Parting the Waters (58 page)

Moses did not agree, but he did not object. As an SCLC volunteer, he considered himself bound to follow its policies. His only reply was a question on a completely different topic: did Dr. King mind if Moses took the fund-raising appeal over to the Butler Street YMCA so that he could assemble volunteers for collating, addressing, and stuffing? He thought he could get the appeal into the mail much faster that way. King heartily endorsed the idea, and the brief meeting closed on an artificial note of agreement.

King himself was on friendly terms with the leaders of the SCEF, against which he had just warned Moses. So were Ella Baker and Rustin. There was an element of expediency, even hypocrisy, in the way King handled the controversy over Moses, but for King it was but a small reflection of much larger and more painful conflicts of pragmatism, belief, and personal loyalty. Most troublesome was the purging of Rustin. Ever since King had demanded that his SCLC board hire Rustin as its coordinator and publicist, the internal resistance had been building again among preachers who were put off by Rustin's homosexuality and Communist past. Pressure against him had increased after the crippling lawsuits were filed over Rustin's
New York Times
ad—the preachers conceded that it was not really Rustin's fault, but they criticized him anyway—and shortly thereafter had come the grotesque blackmail threat from Adam Clayton Powell. These things, added to the memories of smuggling Rustin in and out of Montgomery during the boycott, supported the argument that Rustin would always be a liability. Against these cold facts, King felt loyalties of principle and personal feeling for Rustin, which were only made worse by his awareness that Rustin, nearing fifty years of age, was counting on King for a regular job. Squeezed, King finally appointed an SCLC committee under Rev. Thomas Kilgore—Ella Baker's pastor and one of King's preaching mentors in New York—and Kilgore, with King's blessing, informed Rustin of the committee's conclusion that Rustin should break off contact with King. Deeply wounded, Rustin faulted King for delegating such a personal matter to a committee and for failing to tell him face to face. He resigned from the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King. Fund-raising for the
New York Times
libel cases fell off drastically as a result, and lawyers were hounding King for fee payments.

Moses knew nothing of this strife when he came to Atlanta on Rustin's recommendation. His quick friendship with Ella Baker might also have made the introduction uncomfortable for King, as Baker was leaving again, crowded out of the SCLC by the noisy arrival of Wyatt Tee Walker. On August 1, Walker moved decisively to establish himself by evicting the one-woman SNCC office from the premises—though he helped Stembridge find space across the street. Even before reaching Atlanta, Walker got King to send out over his signature letters praising Walker's talents to correspondents across the South. The publicity brochures for Walker's first SCLC conference touted Walker and King alike as “internationally known” civil rights leaders. On balance, King believed that Walker's talents greatly outweighed his faults, but for Moses the new Walker regime only accentuated his estrangement from King and the Atlanta students.

When Jane Stembridge proposed that he escape the discomfort of Atlanta by going on a recruiting trip through the states unrepresented in SNCC, Moses jumped at the chance. He wanted to see the rural South, and he actually preferred to go alone. The idea took hold in a quick spin of preparation. Wyatt Walker provided bus tickets; Moses agreed to pay all other expenses himself. Ella Baker gave briefings on helpful contacts between Atlanta and the Texas border. Stembridge combed through the SCLC mailing lists and sent out letters asking people to take Moses in. After a last flurry of excitement that included “kneel-ins” at seven white churches in Atlanta, Stembridge put Moses on a Greyhound bus on Saturday, August 13, and he disappeared from the innards of Alabama. “SNCC now has a Field Representative,” she wrote proudly.

Moses and Stembridge were not the first nor the last to be smitten by the romance, religion, and danger of the movement. From Talladega, from Shuttlesworth's house in Birmingham, from Alabama country churches and on into Mississippi, Moses reported his recruitments to her in letters of giddy impressionism. “I plooped on front lawns, lawn chairs, kitchen chairs, back porches, straw and purple velvet with a high back,” he advised in his first dispatch. Moses typed out the names and addresses of dozens of people he had met who expressed interest in SNCC.

“You are doing mucho great job,” Stembridge replied. Her letters kept Moses abreast of the growing excitement over the October SNCC conference. Ella Baker, proving that she would not abandon the students even after leaving the SCLC, had visited from New York just to help with the planning. A. J. Muste was coming, and so was Bayard Rustin. “If there is ANY capacity in which Bayard can work,” Stembridge wrote Moses, “he will do so.”

Moses met his future in Cleveland, Mississippi, in the person of Amzie Moore, a World War II veteran and gasoline station entrepreneur. Moore's voter registration efforts, and the opposing campaign to strangle his businesses, had been dramatic enough to gain the attention of faraway J. Edgar Hoover in 1956, and the support of his cause had been one of the prime reasons for the founding of In Friendship that same year, by Rustin, Ella Baker, and Stanley Levison. Four years later, Moore still had the filling station, and he had an amiable business relationship with his ex-wife, whose beauty shop was partitioned off inside the mechanic's area. “Amzie is the best I've met yet,” Moses wrote Stembridge, “but then I should have known from Miss Baker; I would trust him explicitly and implicitly, and contact him frequently. He works in the Post Office, two hours a day for the last two years, and lives like a brick wall in a brick house, dug into this country like a tree beside the water.”

Amzie Moore took Moses' recruitment pitch and turned it backward. It was fine for SNCC to recruit young people from Mississippi, he said, but it would be better for SNCC to send a work force of students
into
Mississippi to register voters under the protection of the new civil rights laws. “Amzie thinks, and I concur, the adults here will back the young folks but will never initiate a program strong enough to do what needs to be done,” Moses wrote Stembridge. Sentence by sentence, the intoxication of his letters grew into clear-headed fantasy or revelation. “Amzie thinks he can lay his hands on a bus if we can gas it up,” he wrote. “The idea is to tackle the 2nd and 3rd Congressional Districts, about 25 counties in all…. The main thrust is to take place next summer…. Nobody starry eyed, these are nasty jobs but we're going to find some nasty people to do them, so put me down 'cause I'm not only getting mean I'm getting downright nasty.”

“I cannot believe your letters,” Stembridge replied. “…I got so excited that things almost happened to my kidneys. This VOTER REGISTRATION project is IT!” She was telling Ella Baker, Rustin, and everyone else she could find that Moses, who had left on the Greyhound hoping to find a carload of students for the conference, now had her scrambling to find money to print some 200,000 copies of the Mississippi state constitution, the better to educate the would-be new voters.

On August 26, during a campaign stop in Atlanta, Vice President Nixon was greeted at the airport by a dozen of the most influential Negroes in the city. Moses slipped back into the city by Greyhound a few days later, laden with more addresses and ideas. His return was an occasion for both celebration and regret. As much as he ached to stay on in the South, he told Stembridge, he could not renege on the last year of his teaching contract nor yet leave his father. He headed North to meet his math classes after Labor Day, promising to be back.

 

That same summer, a white lawyer from a small town in Wisconsin embarked on a parallel odyssey of revelation. John Doar was lanky, taciturn, and plainspoken. In 1960, still building a general courthouse law practice, he counted it as a small step of success that a client paid him to go all the way to California to work on a paternity suit. He was there when Harold Tyler, chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, tracked him down by telephone.

Attorney General William Rogers had hired Tyler for the express purpose of stepping up the enforcement of the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts. It was a sign of the times that not a single politically connected Republican, nor any friend of Tyler's, expressed interest in the high-ranking position of first assistant in the Civil Rights Division. Tyler's only connection to Doar was that the two of them had overlapped at Princeton, and that some of his friends, after scratching their heads, recalled Doar as a good lawyer who was not on the fast career track and therefore might be interested in the job. Tyler offered the job to Doar over the phone, sight unseen.

Doar thought it over. All he remembered from Princeton was that the Southern students were always saying it would be a terrible mistake for outsiders to inject themselves into the complicated Negro problem. On the other hand, he had grown up resenting the South's one-party system because it allowed unchallenged Southern committee chairmen to dominate Congress, penalizing his home state. Having been taught that perpetuation of Southern oligarchs in Congress was related somehow to the exclusion of Negroes from politics, Doar resolved that it would be a service to history and to Wisconsin if he helped create an honest, Wisconsin-style two-party system in the South. He called Tyler from California at six o'clock in the morning and said tersely, “I'll do it.”

Doar arrived in Washington in July 1960 and plunged immediately into the two bureaucratic struggles that would mark his career. The first one pitted legal thinking against political calculations. When Doar assumed his duties, the Civil Rights Division had only three pending voting rights cases under the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
*
Each was a landmark case, and the lawyers for the defendants had resisted with a host of tactics. Most fundamentally, they had persuaded Southern federal judges to declare portions of the new act to be unconstitutional infringements on the rights of the states, which forced the Justice Department to win contrary opinions on appeal before the cases could go forward. This was taking years, and meanwhile the Southerners were discovering other methods of avoidance and delay. For instance, some of the officials charged with refusing to register Negroes to vote simply resigned their offices, whereupon their lawyers moved to vacate the Justice Department suits on the grounds that there was no properly situated defendant. The 1960 law mended this defect by allowing the Justice Department to include the states themselves as defendants, but the constitutional challenges to the new law were just beginning and promised to stretch well into the decade.

Facing this gauntlet of defenses, Tyler's predecessor had decided to pursue only the three test cases doggedly to victory—no matter how long it took—in order to establish a legally tested avenue toward binding court orders. Only then, hypothetically, would the government come to the task of enforcing such court orders, and here the famed “jury trial” amendment of the 1957 act would work to the advantage of defendants who refused to obey them. Pending the outcome of the three original suits, Tyler's predecessor had refrained from filing others, as redundant suits only risked adverse precedents in weaker cases. This reasoning would have prevailed in arid classrooms, but it flew headlong into the political urgency of Attorney General Rogers. To Rogers, the test-case strategy was vulnerable to political attack as a “do nothing” policy on civil rights enforcement. He wanted more suits.

Doar perceived quickly that politics in the Justice Department gave four sides to every issue instead of the lawyer's proverbial two. He soon encountered a second bureaucratic obstacle in the way of the Attorney General's civil rights plans: a sluggish FBI. Doar began to learn the subtleties of FBI work in the case of Haywood County, Tennessee, one of two predominantly Negro counties outside Memphis where voting disputes attracted widespread publicity in 1960. When the Civil Rights Division first asked the FBI to investigate complaints that white Haywood County farmers were systematically evicting Negro sharecroppers who tried to register to vote, Hoover first tried to scuttle the matter in advance by pointing out that it was very difficult to prove a connection between evictions and attempts to register, as required under the 1957 act. The Civil Rights Division asked for the investigation anyway, and Hoover complied promptly and efficiently with the official request, as he always did. The resulting report was practically useless to the Justice Department lawyers, however, because the local FBI did nothing more than interview the original Negro complainant and obtain a repetition of the story that had appeared in the newspapers.

The Bureau was not inherently or inevitably slow. Agents could move with intelligent, concentrated force, even in civil rights cases, as they had demonstrated in the Mack Charles Parker lynching a year earlier. But lawyers in the Civil Rights Division concluded that Hoover's attitude could fine-tune the hypersensitive FBI bureaucracy to produce anything from galloping initiative to tarpaper resistance—all within a pose of eager cooperation. The Haywood County case was getting the tarpaper. To several more Justice Department requests into the summer of 1960, the FBI replied with reports that invariably contained the narrowest conceivable answers to the questions specifically posed, and nothing more. On July 22, just after Doar arrived in Washington, a white woman in Haywood County gave the FBI copies of two lists she said were circulating among the white people. The lists named those Negroes marked for eviction, credit squeezes, or other forms of reprisal; the woman thought it was wrong. The FBI report to the Justice Department merely noted the woman's claim without forwarding the lists as evidence or making the slightest effort to verify her information. These omissions necessitated still more requests from the Civil Rights Division. Privately, supervisors at FBI headquarters called Tyler and other supervisors at Justice to recommend that the investigation be curtailed or postponed, especially on registration days. The presence of FBI agents at tense scenes only increased the chances of hostility toward the agents. J. Edgar Hoover, as every graduate of the FBI Academy knew, had built his Bureau explicitly on the role model of the small-town banker. This worked splendidly for the agents' usual work of tracking car thieves, bank robbers, Communists, and other outcasts, but the image made it wrenchingly difficult for the agents to take the side of the outcasts themselves.