Parting the Waters (45 page)

The mood of the press conference soured instantly. Reporters rained hostile questions on King, making the point that disarmament was absurd for India because of the threat from its mortal enemy, Pakistan, which the United States was busily rearming. How could Dr. King fail to see that the bloodthirsty Pakistanis would love nothing better than to slaughter nonviolent Indians? King tried to calm their fears, to minimize the risk, to remind them that the true test of Gandhian nonviolence came in the severest trials of one's own life. Most of the reporters kept repeating that King did not understand the Pakistanis, and they glossed over his strange ideas in generally buoyant dispatches on the departure of the Negro Gandhian.

Returning by way of Egypt and Greece, the Kings landed in New York on March 18. They spent a pleasant social evening in what King called the “palatial apartment” of Harry and Julie Belafonte, who treated them to a private home screening of a new Hollywood film,
The Diary of Anne Frank
. Belafonte offered to give another benefit concert for the SCLC, which sweetened King's homecoming because the singer's concert receipts from a single evening could raise the SCLC budget several times over. Four days later, King stepped into the Dexter pulpit to report on his adventures in India. From a description of the Salt March, he distilled for his listeners those qualities of the Mahatma he had found most arresting. Foremost among them was Gandhi's “absolute self-discipline,” which King believed was the key to Gandhi's sainthood. The Mahatma had criticized himself mercilessly in his published journals, demonstrating what King hailed repeatedly as an “amazing capacity for internal criticism.”

“Most of us have an amazing capacity for
external
criticism,” King said wryly. “We can always see the evil in others. We can always see the evil in our oppressors.” The Indian people had felt keenly the injustices of British colonialism, he said, but Gandhi had forced them to acknowledge also the injustice of their own caste system, which had developed long before the first Englishman set foot on Indian soil. He tried to dispel the gloom of Gandhi's martyrdom with an emotional flight about the greater power of his spiritual example, then he closed with an ecumenical prayer much like the one with which the unhinged Mississippi white student had shocked the diners in the Crozer cafeteria a decade earlier. “O God, our gracious heavenly father,” King intoned. “We thank thee for the fact that you have defined men and women in all nations, in all cultures. We call you this name. Some call thee Allah, some call you Elohim. Some call you Jehovah, some call you Brahma. Some call you the Unmoved Mover.”

 

Just now thirty years of age, King returned from India in the spring of 1959, when portentous events were occurring rapidly but almost always in quiet good order. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles died in May. Shortly thereafter, the world's first nuclear-armed Polaris submarine slipped into the Atlantic Ocean down the coast from Newport, where teenager Joan Baez, a native of Staten Island, was about to leap to notice in the world of folk music with her bell-clear soprano voice, singing songs of noble causes and hard times. In Palm Beach, Florida, on April 1, tycoon Joseph P. Kennedy hosted the first private strategy session toward the nomination of his son John for President in 1960. The presence of pollster Louis Harris at the Kennedy conclave gave proof that marketing specialists were advancing from advertising into politics. Also in Florida, the Pentagon demonstrated the growing power of public relations when it introduced the first team of prospective astronauts, successfully passing off seven high-strung and often cantankerous test pilots as specimens of a new American personality type—bland heroes. All seven were white Protestant men from small towns; six had crew cuts. A steady diet of propaganda created the historically dubious impression that it was the wholesome, well-rounded types who stepped off into the unknown.

From New York, Bayard Rustin organized A. Philip Randolph's second Youth March on Washington. At the head of the solemn parade of marchers making their way into the capital, the irrepressible Rustin violated his own rules of silence by muttering witticisms about the kooks with him in the column as well as the gawkers on the side of the road. “Social dislocation,” Rustin chanted merrily, pronouncing the first word “so-see-all.” It was his personal formula for social change. When the marchers reached Washington, King appeared at the rally to make another speech about voting rights. “Do you realize what would happen…if three million Negro voters were added to the rolls in the South?” he asked the crowd. But the gathering was not large enough to command much interest outside civil rights circles.

Significantly, one outsider who did take notice was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who saw FBI reports that A. Philip Randolph publicly thanked Stanley Levison for his help with arrangements. This news seemed to rekindle Hoover's interest in Levison, whom the Bureau had labeled some years earlier as a member of the Communist Party. One of Hoover's assistants drafted a memo suggesting that Levison's assistance to the march “may have been at the direction of the CP as we do know that the CP was extremely interested in the demonstration.” Bureau documents also noted that Levison was “closely associated” with King, who was described as “one of the motivating forces behind this demonstration.” The implication was clear—Levison was strategically placed to be orchestrating both the Washington march and King's career on Communist orders. Hoover directed the New York FBI office to report on the details of Levison's involvement. His order commingled King, Levison, and racial demonstrations under the poisonous heading of subversion.

There was more to Hoover's reaction than either his hostility to communism or his prejudice against Negroes, both of which were strong. Above all else, the Director was a consummate bureaucrat, sensitive to deep historical tides. Twenty years earlier, the FBI had mushroomed in size to guard against Nazi espionage. From a mid-Depression force of fewer than five hundred agents, the Bureau had more than tripled by Pearl Harbor, then tripled again by D-Day. Hoover never needed further education on the advantages of an intelligence agency over a law enforcement department. An intelligence agency enjoyed greater prestige, less danger of public failure, greater freedom and power through the mystique of secrecy, and an enhanced role for shaping national values and symbols. To avoid postwar retrenchment at the FBI, he fought a protracted bureaucratic war to become chief of the new worldwide intelligence apparatus—even though he spoke no foreign languages and never then or later set foot outside the United States. On losing out finally to the newly created CIA, a vengeful Hoover had extracted from President Truman a major consolation prize: responsibility for “background checks” and other loyalty investigations of federal employees. Such work not only sustained the Bureau's manpower levels through the McCarthy era but vastly increased Hoover's political influence as the defender and oracle of domestic security.

Since the final collapse of the U.S. Communist Party after 1956, Hoover had anticipated a bureaucratic danger similar to the end of World War II: a completed mission. The Party's demise coincided with constitutional rulings from the courts and the Justice Department that all but ruled out lawful prosecutions of Communists, except for espionage. Hoover, facing the logical superfluity of thousands of his agents, immediately authorized a new campaign to keep them occupied in extralegal harassments of Communists and other protest groups. From 1956 onward, the formal
COINTELPRO
operations took the FBI deeper into domestic spying. Through covert operations and blatantly political investigations, the Bureau became more of a classical intelligence agency, like the CIA. Hoover kept
COINTELPRO
highly secret, as it violated basic constitutional restrictions on internal police power. On reviewing the files years later, his best biographer concluded that Hoover's lack of clear legal ground for the majority of the FBI's work “made him violently defensive whenever the Bureau's authority for its secret operations was questioned.” That happened rarely, however, and
COINTELPRO
helped maintain the Director's desired allocation of agents. In 1959, while carrying out the renewed investigaton of Stanley Levison, the New York FBI office assigned four hundred special agents to internal security squads and only four to organized crime.

For the time being, the Levison matter was a farsighted precaution on Hoover's part. As yet there was no public knowledge of the heavily skewed deployment of Bureau personnel, let alone any serious political challenge to Hoover's command. If politicians ever tried to show that Communists were effectively extinct, and that Hoover therefore had miscast the FBI as a giant horde of buffalo hunters, the Director was prepared to cite threats such as Levison. Until then, Levison did not particularly bother him. In fact, later that year he authorized agents to recruit Levison as an informant. After several attempts, ever sensitive FBI officials assured Hoover that although Levison turned them down, he had said nothing unfriendly to the Bureau.

Hoover's antagonism toward King remained similarly subdued, as civil rights threatened no imminent divisions within the FBI's constituency. The mood of the era was still such that King and Hoover could arrive independently on the same side of the civil rights crisis, as in the Mack Parker lynching. In April 1959 a band of hooded men abducted Parker from the Mississippi jail cell where he was being held on charges of raping a white woman. King sent a telegram to Attorney General Rogers the next day urging a federal investigation of the disappearance. The few known facts, stated King, made it “almost appear as though mob action was invited.” Rogers agreed, and so did Mississippi's governor, James P. Coleman. In the kind of act that doomed him as a “moderate” by the standards of Mississippi politics, Coleman asked for FBI help.

Hoover dispatched a team of sixty agents to Poplarville about the time Parker's mangled body was found floating in the Pearl River. Working the most sensational lynching case since Emmett Till's in 1955, the agents extracted confessions from three of the lynchers, identified the others, and established the complicity of a law enforcement official in the abduction. When the local prosecutor refused to allow the grand jury to see the FBI report, Hoover authorized agents to volunteer their testimony to the state grand jury. When the jury snubbed the FBI witnesses, Attorney General Rogers publicly branded the Mississippi investigation “a travesty on justice, flagrant and calculated.” The Justice Department sought indictments under weaker federal statutes, but a federal grand jury of Mississippians refused to comply. An excellent FBI investigation was utterly wasted, leaving the killers at large and all the evidence hidden under seal.

 

Less spectacular injustices were pressing steadily on King. In Louisiana, state officials crushed an SCLC registration drive by conducting a review the effect of which was to
remove
ten thousand Negroes from the small number on the rolls. This reversal made little news, but it so disheartened local civil rights workers that Ella Baker left her New York home again, on her own volition. Although squeezed out of the SCLC, and long since discouraged by its slow preachers' methods, Baker kept extending her emergency visit to Shreveport until it consumed five weeks. She got along well with C. O. Simpkins, a dentist who was the only non-preacher heading an SCLC operation, but their best efforts to rally the crusade brought only 250 people to the courthouse. Stalling registration officials talked to only forty-six of them, and registered only fifteen. At this rate, it would take decades just to regain the meager registration totals predating the crusade.

Similar failures had been accumulating for some time across the South. When King returned from India, he reacted to the situation with a deed that was alien to his character and almost unique in his entire career: he fired someone. He demanded the immediate resignation of SCLC executive director John Tilley, stating that the crusade “has not had a dynamic program commensurate with the amount of money that it is spending.” The SCLC board began searching again for a replacement with the same impossible combination of qualities—a preacher of sufficient stature to merit their confidence, and who was also willing, unlike any of the board members including King himself, to quit his church for full-time civil rights work. In the meantime, King asked Ella Baker to come back to the SCLC, this time as the paid executive director. The board agreed, provided that Baker's status was considered “acting” rather than permanent, allowing the search to continue. Baker moved back into the Atlanta office and resumed official correspondence on familiar subjects—the leaky roof, the lack of an air conditioner—made all the more difficult by the sad state of the SCLC treasury.

King fired Tilley because he was impatient. Nothing—not his near martyrdom, or his White House audience, or his thousand speeches—had rekindled the movement spirit of the boycott. King returned home determined to make a fresh start with the lessons of India. In April, he wrote William Stuart Nelson,
*
one of his mentors among Negro theologians, expressing the belief that the SCLC “had failed to get the philosophy over to many persons in the South because we had not taken the time to give serious study to it.” He proposed convening a three-day Institute on Nonviolence that summer in Atlanta. King wanted to organize an American Salt March. To do that, he decided it would be well to move the annual Institute out of Montgomery. “Since returning from India,” he wrote Nelson, “I am even more keyed up over this idea.”