church across the street from Dexter, pronounced King guilty immediately at the conclusion of the summations. He sentenced the defendant to pay a $500 fine or serve a year at hard labor. Newspapers recorded the exact moment, 4:39
P.M.
, when King emerged from the courthouse to tell a cheering crowd that the bus protest would continue. “Behold the King!” shouted someone, and others answered “Hail the King!” and “King is King!” Returning that evening to Holt Street, where it had all begun, King was presented to the first of that night's series of enormous mass meetings with the words, “Here is the man who today was nailed to the cross for you and me.” King declared, “This conviction and all the convictions they can heap on me will not diminish my determination one iota.”

He had been a public figure among Montgomery's Negroes for nearly four months, but now fame spilled into the outside world. W. E. B. Du Bois himself, who had known Negro leaders stretching back to Frederick Douglass, wrote that if passive resistance could conquer racial hatred, which he doubted, then Gandhi and Negroes like King would have shown the world a way to conquer war itself.
Jet
magazine put King on its cover, calling him “Alabama's Modern Moses.”
The New York Times
, in a “Man in the News” profile published during the trial, described King as a man who believed that “all men are basically good,” and whose pulpit oratory “overwhelms the listener with the depth of his convictions…. He is particularly well read in Kant and Hegel.”