Pillar of Fire (19 page)

Three of them—Guyot, Ponder, and Fannie Lou Hamer—were a mess of untreated injuries such as broken teeth and back bruises crusted over with leather-hard skin, in part from systematic, chorelike pummeling with blackjacks. A fourth, June Johnson, was beaten less severely. She arrived in Greenwood as a ghostly curiosity, but the whole family fell silent under the baleful look of Belle Johnson, who grudgingly had acquiesced in another citizenship trip once the school year ended. The sum total of adult commentary on June Johnson's puffy face and bloody dress came from grandmother Johnson, a migrant farmworker, who pointed an accusing finger at her daughter Belle and shouted, “I hold
you
responsible!” She said June was just a baby. The mother kept everything inside. Never in her life would she ask her daughter what happened inside the Winona jail.

 

A
MONG THE REPORTS
that reached King on a speech trip in New York came word of a second telegram from the White House. This time President Kennedy took the initiative to invite King for a visit. King sent an eager acceptance hard upon his letter praising Kennedy's televised speech, but he changed his mind by lunchtime. In the interim, a flurry of adviser calls established that King, instead of joining President Kennedy for a political meeting, was to be one of some three hundred religious leaders herded into the East Room of the White House for a pep talk on racial issues. “Deeply regret that I had overlooked an important longstanding commitment when I accepted…,” King wired the President disingenuously. He closed with a pointed reminder of what he sought: “Thank you very kindly, and I hope we will be able to talk privately in the not too distant future.”

For President Kennedy, who took for granted the ritual importance of status jockeying among politicians, the lesson here was that a neophyte young Negro was no pushover. King's lifelong experience in the elite Negro Baptist clergy had schooled him in the game. Politics, like preaching funerals, required a certain amount of callousness, and movement politics all the more so because regular travel across racial barriers intensified the personal toll. As King left New York for the Medgar Evers funeral, trustees of Lovett School in Atlanta voted to bar all Negro applicants, which ratified and ostensibly depersonalized an earlier ad hoc decision to reject young Martin III from first grade. A muffled debate was under way in Atlanta about how much the decision did or did not reflect the influence of Episcopal authorities with which Lovett was affiliated by charter. In Jackson, Roy Wilkins bristled with anger that King claimed Medgar Evers as a nonviolent crusader, and speakers sniped at King during the funeral itself as a usurper of the NAACP's rightful glory. Hailed as inspiration, reviled as accomplice, King slipped from the funeral just before John Doar of the Justice Department stepped alone between a breakaway youth demonstration and mass of police, snatching a truce from the brink of violence.

On no other subject did critics on both sides dismiss a President more quickly as tyrant or pygmy, and nowhere else did the high claims of government trip more awkwardly over stubborn, unpolished human nature. In Washington, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia vowed on June 12 to fight any civil rights law as a step toward Communism, and conceded only that the President's message “may intimidate a few weak-kneed people [who] have no business in positions of power.” A summit that day at the White House locked in polar standoff, with former President Eisenhower supporting action only in the one area—voting rights—that Kennedy planned to leave out of his proposed legislation. Eisenhower promptly went out to make a rousing partisan speech about the urgency of defeating Kennedy in the next year's election, just as a new report found off-base segregation against Negro soldiers so stubbornly pervasive that Kennedy's own commission publicly endorsed the ultimate sanction of closing military installations. Racial politics threatened the core of Kennedy's Democratic support in Northern cities, where labor unions overwhelmingly excluded Negroes. Between the death and burial of Evers, a large annex to Harlem Hospital ceased in mid-construction over the disputed use of segregated unions under public contract. In Philadelphia, the arrival of the first handful of Negro plumbers at a school construction site under a tentative agreement set off clashes between angry white workers, Negro pickets, and police, leaving thirty-nine people injured.

In St. Augustine, Florida, where local leaders had waited several months without a response to their tape-recorded petition to the city commissioners, NAACP president Fannie Fulwood again lamented the approach of a segregated Quadricentennial, in spite of hopes that had soared during Vice President Johnson's visit, and youth adviser Robert Hayling announced that without some sign of progress he could no longer contain the desire of students to march like the children of Birmingham. This gained a meeting on June 16, after which NAACP leaders complained that the chief of police aggressively pronounced the word “Negro” as “
nigger
” while reading to them—as his preferred alternative to dialogue—from conspiratorial magazine articles on subversive influences behind integration. While fruitless and humiliating to the Negroes, the session itself offended anonymous Klan callers who promised retaliation upon the NAACP, and Hayling erupted two days later under threat of ambush. “I and others have armed and we will shoot first and ask questions later,” he told a reporter. “We are not going to die like Medgar Evers.”

These two sentences cracked a news barrier of color. Hayling, who had obtained no publicity before and since the Lyndon Johnson visit, became an instant sensation in radio reports that Negroes were arming for racial violence. NAACP officials, who would have bristled against a public statement of
non
violence as a policy capitulation to King, repudiated Hayling's statement of self-defense as a provocation to whites. Contacts in the Florida NAACP told the FBI they were working to muzzle Hayling, and that “racial feelings amongst the Negroes were well under control [with] no Muslim or other violent influence….” Whites already were stirred to militance. An investigator from the Florida governor's office reported that St. Augustine policemen received orders to shoot any Negro protesters who might interfere with traffic. Less officially, hotblooded teenagers buzzed the streets of the Lincolnville neighborhood to exchange taunts with Negro residents; one carload of four fired a shotgun into Hayling's garage, wounding two members of his NAACP Youth Council.

 

O
N
T
UESDAY
, J
UNE
18, the day of Hayling's outburst in Florida, a Medgar Evers memorial registration mass meeting swelled to capacity some ninety miles north of Jackson in tiny Itta Bena, which was visible off the highway as a grove of trees and a water tower rising from the vast flatness of Delta plantations near Greenwood. Some 150 Negroes, mostly plantation sharecroppers, were packed into the little brick Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church, singing, when someone ran in with word that there was a bomb under the raised skirts of the church, which sat a few feet off the ground on brick pilings. An intrepid scout soon came back to announce proudly, “Well, that has been taken care of,” but with the singing stopped, cars could be heard driving by at high speed, and an acrid gas began to seep upward between cracks in the floorboards.

Some shouted that it was fire, or smoke bombs, or tear gas, and someone said they had heard the local doctor might have some sort of canisters stored in his office. Thuds could be heard as cars zoomed by—mostly whites, came the reports, but some Negroes, too, sharecroppers beholden to their bosses. Stalwart elders gathered at the pulpit—among them two part-time preachers and James Bevel's father—but they deferred to the young project leader, William McGee, a pin boy at the Greenwood bowling lanes until he had discovered a speaking voice in the movement meetings and then grown so swiftly as an apprentice to Sam Block, the senior youth apprentice to Bob Moses in Greenwood, that McGee had been farmed out as an independent movement colonizer in Itta Bena, canvassing its dirt roads, sneaking onto plantations, attracting mostly teenage girls with movement songs and tales of the vote, and through the girls dampening fear in would-be boyfriends. Now, as the ushers supervised a piecemeal evacuation, McGee tried to fortify morale by leading songs until the fumes choked them off and a Reverend Strong grabbed his arm, saying, “You can't stay in here.”

Outside, McGee was astonished to find most of the crowd huddled together, dodging cars and projectiles, awaiting his plans. Against his own impulse to run for safety, McGee improvised a processional along the few short blocks to the town hall, several times jumping for cover in a roadside ditch. Ed Weber, the town marshal who doubled as deputy sheriff, showed no interest in a verbal petition for police protection against the vigilantes still hotrodding within earshot, and instead supervised the arrest of all those who stood with McGee. After short-order trials the next morning, fifty-eight veterans of the Hopewell Church meetings went off to the Leflore County prison farm, where the women shelled peas and the men used swingblades to cut roadside grass under guard.

News that weekend stunned both sides of nearby Greenwood, where FBI agents swooped in to arrest a local white man, Byron de la Beckwith. Mainstream white Mississippi first cringed in avoidance. A bizarre local newspaper story, “Californian Is Charged with Murder of Medgar Evers,” painted Beckwith as a California drifter even though he had lived in Mississippi since 1925, was related to several of the Delta's pioneer families, and for years had felt at home enough among high-church Episcopalians to circulate letters on “God's laws of segregation” as a kind of lay theologian
*
for white supremacy. For those defending the respectability of segregation, there was a cold chill to the first revelations—photographs of the scoped deer rifle left in the honeysuckle, traceable to Beckwith by fingerprints and otherwise—but a compartmentalized empathy rallied. Newspapers described Beckwith as “weary.” Leading politicians offered to assist his defense, playing to the strong expectation that no jury would convict him on any set of facts.

A sharp foreboding jabbed movement leaders across town: if a local white-collar man could shoot Medgar Evers in Jackson, what might happen to simple country folk in places like Itta Bena, some ten miles “out in the rural,” where semifeudal peonage still domesticated Negroes to segregation? Only the courage of such extremely vulnerable people could chasten Greenwood, where the Winona victims had returned not long after Bob Moses was arrested again. Emergency caucuses resolved that if the Greenwood movement was too poor to obtain bail for the Itta Bena prisoners, and too weak to replace them out at Hopewell Baptist, it must honor their purpose. After immense labors of recruitment, some two hundred Negroes presented themselves at the Leflore County courthouse on June 25. With tempers rising in opposition, Greenwood authorities abandoned their truce policy of peacefully rejecting Negro applicants. That same morning, the city council passed an ordinance requiring citizens to vacate courthouse property on request—a measure aimed at Negroes who made great efforts to come to town from outlying farms—and at noon officers arrested the recognizable leaders. In five-minute summary trials, nine of them, including Hollis Watkins and Lawrence Guyot, drew identical sentences of six months and a $500 fine.

They received a mixed reception from the Itta Bena prisoners at the Leflore County prison farm that afternoon. Already there had been grumbling against William McGee over his assurances that the movement vigilantly looked after its own, as in Winona, and that James Forman or Martin Luther King himself would bail them out if necessary. Instead, after a week of silence, their most likely rescuers turned up as fellow prisoners. Fights broke out. Some exclaimed that whites would extend their sentences at a whim. Others resented random insults, bad food, or pessimists for loss of faith. The nine Greenwood leaders faced special harassments on the road gang, where motorists recognized them, joined the guards for overlording gossip, followed the prison truck, and went so far as to point guns at them in sporting menace. As soon as they protested with a hunger strike, a truck hauled them away to an unknown fate, leaving the Itta Bena prisoners more lost than ever.

 

K
ING RECEIVED
his third White House telegram of the month on June 19. Medgar Evers was buried at Arlington Cemetery that morning, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent a cable urging every embassy and consular post in the world to defend the United States against the global convulsion of bad publicity about race relations. President Kennedy, as promised, sent Congress his proposed omnibus legislation against segregation, then granted King his long-desired invitation for a parley. Appointments Secretary Kenneth O'Donnell confirmed it by evening telegram that coupled the private appointment to a hastily arranged gathering of prominent supporters such as Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers. “We assume,” O'Donnell wired King, “that since you will be meeting that day with the President that you will be in attendance….” King submitted without comment to Kennedy's last protective subtleties—first scheduling him on a slow-news Saturday, then camouflaging the private meeting with a larger one packaged for attention.

For all his tempered realism, King went to the summit unprepared for a serial bushwhacking that left him chuckling in disbelief. First Burke Marshall, then Robert Kennedy, and finally President Kennedy himself gravely insisted that King must tend to advisers tainted by Communism; specifically, he must agree to banish Stanley Levison from all contact with the movement. Tenaciously, they turned each of King's objections on its head. His personal devotion to Levison only showed Levison to be more dangerously skilled as a deceiver, and the evidence of subversion was withheld only because it was too important for ordinary eyes. The more sinister the picture of Levison—President Kennedy called him a top Kremlin agent—the more far-fetched and warped became the entire conversation for King. When he could not bring himself to jettison his friend outright, and Kennedy would discuss no other subject until he did, the meeting drifted to stalemate.