Parting the Waters (50 page)

King went back to Atlanta to prepare for his trial, but he was bombarded with bulletins from Nashville, Montgomery, and the newly erupting campuses across the South. At Orangeburg, South Carolina, on the day of the Montgomery prayer service, some four hundred students from South Carolina State and Claflin College marched downtown to sit at the segregated lunch counters. Forewarned, local police and units of special state agents intercepted them with massed force, firing tear gas and water hoses before they arrested 388 of the student marchers. Doused, choking students, herded into an enclosed park, found themselves as stunned by their own calm as by the ferocity of the police rebuff. Charles McDew, leader of the Orangeburg march, would always recall looking back at the melee from a police car after his arrest, to see one of the hulking local football stars, David “Deacon” Jones, holding in his arms a crippled female student who had been knocked down by the firehoses. The expression on Jones's face was one of peaceful sadness instead of rage. The sight of it haunted McDew. Although he had little use for nonviolence or even for Christianity, he became convinced that an inescapable power could be buried in doctrines of meekness and humanity.

Orangeburg was the first of some forty new cities that experienced student demonstrations in March, as the sit-in movement spread into Georgia, West Virginia, Texas, and Arkansas. In Montgomery, the Alabama State student body pledged at a mass meeting not to register for spring classes until their nine expelled peers were reinstated, whereupon the administration, under relentless pressure from the state, banned unregistered students from the cafeteria. In response, Abernathy pledged to lead a prayer march from the city's Negro churches in support of the students, and in response to that, Police Commissioner Sullivan publicly warned of police reprisals “if the Negroes persist in flaunting their arrogance and defiance by congregating at the Capitol.” Abernathy, trying to lead his march out of Dexter across the short distance to the capitol, found his way blocked by police, fire trucks, and a sizable vigilante mob from the outlying counties. He retreated. The students tried to pick up the campaign the next day by marching around the campus with placards, but the Negro administrators, whipsawed mercilessly between their bosses and their bus boycott memories, tried to protect the school by herding the students off campus. No sooner did the students step off campus, however, than police units arrived in force to make sure they did not demonstrate in the city itself. The students, trapped in a street along the campus border, milled around as police reinforcements arrived with tear gas cannisters, carbines, and even a couple of submachine guns. Finally, the police hauled off thirty-five students in the first of the Montgomery arrests. A woman professor, torn by conflict as to whose behavior was most improper, lectured some of her female students in frustration. “Don't all of you pile on top of each other,” she said to five of them who had been ordered into the back of a patrol car. “Let them get another car for you.” For this, the officers promptly arrested the professor too, on charges of interference.

With the Montgomery student movement temporarily throttled, and the white authorities thoroughly mobilized, Abernathy found himself isolated among the city's Negro leadership. In spite of his best efforts to rally them, his own MIA board refused to sanction any statement or mass meeting in support of the students. Unlike the bus boycott, the student sit-ins were openly subject to physical repression and extremely dangerous to the Negro community's economic center at Alabama State. Nerves frayed under the pressure. When Shuttlesworth privately criticized Abernathy for failing to control the MIA board only five weeks after receiving the gavel from King, Abernathy snapped, “Fred, I'm not a dictator.” He also pointed out that Shuttlesworth himself had been unable to command much adult support for student sit-ins in Birmingham.
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In mood and method, the Southern cities opposing the sit-in movements varied as widely as the sit-in movements themselves. The demonstrations highlighted the divisions among the Negroes as well as those between the races. Abernathy was not the only local leader caught between the urgency of the student protest and the balky hesitation of the most influential Negroes. For King, still traveling constantly, the pressures accumulated on both sides of this internal division. Adding to the strain was his imminent criminal trial in Alabama, for which he desperately needed precisely those commodities least controlled by students and most controlled by the traditional elders: money, lawyers, and accountants.

King tried to go in both directions at once, by a path of his own invention. On March 5, he offered Ella Baker's SCLC post to Wyatt Tee Walker. In so doing, he signaled his refusal to wait any longer for Abernathy. He was accommodating the preachers of the SCLC board, many of whom had never recognized Baker as anything more than a clerical caretaker,
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but he was insisting that the job be filled by someone of Baker's activist views and King's own generation. Walker was a hotspur. As a New Jersey high school student in the 1940s, he had heard Paul Robeson say that if being for freedom and equality meant being a Red, then he was a Red. Walker promptly joined the Young Communist League. One of his high school papers was a five-year plan for a Soviet-type economy in the United States, and he dreamed of carrying out technically ingenious assassinations against leading segregationists. In college, he acquired dark-rimmed glasses that gave his face the look of a brooding Trotskyite. No single obsession could contain his ambitions, however, as Walker identified with the richest industrialists and the best painters as well as the fiercest revolutionaries. Whatever he did, he boasted to his peers, he would make a million dollars along the way.

Walker's college advisers steered him toward the pulpit, and his gifts landed him the historic Gillfield Baptist Church of Petersburg, Virginia. Organized in 1797, Gillfield was a regional center for the Negro aristocracy, much like Dexter in Montgomery. Until shortly before Walker's arrival in 1952, the Gillfield congregation had segregated itself by skin color, with the lighter Negroes sitting on one side and the darker ones on the other. To preach against the class divide, Walker sought the advice of Vernon Johns when the renowned preacher drifted to Petersburg upon his downfall in Montgomery. Walker fell under Johns's spell. He copied his preaching style, borrowed his books, and sold eggs for one of Johns's farm cooperatives. The news of the
Brown
decision flashed on the radio when Walker was chauffeuring Johns to a co-op meeting, and the two preachers knelt on the shoulder of Virginia's Highway 460 to offer a prayer of thanks.

Six years later, Walker proved his own enthusiasm for the sit-ins by going to jail before King's job offer reached him in Petersburg. Spurning the role of supervisor, he took his wife, his two children, a few other preachers, and several students to the all-white Petersburg public library. His budding media consciousness inspired him to appear wearing a clerical collar for the first time in his life. His flamboyant admiration of Vernon Johns inspired the peculiar act by which he violated the segregation laws: before the eyes of the gathered police and reporters, Walker asked the librarian to give him the first volume of Douglas Southall Freeman's biography of Robert E. Lee. Johns, who admired some of Lee's qualities while despising his cause, often had cited Freeman's book to Walker in his Civil War discourses, and it tickled Walker to think that white Southerners would arrest him for trying to read about their most cherished hero. The Petersburg police chief came forward politely with an offer to post bond for Walker and the others there at the library and thus spare them the indignity of jail, but Walker asked to be treated no differently than normal prisoners. They all spent three days in jail before accepting bail.

Complications of salary and pulpit arrangements delayed Walker's answer to the SCLC offer for months, but the arrest itself only whetted King's desire to hire him. He sent Walker and his companions a telegram of support. Not long thereafter, he sent a similar telegram to Fred Shuttlesworth on his arrest in Birmingham, and he welcomed the invocation of his name by students who escalated the “jail-in” movement in mid-March. From her cell in Tallahassee, having led a march of one thousand students, Pat Stephens issued a public statement: “We could be out on appeal, but we strongly believe that Martin Luther King was right when he said, ‘We've got to fill the jails in order to win our equal rights.'” Stephens and four other students became the first to serve out their full sentence, which was sixty days. King praised them, declaring that there was “nothing more majestic and sublime” than their willingness to suffer for a righteous cause.

Only in Atlanta did King mute his praise of the sit-in movement. On March 9, the same day he sent a telegram to Eisenhower protesting what he called a “reign of terror” in Montgomery, King said nothing about the publication of “An Appeal for Human Rights,” which had been composed by the Atlanta students. Nor did he comment six days later when the students rebelled against the counsel of the university presidents and mounted sit-in demonstrations. The students, the police, and even the gawking bystanders were almost uniformly courteous. Spelman women wore stockings and gloves as they rode off to be booked. Nearly all the seventy-seven students arrested identified themselves on the police blotter merely by the name of their college.

The Atlanta protest lasted only one day before being smothered under the combined influence of the Negro and white power structures, who appealed for reason and negotiation. Some student leaders complained bitterly of vanity and obstructionism on the part of their elders. C. A. Scott, editor of the Atlanta
Daily World
, had required them to pay the full advertising rate to print their manifesto—either out of greed, they said, or out of a desire to protect himself with the white people against charges of aiding the protest. The students also resented Scott's patronizing editorials, which praised them for having a worthwhile objective but consistently urged them to quit making trouble and leave things in steadier adult hands.

These disputes cut close to King. C. A. Scott was not only an old friend of Daddy King's but also a trustee at Ebenezer, and thus technically one of King's bosses. Furthermore, as editor and controlling partner of the only Negro daily in the South, Scott helped regulate the light in which King himself would be presented to his primary constituents. King had been reared to look at the world through the eyes of established figures like Scott, and he was practical enough to recognize his dependence on them. Jesse Blayton, another pillar of Ebenezer, raised a more pointed reminder to King of his difficult position. Over the years, Blayton had built an accounting business into a parallel career as president of the Citizens Bank, of which Daddy King was a trustee. Since King's indictment in Alabama, Blayton had been going through King's financial records in order to help prepare a defensible accounting. To King's discomfort, Blayton viewed these services more or less the way Scott viewed the publication of the student manifesto—as a commercial transaction. Off the top, he billed King $1,000 for “two weeks studying thesis of case in order to decide patter[n] of working paper procedures,” and before he was through he had charged King nearly as much to audit two tax returns as King earned from Ebenezer in an entire year.

Even the lawyers thought Blayton was milking King's predicament with an eagerness ill-suited to a longtime family friend. Their sentiments were little consolation to King, however, especially in light of his financial troubles with the lawyers themselves. He had five of them, led by the NAACP board members Wilkins had recommended. William Ming of Chicago and Judge Hubert Delaney of New York were, respectively, a courtroom lawyer and an appeals expert of high reputations. Arthur D. Shores of Birmingham, the senior man among King's three Alabama lawyers, had been the NAACP's principal lawyer in the state before the NAACP banning order of 1956, which was still in effect. Fred Gray and S. S. Seay, Jr., were the younger men who were supposed to do the bulk of the preparatory work. Each member of the defense consortium was considered legally or politically indispensable, but they made an unwieldy team. Several of the lawyers were strangers to each other. They came from five different firms in four different cities in three different states. At King's expense, they duplicated each other's research and quarreled over the division of responsibility. Worse, they bickered over fees, with the Northerners complaining that the Southerners were charging beyond their competence, and the Southerners complaining that the high-powered Northerners refused to disclose their rates even to their co-counsel. Among the few areas of consensus was a general feeling that King stood almost no chance of winning the tax case before an Alabama jury. This judgment rendered the facts of Blayton's accounting essentially irrelevant and his exorbitant fees that much more painful. The lawyers tried to conjure up a legal issue that might entice an appeals court to overturn a perjury conviction growing out of the tax laws.

King found himself soliciting encouragement from any expert who offered hope, no matter how farfetched or expensive. The dire circumstances of the case stretched his pliant nature to its limits, until he felt that he could not afford to alienate anyone who might conceivably be of help. He realized that the fees he was incurring, while larger than he could reasonably hope to pay, were still smaller than the most important professionals felt entitled to charge for their most important cases. Therefore, King felt a keen mixture of victimization and gratitude, helplessness and faith. He lacked the blunt, personal assertiveness of Stanley Levison, who told the assorted lawyers to their faces that they should be ashamed of themselves for letting their concern over fees cloud King's defense against persecution. Levison lobbied quietly and persistently, protected against resentment by the strength of his own example as the most steadfast and selfless of the professionals who devoted themselves to King. These qualities endeared Levison to King, but King himself was too shy to make demands directly or to equate his interests with those of the civil rights movement. On the contrary, King astonished Levison and Harry Belafonte alike by taking them through long philosophical discussions on the distinction between personal and political obligations. Insisting that he could never allow a penny of “movement money” to be applied to his own personal expenses, King tried to devise unimpeachable guidelines. A traffic ticket was clearly a personal obligation, he stated, but what about the income tax indictment? What circumstances made it political? How could he justify using movement money to defend himself? Belafonte and Levison grew impatient with these quibbles, arguing that Governor Patterson's statements alone put the tax indictment squarely into politics.