Pillar of Fire (20 page)

Like King, President Kennedy was cutting loose from historical norms. To touch the splendor of his standing among nations, he could step from the King meeting into a helicopter on his way to speak for the entire Free World from Germany
(“Ich bin ein Berliner”)
, but he gained no respite at home. To suit elements in Congress, he weakened or reversed executive actions against segregation—canceling, for instance, a long-awaited order banning white-only work crews in federally assisted road projects.
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Robert Kennedy offered publicly to soften the bill's integration requirements—suggesting that hotels and restaurants beneath a certain size might be exempted—only to be denounced by a chorus of integration supporters. Whereas nobody in Congress had been interested in civil rights before Birmingham, the Attorney General privately complained, now suddenly they swamped the administration with destructively intense passion—both from the impractical liberals, as he saw them, with their “sort of death wish, really wanting to go down in flames,” and from the cunning, flint-hearted obstructionists. House Majority Leader Carl Albert told President Kennedy in June that civil rights was “overwhelming the whole program.” Congress floundered without predictable votes or political discipline, he said, and the President ruefully agreed. “Civil rights did it…,” Kennedy lamented. “I mean, it's just in everything. I mean, this has become everything.”

King himself escaped the glamorous pinch at the White House to soar briefly again in Detroit, where some 125,000 people pushed downtown along Woodward Avenue with such enthusiastic force that King and the mayor could only lock arms at the front of the surging mass, their feet lifted off the ground. Motown Records, then a fledgling company aimed at crossover rock and roll, issued a record of the rally entitled
The Great March to Freedom
, featuring King's address on race and the American Dream. At his next stop, however, a jeering crowd of Negroes pelted King with eggs outside a church in Harlem. Neither the glory of the march nor the humiliation of the egg attack made much news, coming outside the established drama of his confrontations in the South. “The incident was attributed to the Black Muslims,” noted the
Chicago Defender
in a blurb. King skirmished briefly with Malcolm X over the meaning of the egg attack, and kept to himself a telegram in which a Harlem minister confessed that his Baptist church members—not the Muslims—“did this unbecomming [sic] thing to you.”
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Away from the cheers of Detroit and the boos of Harlem, King debated with some of his advisers the Kennedy administration's demand that he purge others. Could Kennedy really believe they were Kremlin agents, or was the President forced to play along with Hoover? Was this dispute really about the puny remnant of American Communism, or was Kennedy putting King through a painful test of submission, like Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac? Harry Belafonte and Clarence Jones warned that to accept the government's monstrous definition of Stanley Levison would not remove the taint of subversion but spread it instead on the evidence of King's own tacit confession, and it was naive to think otherwise.

Pragmatists around King replied that the Kennedys were trying to balance a government among power politicians, not moral theorists, and that Levison's head was a small price to pay for ending segregation. No one on either side volunteered to tell Levison, who was handling King's book project on Birmingham among a dozen assignments, selflessly efficient as always, briefly unaware that his colleagues had withdrawn to squirm about his fate.

 

E
LEMENTS WERE ALIGNED
from the White House down to the lowliest movement enclave—each one teetering, overheated, and stalled in a kind of vapor lock. In Mississippi, the prisoners from Leflore County endured the crudest, most literal confinement. Along with eight others snatched away from the county prison, including four women, all nine of the Greenwood leaders wound up in notorious Parchman Penitentiary, a timeless fusion of prison and antebellum plantation with cell blocks and guard towers dotting forty-seven square miles of rich Delta cropland.
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Normally sullen guards greeted them expressly as recalcitrants to be broken, saying, “You're going to pay me.” Shorn of hair from head to foot, every patch of stubble slathered with a bluish delousing grease, they were marked apart from other inmates—the thirteen males crammed into cell number seven of the death house built around Mississippi's gas chamber, with seven sleeping on the floor and one on the toilet. From there, guards shuffled them in more or less random punishment between isolation cells and the sweatbox, six feet square without lights or windows, vented only by a crack under the door.

As the weeks of July dragged by, the prisoners fell into illness and disorientation, so that they half believed the guards who said they were taking Lawrence Guyot and Hollis Watkins away to kill them. In a blink, Guyot and Watkins found themselves alive in a courthouse telling what they remembered of the Winona incident to friendly Justice Department lawyers who had filed three novel actions to restrain the Mississippi officers after the stationhouse beatings, but who only nodded to hysterical accounts from the prison-borrowed witnesses of horrible outrages since then. The lawyers, already bleary under voting and school cases, had been battered also by the escalating protest and reprisal since May—John Doar's infant son went nameless for six weeks while Doar tended emergencies across the South—so that in another blink Watkins and Guyot were back in the Parchman death house, as though nothing had happened.

What gnawed at them most was a cold suspicion that the movement itself did not care enough to contact or rescue them, and was letting them slide to oblivion because they were ordinary Mississippi Negroes who lacked the middle-class connections of Annell Ponder in Winona. The thought punctured memories of jail triumph and transforming brotherhood since Bob Moses had drawn them into the registration movement. For Hollis Watkins, somehow it was the heroic memory of catching the runaway yearling at the Dahmer farm that turned to dust; he beat back the thought by singing movement songs even when the punishment came to be hanging in handcuffs
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from a horizontal bar of his cell door. A guard informally sentenced Douglas MacArthur Cotton to stretch beneath the handcuffs for forty-eight hours but took pity on him after three. Willie Carnell hung sleepless for a full thirty hours. Watkins and others lost track of how long they hung, but all of them, still singing or not, eventually gave way to helplessness and let their wastes fall down their prison-issue trouser legs.

O
F MANY NEWCOMERS
swept into the maelstrom of Birmingham spring, one democratic adventurer brought pertinent experience in facing such helplessness. In 1959, after a stint as a young foreign policy aide to Senator Hubert Humphrey, Allard Lowenstein had trekked across the Kalahari Desert into South-West Africa [now Namibia] on a private mission that blended comic spy bungling with tear-choking epiphany. Escaping just ahead of the South African secret police, Lowenstein broke a ten-year global news blackout. “We will not soon forget the stories of arbitrary arrest and police brutality which are the daily bread of the African people,” he testified at a special hearing of the United Nations, “nor the prisoners in their red-striped clothes working in a private home in Keetmanshoop….” He said all the member nations bore a heavy responsibility for assigning the U.N. trusteeship to neighboring South Africa, which had sealed off the South-West under a colonial regimen more degrading even than its own notorious apartheid. No African had finished high school—more starved than reached fifth grade—and yet Lowenstein met noble chiefs and Christian pacifists among the sufferers. Because the South Africans ruthlessly blocked contact with the outside world, he had pledged “to take the story and the message of the non-European peoples of South-West Africa to this forum, and to the people of the world beyond the deserts and the seas.”

Lowenstein scarcely had delivered his testimony when the domestic sit-in movement made a startling political force of his chosen constituency—students—in North Carolina, where he had finished college in 1949.Within a month of the first sit-in, he undertook a fact-finding tour of Southern campuses and then another tour to spread the word at Northern schools, including Yale, where he had completed law school in 1954. On the road, Lowenstein was formally introduced as a founder and third president (1950-51) of the National Student Association, popularly known to admirers and detractors alike as the “world's oldest student activist.” By 1960, several North Carolina citizens had complained to the FBI about Lowenstein's agitation against segregation, alleging that he was a Communist or at least an agnostic whose “teachings and philosophies followed the communist line.”

No sooner did FBI officials file away these vague charges than the State Department mandated a more thorough investigation of Lowenstein's machinations overseas. Since boyhood in the 1930s, when he had plotted the heartache of Spanish Republican defeats on maps in his New York bedroom, Lowenstein had held dear among his far-flung passions the goal of a democratic Spain. After President Kennedy's U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson twice visited the dictator Francisco Franco, both times snubbing leaders of the democratic opposition, “an energetic young American writer and teacher…called at the Embassy…to register his personal dissatisfaction,” as a State Department report archly put it. Lowenstein introduced himself with a copy of the new book he had written about his mission to South-West Africa,
Brutal Mandate
, boasting of its foreword by Eleanor Roosevelt. His rumpled appearance and blunt, evangelical eloquence scandalized diplomats who listened for two days as Lowenstein “made it clear from the outset that he…found it difficult to even talk with Embassy personnel as he was so deeply engaged in activities directly contrary to US policies, namely, in personally trying to overthrow the Franco regime as soon as possible.”

Investigating FBI agents mostly chased the zigzag trail of a dervish. By the time they traced him to a job near San Francisco in the spring of 1962, perturbed administrators of Stanford University advised that they were taking steps already to dismiss Lowenstein for “stirring up” the students on countless issues other than the Spanish dictatorship. A privileged tradition of high-WASP insulation had prevailed at Stanford, where President J. Wallace Sterling discouraged political speakers as troublesome, and Professor James T. Watkins IV modeled the study of government on Stanford's dominant Greek fraternity system. According to biographer William Chafe, Lowenstein single-handedly bowled over campus culture in less than a full academic year as assistant dean. He moved into Stern Hall, a dormitory scorned as the “turkey house,” and so electrified students with his public forums on world citizenship that Stern Hall became the hub of Stanford life, its misfits suddenly attractive, even socially compelling, to the point that an eccentric Jewish graduate student miraculously defeated fraternity candidates in the next campus election for student president—“We can't fight [injustice] with a drink in one hand and a deck of cards in the other”—becoming the first of five successive Lowenstein protégés elected long after Lowenstein himself left Stanford to pollinate elsewhere.

“Last week was perhaps the single most exciting week at Stanford,” the student president wrote Lowenstein, describing three complementary events of May 1963: Rabbi Abraham Heschel's lectures on humanity's search for meaning,
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James Baldwin's address on race, and a giant Stanford rally in support of the Negro children attacked on the streets of Birmingham. “The whole campus seemed to come alive all at once,” the student president observed. By then, Lowenstein was across the country in Raleigh, North Carolina, clinging to another teaching job as a base for his excursions. With an acquaintance from Africa, he was refused restaurant service at the most prestigious hotel in North Carolina, the Sir Walter, creating a small racial incident that drew a puff of criticism from the State Department, which charged that the demonstration had been “staged” by Lowenstein inasmuch as he failed to identify his companion, the Liberian ambassador to the United Nations, as a diplomat immune from the segregation laws, thus embarrassing the hotel.

Lowenstein characteristically disappeared in the midst of the campaign. One of his many protégés sent a running press summary on the Raleigh crisis to New York and “this extra one to Cal. in case you're still in the West.” A delegated strategist, guessing that Lowenstein was at Yale, complained that he had decamped just before “the hostile peak.” While conceding his point that the Raleigh movement was at its usual “bickering, falling apart stage,” she insisted that the students had overcome numbing pressure and fear through a long vigil at the hotel when “they got themselves thrown out on their heads with their hands still clasped around their knees, and Gloria got slapped around inside. Now I don't know what you want from these kids, Al…. In the past they've looked to you, and they've taken your advice and they were willing to follow you to Sir Walter or the middle of the street or wherever you said go, but now you've left them, and it's not fair for you to say they don't have the guts to continue what you started.” Hers was a common reaction to Lowenstein: enthralled, dependent, activated, resentful. To FBI officials still on the Spain investigation, Lowenstein had all the earmarks of a bizarre subversive, but more than a few battered activists suspected he was some sort of covert government agent.

 

L
OWENSTEIN VANISHED
southward with the multilayered preoccupations of his correspondence: with Albert Luthuli of South Africa, whose receipt of the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize Lowenstein had attended as an aide (“Dear Chief: It is always hard to write you a letter because one has the feeling that it will be seen by many eyes…”), with an airline that maintained a ticket office in a segregated hotel space (“Dear Sir: I thought you would want to know that the Sir Walter Hotel in Raleigh has refused to remove its color bar…”), and with the idol of his daydreams, actress Katharine Hepburn (“Dear Miss Hepburn, I hope you'll not think me too presumptuous to leave a copy of this book here for you. Mrs. Roosevelt mentioned once…”). Pulled by the chilling mystique of the Medgar Evers assassination, Lowenstein drove alone to Mississippi to make personal acquaintance with the movement figures in the news. He managed to eat three meals with James Meredith, and on July 4 introduced himself to a suggested contact at Tougaloo College outside Jackson.

Lowenstein's picture of Mississippi began to dissolve with first sight of the young white minister's face, which was caved in on the left side, covered with fresh bandages and an eye patch. Over the past six weeks, Rev. Edwin King had hurtled literally and figuratively into collision with Mississippi. From a ministers' vigil protesting the violent repression of the May 28 sit-ins, he had been hauled away from the Jackson courthouse to jail, still praying. Bailed out by Medgar Evers, he stood trial on May 31 at the annual meeting of his Mississippi Methodist Conference, which voted to bar him from all church posts in the state. Since then he had been stalked after attempts to integrate white worship services with Medgar Evers, in Evers's last demonstrations
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—marked so publicly as a traitor that police officers barreled into a private home to seize him in dragnet arrests following the Evers funeral. Someone loosened the lug nuts on his tires, and when a marauding car sideswiped him and a companion into a head-on collision June 18, few in the Mississippi movement believed the wreck was an accident.

For all this—left weak, sickened with fear, facing reconstructive surgery—King insisted to Lowenstein that he felt relatively fortunate. The vote against him in the Methodist Conference had been close, 89-85, and even the segregationist local newspaper acknowledged some weeping confessions among the Methodist clergy during the debate. A number of the delegates seemed to believe that Edwin King had been lured astray temporarily by his Northern religious training at Boston University, where he had been captivated by the Negro pacifist James Lawson, mentor of the Nashville student movement. On summer break in 1961, King had visited Lawson and other Freedom Riders imprisoned at Parchman Penitentiary, smuggling to them gift books by Gandhi concealed within Billy Graham jacket covers. That mission of mercy had faded already into a comparatively innocent memory, as movement people no longer dared visit Parchman.

Lowenstein seemed to know everybody and to soak up the personal details of the movement leadership struggles as though he had heard them before. On guidance from Edwin King, he followed the trail of leadership northward into the Delta, visiting NAACP state president Aaron Henry in Clarksdale just after the stealthy departure of Martin Luther King himself. White authorities had Clarksdale under such tight clamp that the hunted minister withdrew behind a safety telegram (“…I am at present in the heart of the Mississippi Delta under injunction…”), and Lowenstein followed him into an atmosphere that might have been Keetmanshoop or Sharpeville, where all eyes followed any strange car or person, police camped outside Aaron Henry's pharmacy, and the local court order forbade even private meetings on the topic of integration. Then he walked into a Greenwood SNCC meeting as a startling white face—“I'm Al Lowenstein,” he said. “Go ahead with what you were saying”—and saw for himself the transformed activists who had made national news the previous spring. Food shipments still trickled into Greenwood along with a few celebrities—folk singers Bob Dylan and Josh White had performed privately a few days earlier. The Greenwood movement was gamely “holding out,” in Lowenstein's judgment, but all the passion and outside support were bottled up tightly in the Negro part of town.

Lowenstein extended his journey until finally he located Bob Moses in Jackson. Moses remembered him from a lecture on Africa at Lowenstein's high school alma mater, New York's Horace Mann, where Moses taught math in 1959. Mississippi flooded them again with images of South Africa, and Moses confessed the paralysis of the movement candidly, in part because Lowenstein so readily grasped the situation by analogy. On voting, Moses said, SNCC researchers may have found one small glint of promise in an obscure law that allowed unregistered voters to cast provisional ballots on claim of being unlawfully disfranchised. (Ironically, the provision had been designed to recover the voting rights of white ex-Confederates.) Still, such a tactic required Negroes to face white authorities at the ballot box, and under the current crackdown this meant enduring terror or jail without positive result. Lowenstein recalled that many Africans withdrew into formal mourning on election days in South Africa. Of course, he went on, mourning was appropriate there because voting by Africans was explicitly prohibited by law. In Mississippi, where Negro voting was permitted in theory, he figured that the equivalent gesture would be the massive display by Negroes of homemade, meaningless ballots.

From this seed grew the Freedom Vote of 1963—a mock election parallel to the official Mississippi governor's race. There would be no small resistance to the indignity of a “pretend” vote for Negroes, but Moses and Lowenstein saw the advantage of theater where reality was closed off from hope. By withdrawing into make-believe, they could reduce the threat from whites and thereby regain breathing space to organize shadow voters for a first taste of citizenship—choosing candidates, hearing speeches, marking and counting ballots—and from the hunger of that exercise they could fashion a new appeal for help “beyond the deserts and the seas,” as Lowenstein had said of South-West Africa, meaning in this case outside Mississippi. The two New York intellectuals, a quiet Negro philosopher from Harvard and a bombastic Jewish globetrotter from Yale, approached Mississippi by analogy with underground agitation in surreal South Africa, coming together much as Lowenstein had described in his book: “Across the chasm between white and nonwhite politics leap or limp or sneak a handful of hardy idealists and intriguers, themselves split half a dozen ways and doubtless bearing in their midst the usual contingent of government agents.”