Strategy (66 page)

The immediate effect of their arrival was to make nonviolence a guiding principle rather than a prudent tactic. Rustin argued that nonviolence had to be unconditional, so there could be no guns, even if only for self-defense, let alone armed bodyguards. He also demonstrated how this could be turned
to tactical advantage, by persuading MIA leaders indicted by a grand jury for violating a state anti-boycott statute to dress smartly, smile broadly, and turn themselves in, thus depriving the arrests of gravity and intimidation. By the end of the Montgomery campaign, King was personally committed to a Gandhian philosophy. Within two years, he was making his own pilgrimage to India to meet with followers of the great teacher. “There is more power in socially organized masses on the march,” he declared, “than there is in guns in the hands of a few desperate men. Our enemies would prefer to deal with a small armed group rather than with a huge, unarmed but resolute mass of people.” He drew confidence from history which taught that “like a turbulent ocean beating great cliffs into fragments of rock, the determined movement of people incessantly demanding their rights always disintegrates the old order.”
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Unavoidably, King's nonviolence had to draw as much from the Sermon on the Mount as from Gandhi. Its spirituality and dignity fitted a pastor. How well it was appreciated by black opinion is another matter. They could understand that there was little to be gained by initiating violence, but suggestions that high-minded actions in the name of racial justice might touch a segregationist's heart could seem far-fetched. Moreover, the personal risks involved in inviting time in jail, especially for those who needed jobs and had to care for families, could be considerable.

For King, the strategy made perfect sense. For many of his supporters it was conditional, but then the same had been true for Gandhi. King's own theorizing was largely derivative. Indeed, as his biographers discovered when reviewing his doctoral thesis, King had an unfortunate tendency to plagiarism. At its most benign, this meant that he was relaxed when others willingly offered him drafts to which he could put his own name. Rustin drafted King's first political article and then published it in his own journal,
Liberation
.
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The article described a “new Negro” who had “replaced self-pity with self-respect and self-depreciation with dignity.” The bus boycott had undermined many of the stereotypes Negroes had about themselves and others had about them, that they lacked nerve and staying power. The boycott had “broken the spell.” Six lessons were listed from the struggle: the community could stick together and their leaders did not have to sell out; they need not be intimidated by threats and violence; the church was becoming militant; there was a new self-belief; the importance of economics was understood, as white businessmen were anxious about the loss of business; a “new and powerful weapon” had been discovered in nonviolence, strengthening the movement by facing violence without returning it. King used more or less the same lessons when he spoke in December 1956 after the favorable Supreme Court ruling.
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He never really put the effort into developing a coherent philosophy. Without the direct engagement of Rustin and Levison, his first book,
Stride Toward Freedom
, would not have been published. Garrow described the chapter on nonviolence as an embarrassment. Here too King's contributions indicated a tendency to borrow liberally from others. The key chapter on “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” was “in part a poorly organized and at times erroneous hodgepodge of contributions from a number of King's editorial advisers.”
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Despite the shortcomings of the book, King was on his way to becoming an iconic figure and Rustin understood better than most his value to the civil rights movement.

Any comparison with Gandhi was suggestive but potentially misleading. King was only in his mid-20s and had neither prepared for nor sought a political role. He was at times a muddled thinker and, it later transpired, somewhat reckless in his private life. And yet for all his flaws and inexperience, there was no denying his courage, commitment, and grasp of southern black culture. His eloquence was special, almost poetic, drawing on the familiar cadences and rhythms of black preachers but also the classical tropes of American democracy and Western philosophy. The evident risks he was running, in the face of regular death threats, real violence, and occasional spells in prison, demonstrated that he was a man who suffered for his cause. He soon became a media star and so came to personify the black movement as its most visible face and most compelling voice. He had the quality described by Weber as “charisma.”

As he reflected on the Montgomery campaign, Rustin noted the strategic benefits of a bus boycott. It had a clear purpose, economic impact, and was susceptible to direct action. Unlike other targets, such as integrated education, there was no “administrative machinery and legal maneuvering” to get in the way. The action required a “daily rededication” to the struggle and so raised community solidarity and pride, making “humble folk noble” and turning “fear into courage.” Notably it had depended upon “the most stable social institution in Negro culture—the Church.”
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In early 1957, Rustin masterminded the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Each word was significant. Southern meant “not national.” “Christian” reflected the special role of the Church in the South (for whites as well as blacks) and incidentally undermined claims that the movement was communist. “Leadership Conference” eschewed a mass membership organization. The advantage of this formulation was to avoid a fight with the NAACP, a national organization, which considered itself best able to speak for blacks. The NAACP's director, Roy Wilkins, was wary of King as a young upstart. King made little secret of his concern that based in the
North, Wilkins was too preoccupied with mounting legal challenges to the Jim Crow laws and had done little to challenge them directly. Nonetheless, he did not want to foment disunity in the movement. The serious advantage of the SCLC was that it provided institutional support to King as the leader capable of giving meaning to the struggle and describing the strategy in terms that made sense to those who had to follow it. Wofford later recalled how “Rustin seemed ever-present with advice, and sometimes acted as if King were a precious puppet whose symbolic actions were to be planned by a Gandhian high command.”
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Rustin understood that King was no puppet and had special leadership qualities. The real problem, as he acknowledged, was that the Church was a natural autocracy, without serious bureaucratic procedures. Ministers organized politically in the same way that they organized their congregations.
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This suited King but it soon led to complaints. One of King's most severe critics was Ella Baker, an effective organizer who ran the SCLC. She became discouraged by the developing cult of personality, reflecting an urge to find a savior, which held back the emergence of a democratic mass movement.
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Without a mass base, there was no secure financial stream and much of King's time was spent touring to raise funds. Fairclough argues that the “decision against creating a national mass-membership organization … turned out to be a serious and eventually crippling handicap.”
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Even with a larger organization there would have been problems when it came to major campaigns of nonviolent direct action. There were a limited number of volunteers, perhaps no more than 5 percent of a given population. From those with jobs or responsibilities to their families it was unrealistic to expect major commitment. The real difference when it came to the surge of militancy that marked the early 1960s was that substantial numbers of students, black and white, developed a taste for direct action. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed with SCLC's help in 1960 and began to make their mark by reviving the sort of action pioneered by James Farmer and his colleagues in 1942, starting with four students sitting-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro in 1961. At the time, this was presented as a spontaneous expression of anger that somehow sparked a movement, a representation that dried up “like a raisin in the sun” as it became apparent that the students had been activists in the youth wing of the NAACP, were drawing on experience of sit-ins over the previous two years, and had planned the activity carefully. The movement spread through a network of churches and campuses.
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In May the first “freedom rides” intended to desegregate bus terminals across the South left Washington, DC. The tactic fit in naturally with the direct action philosophy of King and
Rustin, and they had little difficulty embracing it as a new stage in the campaign. By this time the white establishment was becoming more subtle in their tactics. Rustin may have been right that transport was a natural target, but following the Supreme Court ruling cities did not put up much resistance to desegregating buses. Voter registration, the other major push, was the best way to get real political power for blacks over the long term, but it was a slow process, especially when local officials felt able to interpret the law to keep out black voters.

In December 1961, the first “community-wide protest campaigns” began in Albany, Georgia. Now rather than focusing on a particular target, such as a lunch counter or bus terminal, the aim was to develop a concerted attack on all local forms of segregation in order to create a crisis that would test the segregationists' tolerance. This was not a great success, but lessons were learned and then “refined through a process of trial and error to the point where it was responsible for the most dramatic campaigns of the entire movement.”
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The new campaign was much more provocative, almost designed to incite violence, showing how far strategies of nonviolence had moved from when they had sought to inspire a reciprocal goodness in the hearts of segregationists. Now it was the contrast between official brutality and dignified demands for basic rights that provided the impact. As Rustin observed, “protest becomes an effective tactic to the degree that it elicits brutality and oppression from the power structure.”
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If so, the logic was to search for the more brutish police chiefs, a task that became more challenging as the more astute police forces were training their men to arrest without violence. In the spring of 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, such a chief was found in Eugene “Bull” Connors. He exceeded expectations in arresting children and in his resort to fire hoses and dogs. This ensured that the demonstrators were clearly the victims.
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The strategy behind the Birmingham campaign was not so much to provoke violence as to generate a crisis of which violence could be a symptom. When he found himself in jail in Birmingham, facing criticism from local clergyman for “unwise and untimely” activities, King set out a clear statement of his philosophy. The demonstrations, he insisted, should not be deplored more than the conditions which stimulated them. The objective of nonviolent direct action was negotiation, but to achieve that it was necessary to “create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”
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This was a nonviolent version of “Propaganda of the Deed.” In the case of Birmingham, this was achieved as much by sustained economic pressure on the city center as by the
excesses of the local police. The two combined to produce a dramatic effect. Again to quote Rustin, “Businessmen and chambers of commerce across the South dreaded the cameras.”
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By causing protracted disorder, the hope was that business leaders in Birmingham would be persuaded to accept that desegregation and hiring more blacks was the price of economic survival. A further objective was to shift the political calculus of the Kennedy administration in favor of a civil rights bill.

The theater of conflict was the city center, a relatively compact space that could be flooded with protestors unless the authorities found a way to stop them. Unlike the Alabama campaign, Birmingham was well planned and drew on a strong local organization. It began at the start of April 1963, a couple of weeks before Easter, one of the busiest times of the year for city shops. It opened with the black community boycotting shops and holding demonstrations and sit-ins at lunch counters. All blacks (250,000 out of a city of 600,000) could participate in the boycott of downtown shops. The effect was immediate and damaging. To get the city under control, police chief Connor's first tactic was borrowed from Albany. He combined a court injunction to ban sit-ins and demonstrations with the imposition of high bail bonds. Instead of obeying the injunction, as in Albany, this time the leadership decided to disobey. King and his top lieutenant, Ralph Abernathy, were arrested on Good Friday. King thought the timing symbolic and propitious.

This was followed by mass defiance of the injunctions. On May 2, the numbers participating in the demonstrations increased with the introduction of thousands of high school students. Soon one thousand were in jail. The authorities now faced the problem of either filling the jails until they were overflowing or trying to stop the demonstrators from reaching their destination. This is when the violence began, as fire hoses, clubs, and dogs were used to stop the demonstrators from moving downtown. These measures failed to stem the tide. A report from the Birmingham sheriff spoke of “stuffed jail-houses with rebellious staffs and budgets already overspent for the year; street officers on the point of cracking from relentless stress, helpless to make further arrests but caught between taunting demonstrators, omnipresent news cameras, and the conflicting orders of an unstable and divided high command that included Bull Connor.”
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The culminating moment came on May 7, when the whole downtown area was flooded by demonstrators. The police cordons were outflanked by using decoy marches, starting the main marches earlier than normal (while the police were having their lunch), and then holding other marchers back until the police were preoccupied. With some three thousand people effectively occupying the city center, the police had to acknowledge a loss of control. King recalled how one of the businessmen
returning from a lunch he had been unable to reach “cleared his throat and said: ‘You know, I've been thinking this thing through, we ought to be able to work something out.' ”
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The next day the business community threw in the towel, although the political elite wanted to carry on the struggle.