Parting the Waters (81 page)

Byron White was not communicating with the Negroes in the church, more or less because he did not want to appear to be aiding the Freedom Riders. White and Kennedy, acutely sensitive to Governor Patterson's strident declarations that Alabama was maintaining order, had sent out only token forces of marshals to likely trouble spots around the city. They knew that the need to reinforce them in great numbers was growing critical—not a single city policeman had been sighted at First Baptist during the three hours that the mob had been swelling, and the only state officials were two plainclothes detectives slipped in by Floyd Mann—but they did not want to move in without a request from Patterson. State officials were riding a sharp edge between refusal to protect the Freedom Riders and refusal to ask for federal help; federal officials were caught between willingness to protect the Freedom Riders and a need to be asked.

During the war of nerves, the only communication Byron White received from Alabama authorities was an abrupt telephoned question from Police Commissioner Sullivan: if all Montgomery policemen and firemen went on strike that night to protest federal intervention, Sullivan wanted to know, would the federal marshals assume responsibility for traffic control and fire alarms? This tricky question soon ensnarled Justice staff lawyers in Kafkaesque puzzles about whether intervention at the church might open the federal government to millions of dollars in liability if Montgomery citizens allowed parts of their city to burn.

Fred Shuttlesworth found a much more unruly mob on his return to the church than he had warned Farmer to expect. A block from First Baptist, as they were pushing gently through the crowd jamming a side street, the whites surrounded their car and rocked it from side to side. The driver threw the gearshift into reverse and peeled out backward. On the advice of a Negro taxi driver, they abandoned the car to approach the church on foot through Oakwood Cemetery, only to come up behind yet another swirling wall of angry people. “They've got the church hemmed in,” said Shuttlesworth after a moment's hesitation. “All right, Jim, follow me.” With that, the wiry, diminutive Shuttlesworth bellowed, “Out of the way! Come on! Let him through! Out of the way!” He wafted the startled white people out of his path with wild arm motions, as Farmer cringed behind him through the parting mass.

Safely inside the church basement, where they were fussed over like reinforcements at the Alamo, the two of them went up the pastor's staircase into the church. King joyfully presented Farmer to the congregation as the national director of CORE and author of the original Freedom Ride. Farmer was introduced to Diane Nash, then embraced John Lewis, the only veteran of both legs of the journey. After hearing tributes to the symbolic moment of union and giving a brief speech, Farmer was excused to join the leadership conclave downstairs in Abernathy's office. There he listened to Southern preachers in hurried analyses of various distant white men—Kennedy, Patterson, White, Sullivan, Mann—who might control their safety that night.

Farmer was a leader without a staff, a newcomer among people who worshipped King and had never heard of CORE, by and large. Having scorned the pulpit and abandoned the South twenty years earlier for a life among bureaucrats, bohemians, and intellectuals, he was quickened but detached at the eye of the crisis, with much to represent but little to do. As he listened to the excited talk of strangers against a background of hymns about salvation through Jesus and Rebel yells from outside, fear loosened its grip on him, routed by disordered reality. Only days after burying his father and an hour after in-flight meal service, Farmer was still almost hypnotized by images of Shuttlesworth's lunatic charge through the mob.

Not long after eight o'clock, King and the others rushed to investigate chilling reports that a car had been overturned near the corner of Ripley and Jefferson. Glances through windows confirmed that it was true: the car lay wheels-up on the street, circled by triumphant rioters who fled when an old man threw a lighted match near the gas tank. The car soon exploded into flame, illuminating the scene in the primeval light of a bonfire. By then, there was a flutter of panic around King, as the same message was coming from all directions: fear was infecting the congregation. People were saying that one destroyed car would never satisfy a mob that size. Much smaller mobs had burned one bus and beaten two groups of Freedom Riders that week, and now the congregation was trapped inside what amounted to an enormous bus without wheels.

Scattered members of the mob darted across the no-man's-land of Ripley Street to throw rocks at closer range, from church property. Each of them retreated quickly, but soon the crowd began to inch forward along the whole line of Ripley Street to the rallying cry “Let's clean the niggers out of here!” In response, the U.S. marshals ran briskly to positions spread thinly—every twenty feet or so—along the church side of Ripley Street. They held up their nightsticks in a barrier pose as the two state detectives ran along the mob line ahead of them, pushing people back toward the curb. Against thousands of people worked up by hours of hate-mongering and spurred on by the flaming car, they knew the armbands and nightsticks were nothing more than a tissue of restraint. The marshals radioed distress to Byron White, who summoned Chief U.S. Marshal James McShane after a tense conversation with Robert Kennedy. “Get those marshals in cars and get down there!” White ordered. McShane, a puckish ex-cop who had been rewarded with his present job for campaign work as John Kennedy's bodyguard and chauffeur, roared off for the church with three mail trucks, followed by straggler groups in whatever cars could be grabbed.

Inside the church, they were singing “Love Lifted Me,” an old hymn of refuge:

Chorus after chorus rang out as the marshals fired their first tear gas cannisters into the advancing crowd. Each round offered a few minutes' reprieve while the coughing rioters retreated pell-mell, but then the marshals themselves retreated as an angrier crowd came on again. Rocks began to fly, and one of the marshals went down when a brick hit his shin. Crudely fashioned Molotov cocktails, lobbed toward the church, burned themselves out on the open ground behind them. Byron White, hearing the mounting turmoil on the radio, asked for Robert Kennedy on the open phone line. “It's going to be very close,” he said. “Very touch and go.”

From the pulpit, Reverend Seay stopped the hymn periodically to exhort the crowd to remain calm. Then he called for another chorus. “I want to hear everybody sing, and mean every word of it!” he shouted, and most of them did. From the outside, the church seemed to lift off the ground in song, but some of the men who had prepared for this moment were slipping out of the pews, reaching for knives, sticks, and pistols in their coat pockets. There were heated whispers in the wings as some of them told the preachers that they were not about to let the mob burn or bludgeon their families without a fight, even in church. Reports of considerable arms within the congregation reached King along with the news that skirmishers from the mob had reached the locked doors of the church. “All right, I'll call him,” King said.

Wyatt Walker's sense of protocol, finely honed within the National Baptist Convention, dictated that he, as the number-two man under King, should address Robert Kennedy so that King could be reserved to speak with his parallel officer within the government, the President. Accordingly, Walker placed an emergency call to Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department in his own name, “acting for Dr. King,” and when the Attorney General came on the line Walker told him that only immediate federal action could save their lives.

“I know,” said Kennedy. “We are doing everything we can. Is it possible for me to speak with Dr. King?”

Walker surrendered the phone. As King was ticking off the signs of grave peril—the burned car, the firebombs—Kennedy interrupted. “The deputy marshals are coming,” he said repeatedly. Seeking a point of identity with King, he recalled hearing stories from his grandfather, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, about how anti-Catholic mobs had burned nunneries in nineteenth-century Boston.

King excused himself to ask Walker and Abernathy to rush upstairs with the glad news that Attorney General Kennedy himself promised help. Then he asked when the help would arrive, and Kennedy, who had no idea, could only maintain a posture of hopeful government authority. Soon, he assured King. Very soon. Hearing the hymns being sung in the background, he changed the subject with the trademark gallows humor of his family. “As long as you're in church, Reverend King, and our men are down there, you might as well say a prayer for us,” he suggested.

King did not laugh.
*
He excused himself to receive the latest alarms from lookouts, who had spotted no rescuers. With defenders brandishing weapons at points of entry to the church, King addressed Kennedy in a voice of taut urgency. “If they don't get here immediately, we're going to have a bloody confrontation,” he said. “Because they're at the door now.”

Within moments, runners arrived with the news that reinforcements had been sighted. McShane's men from the mail trucks were waving nightsticks and pushing their way single file through the mob. King dashed off to verify and then back to the phone with profuse thanks. “You were right,” he told Kennedy. “They're here.”

Massing in front of the church, the new marshals fired an enormous volley of tear gas that sent the rioters cursing and stumbling backward in flight. Shouts of joy went up from the congregation, followed by prayers and a hymn of praise. It was a dramatic rescue straight out of Hollywood, except that the giant cloud of tear gas drifted slowly back over the church. Some of Abernathy's deacons were obliged to block panicky people from fleeing into the hands of the mob, while others rushed to close windows. The sudden absence of ventilation, combined with an unusually warm May night and the body heat of fifteen hundred frightened people, quickly turned First Baptist into an acrid sauna. outside, the marshals fell prey to the gas too, as few of them had face masks.

Advance commandos of an enraged, regrouped mob were dashing back across the field as it cleared. The attackers battered against the front doors, and some of the marshals, hearing cries from within that the doors had been breached, gained entry through the back door of the basement. They ran through the clogged corridors in time to push the rioters back outside with nightsticks and shoulders. A new round of tear gas stopped the main body of rioters, but one of them managed to heave a brick through a large stained-glass window, scattering the terrified occupants under a shower of broken glass. The brick hit an old man on the head, and while a corps of nurses materialized to care for him, Reverend Seay's thundering voice labored to contain the pandemonium everywhere else. He asked deacons to take the children to the basement, and he asked everyone who could to lie down on the floor. Rocks shattered smaller windows, and tear gas, pouring through all the holes, literally choked off the hymns. Each round of gas, fired nearer and nearer the church, did less harm to the attackers and more to the defenders themselves. The euphoria of the rescue was reduced to a cruel memory.

Through Cyrus Vance at the Pentagon, Robert Kennedy ordered Army units placed on alert at Fort Benning, Georgia. In the agony of deciding whether to commit them, he maneuvered more diligently than ever to obtain some sign of state consent to the federal presence. He sent messages through Patterson's aides without result. His only friendly communications with a state official were with Floyd Mann, who was nearly crushed by conflicting duties. Mann, having already violated the governor's strict refusal to cooperate with federal officials in protecting the Freedom Riders, did take it upon himself to call Byron White at the Maxwell staging area and request that he “commit any reserves.”

“We've committed all we have,” White replied. “They are at your disposal.” This exchange was interpreted in the Attorney General's office as a breakthrough. Although Mann had not asked for troops on behalf of the governor, he had asked for something, at least, and the significance of his call was magnified with each grave new report from Montgomery. A brick hit a marshal on the head, gashing his forehead. Gunshots were fired into Negro homes on four different streets near the church. A Molotov cocktail bounced off the roof of the church. Tear gas was running low.

When word of a renewed mass charge came to Byron White, he reported almost plaintively that he did not know whether this one could be contained. His tone helped push Robert Kennedy over the edge. “That's it,” he said; he would call the President. A legal argument ensued over a technicality concerning the presidential proclamation that was required for the use of the armed forces. They had the proclamation there in the office, but President Kennedy was in Middleburg, out in the horse country of northern Virginia. Would it be legal for them to start the troops moving from Benning to Maxwell before a helicopter could get the proclamation out to Middleburg for the President's signature?

Kennedy hesitated on Marshall's advice. Word soon came that another volley of tear gas was driving back the mob, and during the reprieve came the dramatic news that Governor Patterson had proclaimed a state of martial law. Montgomery policemen were running toward the church in a phalanx, with their commanders shouting “All right, let's move out of here!” Behind them, the first fifteen white-helmeted soldiers of the Alabama National Guard marched double-time with bayoneted rifles. Another hundred came up shortly. The Guardsmen took positions around the front of the church as policemen chased the rioters out of the area. On orders from Byron White, Chief Marshal McShane promptly sought out the colonel in charge of the first Guard unit and placed the federal forces under state command. The colonel ordered the marshals to withdraw from the scene. Elsewhere near the church, Police Commissioner Sullivan made his first appearance of the night. White teenagers pelted his car with bricks.