Pillar of Fire (54 page)

Young was diverted from such thoughts by news of court rulings in Florida. That same day, June 9, Judge Bryan Simpson terminated the ban on marches in St. Augustine and proscribed some of the county's customized punishments for civil rights prisoners, such as the chicken coop, concrete sweatboxes, miniature padded cell, and the thirtyfold bail increase for misdemeanor charges. “More than cruel and unusual punishment is shown,” Simpson wrote. “Here is exposed, in its raw ugliness, studied and cynical brutality, deliberately contrived to break men physically and mentally.” Because the judge made his orders instantly effective, Robert Hayling and Hosea Williams considered it a jubilant duty to march forthwith that very night.

Their pleas for support rang north into the Atlanta headquarters of SCLC, which had been embroiled all day over a crisis from Alabama. In Tuscaloosa, home of the state university, police first had blocked an anti-segregation march by forcing some five hundred marchers to retreat back inside the First African Baptist Church, and later, deciding to force them outside again for arrest, hurled tear gas and sprayed fire hoses through the church windows. The Tuscaloosa jail gained ninety-two Negro prisoners, including SCLC's field representative for Alabama, Rev. T. Y. Rogers, and a volatile new siege held against pressures from both sides. By triage, King dispatched James Bevel to rally the nonviolent movement in Tuscaloosa, then turned to events in Florida.

Meanwhile in Washington, President Johnson took a phone call shortly after noon from Attorney General Kennedy, who had “heard of this incident of last night.” The first two U.S. reconnaissance jets had been shot down over northern Laos. On secret, crisis recommendations that “unless we showed some strength and made some kind of reply, it would be very bad for us,” he told Kennedy, Johnson had tried to knock out the anti-aircraft batteries with surgical air strikes, which failed because of bad weather. (“It shows us that we can't rely too much on airpower,” he said.) Kennedy expressed worry that “the Chinese will probably talk about it, and the Russians will probably talk about it,” which would break secrecy about the shadow conflict in Laos behind the undeclared war in Vietnam. Johnson managed to avoid news reports. He spent the afternoon notifying congressional leaders confidentially, saying he did not want to make “too big a deal of it” with a White House briefing. “If they'll just quit advancing,” he told Senator Mansfield, “why then we can get out.” Mansfield pleaded for a public explanation of the administration's Asia policy, and Secretary McNamara agreed Tuesday evening in a postmortem on the immediate crisis. “If we're gonna stay in there,” he told Johnson, “if we're going to go particularly up the escalating chain, we're gonna have to educate the people, Mr. President. And we haven't done so yet. I'm not sure now is exactly the right time.”

“No,” said Johnson. “And I think if you start doing it, they're gonna be hollerin', ‘You're warmongers.'”

“That's right,” said McNamara. “I completely agree with you.”

In Atlanta, meeting across town from SNCC's ongoing debate about the Mississippi project, the SCLC staff argued all Tuesday afternoon about how King might honor his pledge to return to St. Augustine. What Daddy King heard about two specific threats against his son alarmed him enough to call Burke Marshall in the Justice Department with pleas for protection. Marshall called Lee White in the White House, who called Florida's Governor Bryant. SCLC sent a telegram to Attorney General Kennedy charging that the federal government was ignoring racial strife in St. Augustine. From New York, Clarence Jones orchestrated supporting messages from James Baldwin and others calculated to gain attention. Wyatt Walker called the Jacksonville FBI office only to be advised that threats against King were not a federal matter and should be referred to Sheriff Davis. Late on Tuesday afternoon, yielding to a chorus of worry that he was rushing into a death trap, King told reporters that he had postponed his flight until the next morning. With C. T. Vivian, Andrew Young raced off to the airport in his place, leaving behind a handwritten note on a copy of his fresh request for career guidance: “Dr. King—this is the letter I wrote….”

Young's journey coincided with Senator Robert Byrd's last-stand address on the civil rights bill in Washington. Observers noted that the energetic West Virginian took the Senate floor at 7:38
P.M.
for the final scheduled speech before a test vote on shutting off debate. Determined not to yield the filibuster while breath remained, he read into the record the entire text of the Magna Carta signed in June of 1215—“749 years ago next Monday.” Byrd traced American doctrines of constitutional liberty to historic roots in Anglo-Saxon character and specifically to the property rights British nobles had forced upon King John at Runnymede, then declared that the civil rights bill fatally undermined this foundation. From time to time, friendly senators rose for colloquies that allowed Byrd to rest his voice without endangering his parliamentary right to the floor. Senator Russell opined that the bill would guarantee the commercial destruction of white people “when it comes to employment, when it comes to promotion, when it comes to being laid off in times of economic distress,” by ensuring that “the average garden variety type of American has no chance whatever.” To prompting questions from Senator Strom Thurmond about a future in which “a woman of one race is required to give a massage to a woman of another race against her wishes,” Byrd readily agreed that the bill imposed a new form of slavery by federal mandate.

In St. Augustine, Andrew Young walked again into a river of enthusiasm and a command invitation from Hosea Williams. Within minutes of his arrival at a tumultuous mass meeting, he was heading a double-column march of three hundred out of St. Mary's Baptist Church downtown to the steps of the Old Slave Market. Aggressive but isolated calls of “nigger” sustained an eerie tension until one man broke from the wall of white hecklers to strike Young across the mouth, knocking him to the pavement. Curiosity seemed to check war fever for a moment, as the crowd watched Young rise slowly to his feet and resume the march across the plaza. The hecklers proceeded to St. George Street a block away, and then to the corner of Cordova. At both standoffs, the attacker darted in to knock Young down with a blackjack, and at Cordova he stood over him delivering kicks until Willie Bolden threw himself down over Young, cradling his head in his stomach, absorbing blows on his back. Another attacker singled out one of the few whites marching with Young—Boston University chaplain Will England, who had returned two months after accompanying Mrs. Peabody to jail—and beat him to the ground. “The thud of the kicks were [
sic
] punctuated with groans from the victim,” reported an account in the local Jacksonville newspaper. “Then a slender Negro boy, about twelve, broke from the ranks of the halted marchers and threw his body over the chaplain. The assailant turned and slouched away slowly. Policemen attempted no arrests….” Half a dozen other marchers needed hospital treatment before the columns reached the safety of St. Mary's, from which a battered Andrew Young later emerged. “Despite what happened, we are going to continue protesting unjust discrimination,” he told reporters, shrugging when asked about prospects for federal protection.

 

B
Y THE NEXT MORNING
, June 10, as Martin Luther King left Atlanta for St. Augustine, Senator Byrd was turning to religious themes after speaking all through the night. “I have attempted to reach some understanding as to the Scriptural basis upon which we are implored to enact the proposed legislation…” he declared to a Senate gallery brimming with people and anticipation. “I find none.” Noting that the King James translation of the Bible had been published in the same year colonial Virginia first imported slaves (1619), Byrd listed accepted giants of theology and evangelism who had made little or no mention of race ever since. It would be preposterous to find a clear religious imperative in civil rights after all this time, he argued, because doing so would impeach the leading American divines as knaves or hypocrites. “Shall responsible men and women be persuaded that throughout the religious history of this country, they failed to preach the truth?” Byrd inquired, adding that if so, “I might say to Christians that Christ died in vain.”

To support his point, Byrd expounded on the biblical “curse of Noah” and quoted the law of Leviticus against letting “thy cattle gender with a diverse kind.” Citing the parable of vineyard laborers, he said Jesus not only condoned employment discrimination but endorsed a property holder's right “to do what I will with mine own.” He found authority in the book of First Peter for a hierarchy of kinds, “even in heaven,” and went on to dismiss Jefferson's doctrine of equal creation as extraneous
obiter dictum
from “the verbiage of the Declaration of Independence.” Byrd recited the parable of the ten virgins from the book of Matthew to justify a society stratified by attainments and inherited features. “If all men are created equal,” he asked the Senate, “how could five of the virgins have been wise and five foolish?”

The exhausted senator pressed through segregationist interpretations of Luke and Paul, pausing only to thank his chief opponent for a gift of red roses “from the garden of Mrs. Humphrey.” After conceding a superficial relevance to civil rights in the Good Samaritan parable and Jesus' command to love neighbors as oneself, Byrd thundered his response: “But the Scriptural admonition does not say that we may not
choose
our neighbor!…It does not admonish that we shall not build a wall betwixt us and our neighbor.” With a final flourish from Daniel Webster's eulogy for George Washington, he yielded the floor after fourteen hours and thirteen minutes—the longest speech of the longest filibuster in Senate history.
*
The Senate secretary then called the roll on the petition for cloture, and one by one, relayed from the hushed chamber through Roger Mudd's live outdoor broadcast, the suspenseful tally grew. Californian Clair Engle, hospitalized and unable to walk or speak for months after two surgeries for brain cancer, was wheeled unexpectedly into the Senate long enough to record an aye vote by pointing to his eye.

In Massachusetts, handed a note ten minutes after the roll call, President Johnson interrupted his commencement address to announce simply that “we voted cloture in the Senate today by a vote of 71 to 29.” No further explanation was needed to elicit a standing ovation in the Holy Cross College football stadium, led by Governor Endicott Peabody. Johnson flew home to a rubdown before grim war bulletins from Vietnam were delivered, and was huddled over them that evening with adviser McGeorge Bundy when Attorney General Robert Kennedy poked his head in the office. “Hello, hero,” said Johnson, in tribute to Kennedy's hard work toward cloture.

“Wasn't that good?” Kennedy replied, and the President whisked him off to daughter Lynda Bird's hamburger party in honor of young Presidential Scholars. Under red-striped tents on the White House South Lawn, they joined a host of attending celebrities, all of whom (except for J. Edgar Hoover) celebrated the day as buoyant supporters of civil rights: among them choreographers George Balanchine and Martha Graham, poets Ogden Nash and Gwendolyn Brooks, baseball star Stan Musial, folk singers the Kingston Trio, conductor Leonard Bernstein, actor Sidney Poitier, and writers Philip Roth, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, and Harper Lee. Before retiring, Johnson conferred with congressional leaders on his foreign aid bill, and instructed Lee White to respond to wire stories about King's plight in St. Augustine. “Open up some communication down there,” he said. “…Then call the governor, too…. Get Burke Marshall on it. Let's watch it now.”

On Thursday, even while complaining to his staff that Robert Kennedy was planting political stories against him, Johnson called the Attorney General to say that his follow-up note on Vietnam was “the nicest thing that's happened to me since I've been here.”

“Oh, that's very nice,” said Kennedy.

“And you're a great, great guy, or you wouldn't write that kind of letter,” said Johnson.

Johnson also reached across the passions of the cloture debate, asking Richard Russell to “do a little heavy thinking for me” about Asia.

“Well,” said Russell, “we're just like a damn cow over a fence out there in Vietnam.”

Johnson bemoaned his dilemma in earnest: “A. W. Moursund said to me last night, said, ‘Goddamn, there's not anything destroy you as quick as pullin' out and pullin' up and runnin', 'cause America wants by God prestige and power, and they don't want.' I said, ‘Yeah, but I don't want to keep—'”

“That's what he said?” Russell interrupted.

“‘I don't want to kill these folks,'” Johnson continued. “He said, ‘I don't give a damn.' Said, ‘They didn't want to kill 'em in Korea,' but said, ‘if you don't stand up for America, there's nothing that a fella in Johnson City or Georgia or any other place, they'll forgive you for everything except being weak.'”

“Well, there's a lot in that,” said Russell. “A whole lot in that.”

The President sighed, wandered through other subjects, then congratulated Russell for gallantry in defeat on the cloture vote. “Bob Byrd just stood to the last, didn't he?” he said.

“Yeah, he sure did,” said Russell. “…He's tough as hell.”