Pillar of Fire (65 page)

K
ING PRESIDED
over contentious staff debates about SCLC's next initiative. Hosea Williams wanted to fight on in St. Augustine, where he had made a movement name for himself with night marches and bombastic courage. James Bevel, beginning an intense rivalry with the upstart Williams, dismissed St. Augustine as a “waste of time” without new political purpose, and ridiculed Williams for bullheaded leadership—“niggers getting people killed so they can get their picture in the newspaper.” Williams debunked Bevel's reputation as the visionary of Birmingham, saying everybody knew he was crazy, and he accused Bevel of harboring grandiose ambitions against King's supreme role. To impose a temporary truce, King and others accepted a distilled essence of each warring criticism—that the St. Augustine movement was indeed stale, and that the Bevel-Nash plan for a massive voting rights campaign in Alabama was premature, especially now that SCLC's Alabama affiliates were immersed in tests of the new civil rights law.

Andrew Young, while leaning toward Bevel, favored an interval for repair of personal distress and administrative disorder. His new organizational chart for SCLC contained thirty-five boxes with crisscrossing lines of authority, and Young was defending himself from Septima Clark's scolding reminders that he had neglected the citizenship classes for the buzz of excitement around King. (“There were many days when I thought I might be on the verge of cracking up,” he wrote Clark on July 20. “I know I had too much on me, but there seemed to be no way of getting around it.”) Still, Young argued that King could not refuse the most dangerous of the new diversions being pressed upon him: an invitation from Bob Moses to tour COFO's embattled summer projects. This idea kindled another ferocious dispute. Some aides protested that the movement could not offer King as the premium bull's-eye to Mississippi Klansmen who were killing civil rights workers already; others shouted that the movement could not shrink from violence. King himself raged against the choice, and when his own staff members denied his claim to “a normal life,” he stalked bitterly but briefly from a late-night retreat in St. Augustine.

At midday on Tuesday, July 21, Attorney General Kennedy called the White House with notice that King was on his way to address the evening's mass meeting in Greenwood. He said Mississippi authorities, while refusing to supply police escort, recommended that King not try to spend the night in the Delta. “It's a ticklish problem,” Kennedy told President Johnson, “because if he gets killed, it creates all kinds of problems.” He laughed nervously. “Uh, just being dead, but also a lot of other kind of problems.”

The President suggested that Kennedy have the FBI guard King, which produced an awkward silence. “Well, it's difficult…uh they're not, uh, I suppose,” Kennedy sputtered, then blurted out his most galling complication: “I have no dealings with the FBI anymore.” His frustration veered into bitter accusation. “I understand that he sends, you know, all kinds of reports over to you,” said Kennedy, “but
about
me.”

“What are you talking about?” asked the President.

Kennedy hesitated and then complained—accurately—that Hoover was painting him as a traitor to Johnson. “Well, I just understand he's got me planning and plotting,” said Kennedy, “…plotting the overthrow of the government.” He added wryly, “Leading a coup.”

“No, that's in error,” the President replied. His flat, innocent denial led to a dead-end pause, after which Kennedy proposed getting back to the issue of King in Greenwood. When Johnson volunteered to arrange FBI protection himself, Kennedy fought tense chuckles over the absurd mix of treachery, helplessness, and polite manners. “I hate to ask you to be dealing with somebody that's working over in the Department of Justice,” he said. “That's not a very satisfactory situation.” The President joined briefly in the tickles before both men recovered to unspoken truce. “The other thing, Mr. President, is New York,” said Kennedy. He wanted the FBI to investigate reports that Communist groups were fomenting the recent disturbances in Harlem.

President Johnson promptly called Director Hoover with orders to treat the Harlem troubles with regional balance—just as seriously as the Klan crimes in Georgia and Mississippi. “Maybe you can put a quietus on that Muslim X and all that stuff,” he suggested vaguely of Malcolm X. “I think the Communists are in charge of it.” The President introduced “another problem” without reference to the Attorney General, which would have been inherently inflammatory to Hoover, saying he had word that Martin Luther King was on his way to Greenwood.

The Director was prepared. “I understand someone there's threatening they're gonna kill him,” he replied.

“Yeah,” said Johnson. He thought it “the best part of wisdom in the national interest” to make sure “we don't find another burning car.” He said it would be a good idea for “someone” to be “in front and in back of him when he goes in.” On the next pass, he added that there “ought to be an FBI man in front and behind to observe,” and finally he said King should have an escort of FBI agents “in front and behind.”

Hoover got the point. Although there was suspicion in headquarters that King himself had planted assassination rumors through Burke Marshall in order to manipulate the FBI, Hoover threw the FBI into temporary high-speed reverse on two policies: his publicly announced stance against protecting civil rights workers and his special policy of aloofness about threats to King. He sent Assistant Director Alex Rosen back to Mississippi and ordered the leader of the New Orleans FBI office to command an emergency expedition of Louisiana agents.

 

I
NSPECTOR
S
ULLIVAN
was excused from the first day of the “King special,” because he and his agents were combing Neshoba County by car and helicopter on the guidance of a young witness with a cardboard box over his head. The search was the culmination of a tip from local white women about the sufferings of Mrs. Fannie Jones, who showed agents a long letter from her son Wilmer about his May 30 arrest on suspicion of asking a white female store clerk for a date. The letter described how Sheriff Rainey and his deputy, Cecil Price, had slapped him around in the cell, cut off his scraggly new high school graduation goatee with a pocketknife, and finally released him around midnight to armed abduction by four Klansmen waiting outside the jail. Located and retrieved from his permanent hiding place in Chicago, terrified of reprisal against himself or his family, Wilmer Jones looked through holes in the cardboard to lead FBI agents through a tentative search for an isolated spot where the Klansmen had threatened to kill him if he did not confess lewd intentions toward the salesclerk. The caravan attracted intense curiosity and so many accurate whispers about his identity that Jones threw off the stifling disguise before the end of the day. Sullivan reconcentrated his ongoing search for the three MIBURN bodies around what the four kidnappers called “the place,” according to Jones's letter—an abandoned well near a weather-beaten shack, through a barbed-wire gate. Even if that site yielded nothing, as proved the case, Sullivan hoped to rattle potential witnesses with graphic advertisement of FBI interest in “jailhouse giveaway” conspiracies, which was the working theory about how Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman had been murdered exactly one month before.

King knew nothing of FBI wiretaps, Neshoba County investigations, or secret presidential orders for his safety. Aboard his flight from Atlanta, he flipped through news magazines like a business tourist while his traveling assistant Bernard Lee read Du Bois's classic,
The Souls of Black Folk
. A well-dressed young passenger across the aisle recognized King. “I happen to be a Christian,” he repeated several times, asking with a polite edge whether King thought he advocated “the same love Jesus taught” even though King's methods “incite one man against another.” King replied that nonviolence aimed at a “love that is strong, so that you love your fellow men enough to lead them to justice.” He asked whether his questioner thought segregation was Christian. “I was anticipating that,” the passenger warily replied, adding that he was less resolved on the large issue than on his hunch that King's methods were “causing more harm than good.” King asked what methods the passenger suggested, which eventually elicited an opinion that the new civil rights law was harmful, too, and would “just carry on the trend toward federal dictatorship.” When he expressed his inclination to vote for Goldwater, they lightened the stakes by sparring over presidential election odds until the passenger moved to another seat. King returned to his magazines, shaking his head. “Such a young man, too,” he said to Bernard Lee, who scarcely had noticed. “These are the people who are rallying to Goldwater.”

At the Jackson airport, blinking into bright sun at the foot of the outdoor stairway, King looked lost when reporters converged to ask about riots in New York and rumors that Goldwater might agree to set aside the race issue in the presidential campaign. “I'm here on a twofold visit,” King declared. “First I'm here to demonstrate the absolute support of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for this summer project, this COFO project. Uh, secondly, I am here to…support the tremendous quest for the right to vote on the part of the people of the State of Mississippi in the midst of bombings, murders, and many other difficult experiences….” Roy Moore, SAC of the new Mississippi FBI office, identified himself from the crowd, and when King's connecting flight landed a few hours later in Greenwood, an FBI escort mobilized for the drive into town.

The 111 prisoners arrested on Greenwood Freedom Day were emerging from jail, foul-smelling and haggard from a six-day hunger strike, and some of them briefly mistook the commotion downtown as a welcoming ceremony for them. Unfamiliar reporters prowled with clipboards and camera equipment, wrote volunteer Sally Belfrage, who noticed that “for Negroes there hardly seemed to be anyone who wasn't rushing around looking for King, cooking for King, talking of King as if they couldn't find him, and thinking of him if there was no one to talk to.” The famous visitor turned up here and there at the heart of a swirling entourage. “Gentlemen, I will be brief,” he told customers at the Van Pool Room.Dorothy Cotton, James Bevel, Andrew Young, and C. T. Vivian went ahead with runners to summon patrons from the Red Rooster Club and the Savoy Cafe to hear King, standing on a bench, tell them that “Mississippi has treated the Negro as if he is a thing instead of a person. Above all things they have denied us the right to vote. We have got to show the world we are determined to be free.”
Times
reporter John Herbers recorded that “most residents appeared to be astonished by Dr. King.”

There were two fervent mass meetings that night. An airplane overflew the Negro neighborhoods to drop Ku Klux Klan hate leaflets denouncing the “Riot King.” In the churches, Ralph Abernathy raised $1,288 with an appeal for everyone to give COFO “the price of a good fifth of Scotch,” and the crowds received King's speeches with what volunteer Belfrage called “searing love.” She marveled at the crowd's mass adulation from the fringe where some staff workers shouted “De Lawd!” with the mocking undertone that was becoming a private signature of SNCC. Resentment of King festered among young movement veterans who disapproved of his royal style or criticized him for harvesting attention that was built on their long sacrifice. They took the conspicuous FBI detail as evidence of a double standard.

The next morning, while FBI SAC Roy Moore posted agents on King's flight from Greenwood to Jackson, James Eastland interrupted Senate debate on President Johnson's poverty bill with a speech charging first that King was corrupted by Communists, second that the summer project was, too, and third that integrationists with such glaring character defects were not above concocting the Neshoba County murders as a hoax. “Many people in our state assert that there is just as much evidence, as of today, that they are voluntarily missing as there is that they have been abducted,” the senator declared. He challenged critics to produce hard proof of a crime, and defended Mississippi voters as victims rather than perpetrators of bigotry. “They do not seek racial violence,” he said. “They do not want it. There is a conspiracy to thrust violence upon them.”

King rejected Eastland's claims of subversion, saying there were “about as many Communists in this freedom struggle as there are Eskimos in Florida.” As for the charge of self-abduction in Neshoba County, King told reporters that he could only hope the FBI would pursue the case with the same dedication and technical wizardry it had employed “some years ago” to prove that an airplane crash near Denver was homicidal insurance fraud. King's comments, which reflected what he had picked up in Mississippi about the 1955 case for which SAC Roy Moore was best known, were broadcast by Walter Cronkite on the Wednesday network news—then instantly and sourly noted at FBI headquarters as a criticism of the Bureau. Roy Moore himself stayed up past midnight on the logistics of King's FBI protection. Early the next morning, Atlanta agents monitoring the wiretap on King's home phone overheard an ABC News correspondent warning Coretta King of news tips that her husband would be assassinated that day in Mississippi. Flash bulletins about the call briefly detached Atlanta SAC Joseph Ponder from his Lemuel Penn investigation to address the thorny question of how to verify and respond to the information without compromising the secrecy of the King wiretap. In Mississippi, Moore buttressed the protective detail with “all available manpower as necessary.”