Pillar of Fire (55 page)

“He's a good little boy,” said Johnson.

 

A
T HIS MASS MEETING
Wednesday night in St. Augustine, Martin Luther King recognized the “magnificent drama taking place on the stage of American history.” He praised as its vanguard “all of these persons back with us who have been in jail, I think about ten days”—Georgia Reed and others just released under Judge Simpson's bail reduction. After beckoning them to stand in the church, “so that we can see them and give them a great hand for their courage and their dedicated witness in this city,” King preached on what he called the dignity and discipline of those who had marched with Andrew Young the previous night. “And we go on with a faith that unearned suffering is redemptive,” he said. “Now we face the moment of great decision. Now we face the moment when we must put on our walking shoes and get ready to make a definite witness.”

King withdrew to debate the complications of that decision. He and his aides realized that the conflict in St. Augustine was a footnote to the national legislation against segregation, and they wanted to avoid an upheaval that might jeopardize the measure on the edge of victory. (While the filibuster was broken, the Senate version differed from the House version, and numerous pitfalls littered the path toward final approval of identical bills, suitable to become law.) Parallel to Johnson's tricky course between the House and Senate, King tried to keep the nonviolent movement healthy without feeding the incipient white backlash. Privately, at his urging, Johnson officials pushed the St. Augustine officials for small concessions—such as a biracial commission—that might allow King to withdraw. Without a truce, they argued, St. Augustine was about to repeat the 40 percent loss in tourist business that had followed Mrs. Peabody's arrest in April. The White House brokered messages between King, Judge Simpson, and Florida politicians. “The Governor said that he would talk to the Mayor about the possibility of calling a meeting,” Lee White reported to Johnson.

When St. Augustine held fast, King felt obliged to keep faith with the local jailgoers and with the national movement that had created the civil rights bill in the first place. To do nothing was to risk charges of collapse from the same people who accused the movement of provocation. Despite growing Klan violence, King's hopes for state or federal protection were slim. He was not privy to the vituperative hate mail that greeted Judge Simpson's order restoring Negro demonstration rights,
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but he knew from impeachment rumors and overt pressures that Simpson had stretched judicial help to the limit. Therefore, by logic familiar from the low point in Birmingham the previous spring, the battered local movement must expose itself to further punishment, and King resolved to submit himself to jail. Personalized threats and his demolished beach cottage recommended that he get there by a short, unannounced route, in the daytime.

At 12:22 on June 11, along with Ralph Abernathy, Chaplain Will England, and two others, King presented himself for lunch at the Monson Motor Lodge, a motel favored by visiting journalists. Several dozen reporters gathered behind in a tight semicircle, jostling for notes and photographs as owner James Brock confronted King's group outside the entrance. “We can't serve you here,” he told King. “We're not integrated.” King said he would wait. When Abernathy asked about a sign welcoming tourists, Brock explained that exceptions to segregation were reserved for Negro servants of white patrons, who could take meals from the service area. King asked Brock if he could understand “the humiliation our people go through.”

A waiting customer called out from the back of the crowd, asking whether Brock was open for business. Told yes, the burly man pushed his way through, shoved Abernathy into King, then threw King roughly to the side of the door. “Black bastard,” he said on his way inside.

Brock told King it would ruin his white business if he accepted Negroes. He appealed for consideration of his own hardship as a local citizen of prominent obligations—a Rotarian, head of the Community Chest, president of the Florida Hotel and Motel Association. “I ask you on behalf of myself, my wife, and our two children,” he told King, “to leave.” As he turned to face news cameras, Brock added, “I would like to invite my many friends throughout the country to visit Monson's. We expect to remain segregated.”

Chief Stuart and Sheriff Davis arrived to end the dialogue with arrests for breach of peace, conspiracy, and trespass with malicious intent, among other charges. Eight volunteers, including a white woman, stepped forward on Davis's announcement that he would accommodate anyone who wanted to join King in jail. A Negro teenager changed his mind when asked pointedly by Stuart if he were sure.

A rumor swept through Lincolnville that Klansmen dressed as women were training to assassinate King, and a fantasy report came back from the white side of town that a squadron of seventy-five Black Muslim snipers was already deployed to fire from rooftops near Lincolnville. (The latter took hold as accepted fact. “Had it not been for the white police,” a leading radio station reported of an aborted Klan parade, “veteran observers say that no white would have gotten out alive.”) In the placid daylight hours, city work crews removed the brick borders from public flower beds near the Slave Market, so they could no longer be heaved during night marches.

Police officials told the FBI they wanted to move King out of St. Augustine to avoid a jailhouse lynching. “Medgar Evers was just a two-bit local philanthropist, and now he's a martyr,” editor “Hoopie” Tebeault explained. “We don't want that to happen here.” Handcuffed, placed inches from a German shepherd guard dog in the back seat of Sheriff Davis's car, King was removed from the county jail the next day for grand jury questioning, then returned when the paperwork was not complete for his transfer to Jacksonville.

Messages on everything from local gossip to long-range trends in national politics reached King's cell. Historian Lawrence Reddick, King's friend and first biographer, was submitting to his New York Research Committee a sober analysis of the George Wallace campaign. He discerned from its stunning success that while Northern whites had sympathized with the Negro movement against crude Southern brutality, many privately favored “the principle of racial separation.” Reddick warned King confidentially that a voting majority “can be mobilized by the anti-Negro camp on an appeal that is reasonable and correlated with other long-time, deep-seated desires and irritations…. Many an individual in our society feels overwhelmed by gigantic forces.” If George Wallace himself could refine such a message from hateful segregation,
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Reddick reasoned, other national politicians surely would follow. “This also may be part of the secret of Goldwater's support,” he wrote. Reddick advised that the movement should forswear any claim to racial preferences or compensatory treatment, no matter how justified by history. “Equality is the principle that permeates the American ideology (despite exceptions here and there),” he concluded. “…We cannot win without allies. We cannot win with the majority of Americans apprehensive of our advances.”

King, knowing he could not stay in jail long, grasped for ways to maintain the spirit of the St. Augustine movement. His goal was to hold on through the anticipated ordeals, with an eye on the civil rights bill and a finger on the pulse of nonviolence. Already, he had urged national celebrities to bring their witness to the mass meetings in St. Augustine, but none agreed to come. (Actor Marlon Brando sent King a telegram of regret on account of his bleeding ulcer and “great personal strife.”) King eventually came down to those who had answered his most desperate calls the previous two years, from Albany and Birmingham. “Dear Sy,” he wrote, “I am dictating this letter from the St. Augustine City Jail.” Andrew Young had brought King word that Rabbi Israel Dresner—a Freedom Rider from 1961, who had brought King to preach at his New Jersey synagogue after the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race—was about to attend a convention of reform rabbis in the Catskills. “Perhaps if this letter could be read to your brethren next week, it might be considered a ‘call' to St. Augustine,” King wrote Dresner. “I would imagine that some 30 or so rabbis would make a tremendous impact on this community and the nation. We would hope that some would be prepared to submit to arrest.”

O
N
F
RIDAY
, J
UNE
12, with King in jail, Hosea Williams presented himself for arrest in order to cajole fifty-five reluctant recruits to join the daily restaurant sit-ins. With local volunteers running low, the St. Augustine movement welcomed a busload of temporary reinforcements who arrived that day from Birmingham, and Williams announced on his way to jail that other buses would arrive from Albany, Georgia, and Williamston, North Carolina. A crowd of nearly two hundred mustered for an early evening rally at the Slave Market, guarded precariously by a ring of police officers. No sooner did the Negroes retreat than a larger crowd of hecklers seeped into the plaza for a boisterous counterrally featuring the white opposition's imported talent. “We're not gonna be put in chains by no civil rights bill now or any other time!” shouted J. B. Stoner. “There's nothing in the Constitution that gives Congress the authority to tell us we've got to eat with niggers!”

A whiff of legend about Stoner helped him command the enthusiasm of the segregationist crowd. He had turned up after spectacular racial violence for years, as police suspect in conspiracies from the 1958 bombing of Atlanta's Temple Beth-El to the Birmingham church bombing the previous September, and as defender of his friend Byron de la Beckwith in the Medgar Evers murder. Until his conviction more than a decade later on an old charge—blowing up part of Fred Shuttlesworth's church and parsonage—Stoner would carry the Klansman's presumed immunity from restraint by any jury.

Almost alone among whites of the 1950s, Stoner had studied the Nation of Islam with the taunting respect of an opposing sectarian. “You need to learn more about that evil genius, Elijah Muhammad, or you will never stop him and his niggers from taking over your city,” he had warned the New York police commissioner in 1959, offering to lend specially trained warriors from his Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Stoner claimed to have been called into Klan leadership in 1942, at the age of seventeen, and had specialized in anti-Jewish polemics as founder of the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party out of Chattanooga. Like his friend and fellow stump speaker, Rev. Connie Lynch, and Sam Bowers of the new White Knights Klan in Mississippi, he championed the sectarian doctrines of Dr. Wesley Swift, a California fundamentalist who managed to repackage the historical Jesus as an Aryan instead of a Jew—and Anglo-Saxons as the Chosen People of the Bible—by tracing strange, previously unknown migrations of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel through Bethlehem and the Caucasus into Northern Europe. Evolving years later into Aryan Nations, Swift's Christian Identity movements would inspire white supremacy groups for the remainder of the twentieth century.

That Friday in St. Augustine, Stoner waved a Confederate flag behind an imposing wall of bodyguards. His discourse on the Founding Fathers—“When they said that all men were created equal, they weren't talking about niggers…”—drew only sporadic cheers from an audience that was easily bored, dressed in beach clothes on a balmy night, but Stoner struck home with coarser talk. “The coons have been parading around St. Augustine for a long time!” he shouted, and proposed to get even by marching through the darkest streets of Lincolnville with flags, weapons, and scraps of Klan regalia. His dare provoked a crescendo of war whoops. “Under no circumstances should you panic,” Stoner advised. “If some nigger calls you a bad name, pay no attention because what a nigger says doesn't matter anyhow.”

Flanked by Chief Stuart and Sheriff Davis, who had assembled a protective escort of armed officers, Stoner led a double column of two hundred segregationists and some thirty trailing reporters out of the Slave Market, behind accommodating Negro “scouts.” Stoner walked with a slight limp from childhood polio. When the march entered Lincolnville, which lacked street lamps, police flashlight beams scanned wary faces and crowded front porches on both sides of the narrow streets. Near the point of greatest apprehension, a rowdy nightclub called Big Daddy's Blue Goose Bar, Negro residents ambushed the semi-martial cavalcade with repeated choruses of Andrew Young's favorite hymn for mass meetings, “I Love Everybody, I Love Everybody in My Heart.” Faltering at first, the orchestrated welcome grew stronger once its effect on the grim invaders registered clearly. Stoner called for a strong white marching song to drown out the fraternal mush from Negro residents, but there was confusion down the long columns about what selection fit the moment. The whites halfheartedly settled on “She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain.”

At the Slave Market on Saturday, Stoner raised very little enthusiasm for a second march into Lincolnville, while Andrew Young found only fifteen jail volunteers, including eight local juveniles and three visiting whites from the North. In bigger news, Florida Senator George Smathers made public his offer to raise the necessary bail money if Martin Luther King would promise to leave Florida. “I respect you as a man working in behalf of your race,” Smathers wired King at the Duval County jail, “but willful violation of laws, no matter how unjust they may seem to each of us at the time…does serious harm to our form of government and the image of the United States of America.” King declined the offer, but he did post his own bond late Saturday. From Washington, Lee White told King's staff that the White House had no record of Johnson's trip to St. Augustine the previous year, nor of promises by the former vice president to secure a “dialogue” between the races.

Just before the Sunday commencement service at Springfield College in Massachusetts, where King delivered his Rip Van Winkle sermon about how too many Americans were sleeping through a great social revolution, two churches in St. Augustine summoned police to arrest a Yale student from Little Rock along with six other aspiring worshippers in mixed groups. On Monday, Yale President Kingman Brewster introduced King, saying, “The gratitude of people everywhere and of generations of Americans yet unborn will echo our admiration,” and ten thousand people determined the headlines for Yale's 263rd commencement with two prolonged, standing ovations when King received his honorary Doctor of Laws.

 

I
N
N
EW
Y
ORK
, Clarence Jones decided not to tell King about the evening of his secret introduction to Malcolm X. Harry Belafonte declined to attend, saying he thought some of the invited celebrities were too hotheaded to trust with such an explosive, newsworthy encounter, but Jones, holding himself out with slight exaggeration as King's authorized spokesman, ventured with novelist John Killens to actor Sidney Poitier's home. Malcolm captivated Jones with his vision of a worldwide human rights campaign to make U.S. racial practices a test case at the United Nations, like South African apartheid and persecution of Soviet Jews, but Jones was obliged to conceal his excitement from colleagues in the Southern movement. He knew that King—stretched to the breaking point by the demands of nonviolence—would be pained to learn that his New York lawyer was drawn to a nascent alternative behind a Black Muslim.

Like King, Malcolm X was tumbling through his own extremes between punishment and acclaim, glamour and despair. He arrived at Poitier's from a weekend recruiting trip among disaffected Muslims from Muhammad's Temple No. 11 in Boston, where he had made his pitch for six hours on Friday over the airwaves of two radio talk shows. Afternoon host Paul Benzaquin announced that his guest arrived at station WEEI under police escort, following an anonymous warning to police dispatchers that Malcolm would be “bumped off” if he appeared. Malcolm told listeners of the “real reasons” for his split with the Nation of Islam, reciting his accusations about Elijah Muhammad's bastard children. Among the on-air callers was a confused Muslim who asked whether Malcolm still considered Elijah Muhammad the Messenger of Allah. Malcolm said no, citing Wallace Muhammad and officials in Mecca, adding that the Nation was guilty of idolatry under Islam for deifying Elijah Muhammad. Late that night, Malcolm amplified his charges. He had discovered, he told host Jerry Williams over station WMEX, that Minister Louis X of Boston had learned of Muhammad's infidelities long before he did.

On Saturday, June 13, Malcolm interrupted his Boston trip to attend the Poitier rendezvous in suburban New York. He called the tentative coalition of black luminaries his “brain trust,” through which he would develop a new national agenda somewhere beyond civil rights. To them he displayed only a residual buzz of danger from the Nation's intrigues, but alone again, shortly after midnight, Malcolm tuned in Boston's WMEX to hear guest Louis X denying all his accusations from the previous night. Malcolm dialed into busy signals until he got through to the Jerry Williams show, then challenged Minister Louis to meet him at the station and hear the facts repeated “to your face.” Louis X replied that he would need the permission of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

Malcolm still saw Louis X as his devoted protégé who had closely studied his mannerisms at the lectern, down to the smallest hand gestures. (“Tell Minister Louis to stop imitating me!” he had ordered some months earlier.”) While appreciating the pressures that bound Louis X tightly to the Nation against him, Malcolm retained some confidence that he could win him back. He did not know that Elijah Muhammad had summoned Louis across the country that week to hear only “a few words, but it should be done in person.” Returning swiftly from Phoenix to Boston, Louis reported to Muhammad that Malcolm was still in town “going right after the whole thing.” The FBI wiretap in Phoenix recorded Louis's cryptic question—asking whether it was “wise to go after it with the body”—and Muhammad's reply that he was not in a position to answer because he did not fully understand all the circumstances. With an air of disinterest, Muhammad told Louis X that while he cared nothing about a dog barking, the dog was “very silly to bark in everyone's house.”

On Sunday afternoon in the Roxbury section of Boston, jammed into a room of her home that Malcolm's half-sister Ella Collins had converted into a kindergarten, more than a hundred people turned crestfallen when Benjamin 2X arrived as the substitute speaker. They had come to hear Malcolm, drawn by his electric revelations and his promotional announcements on radio. Benjamin could offer only a few definitive statements about Malcolm's evolving public stance—that he no longer advocated a return to Africa, and now favored a leadership congress of black organizations rather than the Nation of Islam's “monarchy” structure. Every other idea and detail was in flux.

Although many disaffected Muslims in the room still admired Malcolm X as the minister who had converted them, bitter experience left them wary of blind commitment a second time. Most were rebels against the Nation's bareknuckled debt collections. Not long after Temple No. 11 members battered one delinquent member in Franklin Park, and placed a warning noose around another's neck at the edge of the Charles River, a number of members had signed a letter vowing to retaliate against Louis X if there was further violence. Captain Clarence X promptly announced that the temple would answer the slightest harm to the minister by killing the signers of the letter along with their children and “some of their parents.” Some frightened Muslims traced corruption to Chicago and the hoodlum past of Captain Clarence X; others blamed Minister Louis himself for sermons that ignited holy wrath by contrasting the infinite gifts of the Dear Holy Apostle Elijah Muhammad with the skulking ingratitude of the slackers listed by name on a temple blackboard.

Since Malcolm's suspension, the Nation had relied more than ever on fear. Temple investigators, still authorized to enter Muslim homes at any hour to confiscate cigarette butts and forbidden pork, now prowled also for heretical complaints and suspicious friends. They lumped dissenters together with deadbeats as “hypocrites,” the Nation's term for traitors to Elijah. Against all this, a dozen leading defectors—including Aubrey Barnette, a graduate of Boston University and cousin of the slain Los Angeles secretary, Ronald Stokes—looked to Malcolm X for a “positive program” to redeem the sacrifice of their youth to Islam. In the kindergarten room, they waited stoically for many more specific answers about discipline and purpose than Benjamin 2X could provide.

 

T
HE CHASE BEGAN
as Benjamin 2X rode back to the Boston airport in a Cadillac late Sunday afternoon, reminiscing with Goulbourne X Busby about Army service in Korea and Japan. A white Lincoln pulled alongside, tried to run them off Massachusetts Avenue in tandem with a 1955 Chevrolet, then commenced high-speed pursuit on and off expressways and even sidewalks. The Chevrolet managed to get ahead of the Cadillac and skidded to a stop across both lanes inside the Callahan Tunnel. The Lincoln did likewise from behind, and as traffic piled up in each direction, Temple No. 11 Muslims, led by one of its lieutenants, jumped out of the chase cars with pistols, shouting, “You ain't leaving here!” Some inside the trapped Cadillac shouted hysterically that Malcolm X was not among them. Goulbourne X grabbed a shotgun from beneath the seat to hold attackers at bay. A passenger screamed as Malcolm's nephew Rodnell Collins lurched the Cadillac backward and forward into the blockading cars until he rammed the Chevrolet far enough aside to squeeze by. The mangled cars resumed the chase all the way to Logan Airport, where Benjamin's frantic party—despite honking the horn and abandoning the Cadillac in the taxi lane—failed to attract any police notice until they ran through the Mohawk Airlines concourse out onto the airstrip and back inside to another ticket counter, waving the shotgun. “It was here the Massachusetts State Police arrested them,” an investigative report dryly noted, “for which they all thanked Allah.”