Pillar of Fire (56 page)

On Monday, when Martin Luther King was at Yale, Benjamin 2X returned with his tale and his bail bond papers to find Malcolm X under siege by New York Muslims, having delivered his bastardy speech again the previous night to four hundred listeners at Harlem's Audubon Ballroom. Wiretappers overheard Malcolm challenge one threatening caller to bring his rifle around to the house “and talk some stuff.” New York police received so many corroborating reports that thirty-two officers escorted Malcolm and his eight Muslim bodyguards into Queens that morning for Malcolm's hearing on the eviction petition brought by Temple No. 7. Testifying for the plaintiffs, Captain Joseph defined the Fruit of Islam as an organization “just like the Boy Scouts.” He smiled from the witness stand as he broke courtroom tension with one of Malcolm's own laugh lines, deflecting suggestions by Malcolm's lawyer that the Nation was built on intimidation.

That night from Boston, Minister Louis X reported to Elijah Muhammad that he would not sink so low as to debate Malcolm in person, having “cut him to pieces” on the radio. He said he had rebuffed Malcolm's private pleas for help by answering that if Malcolm's life was on the line, he had put it there himself. Louis X assured Muhammad that newspapers would not print Malcolm's “inside story of the Nation” without proof in court, and Malcolm tacitly accepted the point when he testified the next morning in Queens. He approached what he called a “very private” complaint several times but backed away in favor of his technical defenses—that Muhammad had promised him the house, that in any case he was being removed improperly from the ministry. Finally, after Judge Maurice Wahl showed little interest in the Nation's internal arrangements, Malcolm blurted, “I found out that he had nine children by six different girls.”

To Malcolm's disappointment, the imprimatur of courtroom testimony gained little public notice for his allegations. White newspapers ignored what for them were hearsay sex charges from a squalid and inscrutable race schism, and instead found plenty of news in predictions of boomerang violence. “There is no people in the United States more able to carry out this threat than the Black Muslims,” reported the
New York Herald Tribune
, quoting Malcolm: “I know. I taught them myself.” Leading Negro papers headlined the gangland hostility—“Muslim Factions at War”—while reporting merely that Malcolm attacked Elijah Muhammad's character. A few, such as the
Philadelphia Tribune
, did break the sex barrier—“Says Muhammad Brought Stork to Six Teens/Claims Two Local Lasses from Gtn. [Germantown] Are Among Them”—but the voltage from Malcolm's revelations surged mostly within the Muslim world. Before nightfall in Chicago, Wallace Muhammad ventured out of hiding to see his mother, Clara, who confessed that she had learned of what she called her husband's “troubles.” Lonely and distraught, she begged her favorite son to stop associating with Malcolm's terrible poison and confide in “the big man,” Elijah. Wallace tried to comfort her while insisting that he was not afraid to have his money cut off again, and would not shrink from the next threat. In New York, meanwhile, police made six arrests to stop a street rumble between Muslims carrying rifles, and Malcolm X found the telephone dead at the house he had lost that day in court. (Judge Wahl allowed him a grace period of several months to vacate.) An impostor had ordered the phone company to disconnect the line, saying Malcolm would be going away for a long time.

 

K
ING WAS BACK
in St. Augustine. Former baseball star Jackie Robinson had received a tumultuous response the night before in King's absence, and had been moved to invite several of the youngest movement heroes to be guests at his summer camp in Connecticut. Of fifty-one demonstrators who went to jail from restaurant sit-ins that Tuesday, June 16, the majority were visitors from the Williamston, North Carolina, movement, led by Sarah Small and Golden Frinks. King's staff, running short on bail money and volunteers, labored to sustain morale on celebrity appearances and low-budget sacrifice in the hope of reaching at least a minimal settlement with city officials. A camera crew from Miami caught glimpses of busy preparations in and around the Elk's Rest Lodge: working the telephones, C. T. Vivian excitedly confirmed the pending arrival of the rabbis from Atlantic City, and checked on the besieged church in Tuscaloosa. “How is Bevel?” he asked. “How long has he been out of jail?” Nearby, drilling sit-in volunteers in groups of four and five, Andrew Young worried about whether the rabbis would need to return north to their synagogues for Friday night services. Willie Bolden gave a workshop lecture on the need for “jail discipline,” saying catfights and quarrels hurt the movement. Robert Hayling—just back from a mission to Washington with Henry Twine, where they petitioned Burke Marshall and others for federal assistance—asked a Yale journalism major whether he had remembered to recruit local help for the daily movement newsletter.

“No, but I'm working on that,” the student replied.

“Have you even tried to have some of the young people write an article or two?” Hayling pressed.

“Yeah, I have,” said the Yale student, busy over his papers, “but actually they just aren't experienced enough to handle this sort of thing, and that's why I'm doing it myself now.”

King himself kept apart for small meetings. Having abandoned the rented beach cottage, he was staying at the Lincolnville home of a registered nurse named Janie Jones, teasing her about why she and the other “high Negro Catholics” from the segregated parish of St. Benedict the Moor could not bring themselves to go to jail. With Bernard Lee sleeping on the couch, King shared the guest room with Ralph Abernathy, who occupied himself during daytime lulls by eating figs off a tree in the yard. In the afternoon, calling as one of the journalists who carried feelers back and forth across the racial divide, ABC correspondent Paul Good sat on the screened porch to discuss King's minimum truce condition of a biracial committee, which prominent white businessmen tentatively favored and Mayor Joseph Shelley adamantly opposed. When Good suggested that whites would be more inclined to accept biracial dialogue if Negroes agreed in advance to exclude movement activists—especially Hayling—King's disgust cut through his forbearance. “This is the old story we find every place,” he said. “They never want to deal with the local man who began the movement, because invariably he is a true leader and a dynamic force in the community. What it really means is that they don't want to deal with anybody they can't control. We went through this in Birmingham with Fred Shuttlesworth.”

That evening, Chaplain Will England told a cheering crowd at First Baptist that he had lost twenty pounds fasting in jail since his arrest the previous Thursday with King. From the pulpit, King walked a fine line between disengagement and commitment in St. Augustine. He prepared the audience for a settlement within a few days, saying his attention was required elsewhere, but he embraced their purpose. “Thank you very kindly my dear friends and fellow jail mates,” he said. “For I do see some of my fellow jail mates here tonight.” He told them their goal of a democratic St. Augustine was both theirs and universal, then preached on the tension between nobility and lonely submission. “Jesus has made it clear that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant,” he declared. (Yes sir!) “And we have been servants to a great theory and a great idea. We have allowed the idea of nonviolence to work
through
us (Yes!), and to move out into the community and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. This is greatness. Greatness is found in the
power
of one soul. So with your soul force, you have done something for the community, and you have done something for the nation…that can serve as I have said as a purifying prelude for this hot, sweltering summer that we face ahead.”After the meeting, three hundred Negroes and seven whites marched behind Fred Shuttlesworth to the Slave Market and back.

In Washington, President Johnson buzzed an assistant to ask, “How is St. Augustine?” Lee White answered that “Governor Bryant said he was going to maintain law and order,” that a settlement was possible, and that “at the moment, it seems to be in perfect control.”

“Is King satisfied with our reply, and our talking to the governor?” asked Johnson. “His man [Wyatt Walker] I noticed is over…raising hell with Burke Marshall.”

White explained that Walker was lobbying about unfulfilled promises of biracial negotiations allegedly made during Johnson's visit in 1963, which neither Marshall nor White knew about. Johnson then briefed White from memory, saying everything had been settled. The St. Augustine leaders “didn't agree to integrate the town, or to change a thing, or to sweeping reform,” he told White. “They just agreed that they'd let Negroes come for the first time to the hotel to eat at the dinner I spoke to, and that they would talk to 'em about what their demands were.”

“And both those things took place?” said White.

“And both those things took place,” confirmed the President.

White said he was delighted to hear this, because King's people were trying to “push way beyond” the prior agreement.

 

I
N AN
O
HIO AUDITORIUM
that night, the first two hundred volunteers-in-training watched a CBS television documentary entitled
Mississippi and the Fifteenth Amendment
. For three days, the assembled volunteers and movement veterans from Mississippi had encountered each other awkwardly, with whites quoting James Baldwin and Negroes singing jail hymns with Fannie Lou Hamer. Bob Moses had welcomed the college students as instruments of national mobilization—“getting the country involved through yourselves”—but grizzled SNCC members eyed them warily as privileged waifs, perhaps too naive to survive Mississippi. Drills in nonviolence swerved between frozen timidity and hostile excess. Some volunteers were awestruck by the moral bondedness of the movement (“I met those SNCC people and my mouth fell open”); others felt excluded by cliquish veterans “who looked down on us for not having been through what they had.” A few volunteers were shaken by their first sight of Rev. Edwin King's scarred, sunken cheek, but others seemed to view Mississippi as a kind of fantasy.

Tension rose as the Mississippi SNCC staff watched volunteers snicker at televised images of the obese Forrest County registrar Theron Lynd drawling on about contented Negroes. In spite of themselves, the students laughed also at the simplicity of rural Negroes who vowed to brave buckshot for the vote in order to get a street paved. Hollis Watkins could not bear it. Two years earlier in Hattiesburg, he had overcome his own fears to help the CBS crew shoot this film footage of the implacable Lynd, who remained a frustration to the U.S. Department of Justice and a tormentor to Negroes as intrepid as Vernon Dahmer. The rage of Watkins and other veterans in turn scalded the Northern volunteers. “Six of the staff members got up and walked out of the movie because it was so real to them while we laughed because it was so completely foreign to us,” one of them wrote home. “…We were afraid the whole movement was going to fall apart….” Arguments spilled from confrontation to tears over what could and could not be helped, and how to protect each other in Mississippi across immense cultural gaps.

Far to the south, that same Tuesday night, an advance attack blurred the line between fear and understanding. In the woods outside the hamlet of Longdale, Mississippi, between Meridian and Philadelphia, ten stewards of Mount Zion AME Church finished their regular business meeting. As a point of decorum, the AME Methodists distinguished themselves from impatient Baptists by deferring nonspiritual matters—including dispersement of the visiting preacher's fee—from Sunday until a weekly accounting on Tuesday night. That done, the stewards locked the church and drove away as usual, but ran into roadblocks a hundred yards in both directions. At one end, perhaps because the stewards had their young children with them in the cars, armed Klan interrogators reluctantly accepted word that Mount Zion harbored no white plotters, but frightened answers only seemed to infuriate the ambushers at the other end. “Where are your guards?” they shouted, clinging to an assumption that something military was going on in preparation for the summer “invasion.” Cries of liar turned into slaps and several beatings. One Klansman reached inside the cab of a pickup to break Georgia Rush's collarbone with the butt of a pistol, after others had dragged Rush's son from the driver's seat. Nearby, Beatrice Cole ran screaming, “Lord have mercy, don't let them kill my husband,” around her car to a place in the road where a circle of men was stomping her prostrate husband, Roosevelt “Bud” Cole. She asked permission to pray and fell to the ground crying out the words of a Methodist hymn that came to her, “Father, I stretch my hands to Thee, I stretch my hands to Thee, no other help I know,” until someone said to let him live and the Klansmen withdrew to torch Mount Zion Church with gasoline. Cole took her bleeding husband back to their farm with a broken jaw and spinal injuries, but did not dare take him to a hospital before daylight.

The attack on Mount Zion jolted those in Ohio with a message far stronger than any lecture. The volunteers knew or quickly learned that James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner, two CORE staff members then present at the Oxford training sessions, had asked Mount Zion to host a Freedom School, and that the tiny congregation had agreed to do so with trepidations and second thoughts. Merely for these intentions, it seemed, the hand-built church was destroyed. This news, coming only three days after the latest written appeal by Bob Moses,
*
spurred another COFO press release calling for federal protection and a flurry of orchestrated letters to Washington officials from volunteers and their families. Most of the pressure fell upon the President's exasperated civil rights aide, Lee White. “Although on the surface it is nearly incredible that those people who are voluntarily sticking their head into the lion's mouth would ask for somebody to come down and shoot the lion,” he wrote President Johnson on June 17, “we now have a request for the parents group to meet with you and their insistence on Federal protection ‘before a tragic incident takes place.'”