At Canaan's Edge (14 page)

By four o'clock, recorded a member of King's staff, the crowd in Brown Chapel “got tired and even a little hostile.” There had been futile attempts since dawn to circumvent the six-day blockade at the invisible wall, where internecine tensions among the segregationists were reaching the brink of open fisticuffs between Wilson Baker and Sheriff Clark over the latter's refusal to permit a token, pressure-relieving march to the courthouse. Inside, the afternoon service heated with the overflow crowd, which spilled from the aisles into window casements, then over the balcony railings and camera equipment.

With pilgrim travelers far outnumbering local veterans a week after King's mass invitation, spoken tributes recognized a swelling bank of dignitaries—presiding Bishop John Hines of the Episcopal Church, United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther, several members of Congress, more than a hundred Roman Catholic priests and nuns of different orders, and Archbishop Iakovos, Greek Orthodox Primate for North and South America, who wore a flowing black cassock and carried a gold-tipped pastoral staff. In 1959, Iakovos alone had represented the Eastern hierarchy at its first direct Vatican contact in nine hundred years, opening ecumenical discussion with Pope John XXIII toward removal of the mutual excommunications that had stood between Rome and Istanbul since the year 1054. Here, however, the Archbishop ventured on his own against the advice of his clergy and staff, who worried correctly that he would be called traitor to the quest of marginalized Greeks for full acceptance as Americans. Not a single member of the Orthodox community would appear for scheduled events at his next stop, and Iakovos would find himself alone in a Charleston hotel room, stripped of accustomed pomp, telling hostile callers nationwide that he was compelled to Selma by formative memories of Greek suffering on his native Adriatic islands, under harsh occupation by the Ottoman Turks.

Between hymns at Brown Chapel, one bored reporter counted seven of eighteen bare bulbs burned out from the cross made of lights on the pulpit wall behind Iakovos, and murmurs of disapproval ran through the crowd over the effusions of speech and prayer. “I found myself greatly agitated and sometimes furiously angry at the behavior of my white colleagues,” wrote a clergyman from New York. Most speakers gloried in the footsteps of James Reeb's martyrdom. Some abased themselves before the lifetime sacrifice of the local movement, or confessed that they had just learned of Jimmie Lee Jackson, and others winced to hear local Negroes lionized in theological language by strangers who were unsure how to say hello to them in the same pew. Long overdue, a clamor from outside finally announced King's arrival, and relief whipped through the weary crowd. “It suddenly seemed right,” the New Yorker decided, “that we should all be there.”

K
ING IMPROVISED,
reaching first to salute Reeb with the lines from
Romeo and Juliet
that Robert Kennedy famously had quoted (“And if he should die/Take his body, and cut it into little stars…”) for his assassinated brother. “James Reeb was martyred in the Judeo-Christian faith that all men are brothers,” added King. “His death was the result of a sensitive religious spirit. His crime was that he dared to live his faith.” He joined Reeb's name to predecessors from the movement, summoning up language from his own eulogies back to the funeral of the Birmingham girls bombed in church. Looking beyond the killers as a few “sick, misguided” men, King repeated a question he had asked “a few days ago when we funeralized James Jackson”: what could sustain such anonymous hatred? “When we move from the who to the what,” he said, “the blame is wide and the responsibility grows.” To a Brown Chapel half-filled with prominent clergy, King still began his roll call of shame with indifferent religious leaders and irrelevant churches that kept “silent behind the safe security of stained glass windows.” As in Birmingham, he went on to indict the demagoguery and brutality of local officials, the “timidity” of the federal government, and the broad apathy of citizens who nominally owned the country. “Yes,” said King, “he was murdered even by the cowardice of every Negro who tacitly accepts the evil of segregation.”

He pulled back to soft consolation. “I know our hearts, all the sympathy we can muster, go out to Mrs. Reeb and the children,” said King. He called up words from his most shattered moments—“At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel”—and cited in ecumenical language “the great affirmations of religion, which tell us that death is not the end.”

To lift up a vision of justice “one day,” when “our nation will realize its true heroes,” King drew upon memories etched in his speeches since the Montgomery bus boycott. He pictured first among future honorees the “old, oppressed, battered Negro women,” symbolized by the steadfast walker Mother Pollard, “who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness, ‘My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.'” From his awakening tributes to the breakthrough sit-ins and Freedom Rides, he saluted the discipline of nonviolent youth—“faceless, honest, relentless young people, black and white, who have temporarily left behind the temples of learning to storm the barricades of violence.” For the first time, he included in his pantheon the “ministers of the gospel, priests, rabbis, and nuns, who are willing to march for freedom, to go to jail for conscience's sake.” From the cry of hope in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, he foresaw again a broad, healing realization that all these vexing protesters “in reality” stood for “the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy.” From the perorations that defined his public voice, King rolled out citations from prophets and patriots to extol a fused source for justice—sacred and secular, equal souls and equal votes—ending this time with Isaiah and Jefferson: “‘Every valley shall be exalted…and all flesh shall see it together.' We must work to make the Declaration of Independence real in our everyday lives.”

He claimed only a glimpse of sweetness beyond an age of pangs. “Out of the wombs of a frail world,” said King, “new systems of equality and justice are being born.” There were seeds of hope for “the shirtless and barefoot people” of a shrinking globe, he said, borrowing from his Nobel Prize lecture of December. “Here and there an individual or group dares to love…. Therefore, I am not yet discouraged about the future…. So we thank God for the life of James Reeb,” King said. “We thank God for his goodness.” As he finished, Sheriff Clark received mortifying news on the sidewalk outside with Wilson Baker, Hosea Williams, and James Bevel, after which Baker removed the wooden barricades across Sylvan Street. Four minutes later, Ralph Abernathy rushed behind King into the pulpit to announce that U.S. District Judge Daniel Thomas of Mobile had ordered Clark to permit a limited march to the courthouse—now! “Grown men wept at the wonder of the moment,” recorded a participant, as days of complex machinations by LeRoy Collins and others seemed to answer King's eulogy. Crowds surged toward the church doors, sweeping King and the distinctive Greek Archbishop from handshake recognition that they had met briefly in Geneva after the bus boycott, on King's first trip abroad. Iakovos wore a frozen look. A small Negro girl took him by the hand and said not to worry.

A march of some 3,500 people stepped off at 5:08
P.M.
, breaking confinement that had introduced people of the local movement to relays of incoming clergy through six days of rain, bullets, tedium, and song. For holdovers such as Boston seminarians Judith Upham and Jonathan Daniels, the unplanned boot camp in nonviolence made this hard-won release more impressive than the fresh fear of Tuesday, even though the lines made no attempt to cross Pettus Bridge. Sheriff Clark locked the courthouse to guard his bastion of local power; behind windows, his five children watched the twenty-minute memorial ceremony for voting rights martyrs on the steps below. A photographer captured the extraordinary assembly with a shot destined for the next cover of
Life
magazine. At dusk, with the recessional fading back toward Brown Chapel, a hand emerged just long enough to remove a mourning wreath King had left in the courthouse doorway.

March 15, 1965

I
N
Montgomery, Stokely Carmichael reported Monday afternoon over the SNCC WATS line that police “with guns” tried to raid the Ben Moore Hotel, where James Forman had set up temporary headquarters. Assured by the manager that the Negro establishment had warded off the assault, Carmichael returned to his fifth-floor outpost to observe SNCC colleagues moving nearly three hundred demonstrators from the nearby campus of Alabama State University, where faculty and deans vainly pleaded and shrieked to dissuade them, past the hotel toward the Alabama capitol ten blocks away. Forman intended to establish a beachhead there, leapfrogging the stalled campaign out of Selma, for more aggressive “second front” forays to demand the attention of Governor Wallace. From his window, Carmichael saw police units with cavalry detachments of sheriff's deputies move slowly from distant points to seal off the march. He rushed downstairs to sound a warning, only to find the hotel doors chain-locked from the outside. He banged helplessly against the exits, then ran back upstairs to watch the converging police repulse the march in the streets below. Skirmishes broke out along the fringes. Horses reared, and officers swung long-handled truncheons.

In the aftermath, SNCC colleagues came upon Carmichael standing dazed on the sidewalk. He said they should have seen this coming. “This is you,” he accused Cleveland Sellers, a friend and fellow project director in Mississippi. He could not, or would not, explain himself beyond saying, “Et tu, Brute?” with a vacant cast to his normally infectious grin. Sellers, Willie Ricks, and others knew Carmichael had been troubled since his duels with Bevel inside the besieged Dexter Avenue church. Discounting a remote chance that he was “possuming” to fool them, they recognized signs of the nervous breakdown that had afflicted SNCC workers with far less stress than Carmichael's five years and two dozen trips to jail. Either way, they knew from previous triage to get him swiftly out of town.

Couriers managed to notify Forman a few blocks from the Ben Moore Hotel, where his demonstration settled in a standoff that lasted into Monday evening. Huddled with companions against buildings on a dark street, surrounded by police and the mounted deputies, Forman had scrounged a transistor radio that scratchily could receive President Johnson's address to Congress, but he labored to disseminate his own small news without benefit of eyewitness reporters. Gathering sketchy details of a dozen injuries nearby (“Melzetta Poole, 19, Alabama State, hit in head…Eric Stern, U. of Pitt., possible broken jaw…Fran Lipton, U. of Michigan, horse kicked her…Rev. Gerald Witt, 28, Huntington, Pa….”), he found substitutes for Carmichael's role of calling them through SNCC's communications department in Atlanta to be offered as balancing grist for the official version that otherwise appeared baldly in many newspapers: “300 Negro demonstrators blocking an ambulance…throwing stones, bricks and bottles at the deputies, none of whom was hurt seriously…violent demonstration about six blocks from the state Capitol.” Carmichael himself went numbly but willingly to the Montgomery airport with escorts, headed for the usual therapy of a speaking tour in safe cities. Not for the first time, however, the contrast of bustling normalcy at an airport concourse—travelers with golf clubs, families embracing at the gate—ate through the wounded psyche of a veteran SNCC worker, and Carmichael collapsed on the floor before an astonished police officer. He writhed and screamed beneath friends who sat on him until he was subdued enough to board an airplane for California.

L
ADY
B
IRD
Johnson stoically watched her husband flay the pale aides who raced between typewriters carrying pieces of his speech. With a motorcade waiting to transport him to the Capitol for the nine o'clock address, the President berated a distant secretary for typing slowly with “fourteen goddam wooden fingers,” and accused Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers of garbling his clearly stated revisions. “Every goddam body around here thinks he's smarter than I am!” he grumbled. When Valenti bared his chest to announce that previous additions already pushed the end of the speech too late to make the TelePrompTer screen in the well of the House, the notoriously sensitive Johnson raved to the doorway against a host of betrayals he saw conspiring to accentuate his cornpone look and ponderous delivery. He composed himself swiftly, however, so that Richard Goodwin—waiting with a speechwriter's rare invitation to ride along, freshly shaved but bleary from the day's crash composition—heard no sound from the arriving sphinx who exuded and commanded silence in the presidential limousine.

President Johnson's concentration sank into script changes that lengthened Goodwin's draft. There was a new section on the provisions of his voting rights bill, for instance, along with words of disapproval for protesters who “holler fire in a crowded theater” or “block public thoroughfares to traffic.” Changing his mind, Johnson struck the latter paragraph to avoid misimpression that marginal annoyance reflected his true feeling. Elsewhere, his editing added words and compounded metaphors. Where Goodwin exhorted Americans to “look within our own communities, and our own hearts, and root out injustice there,” the final version substituted: “let each of us look within our own hearts and our own communities, and let each of us put our shoulder to the wheel to root out injustice wherever it exists.” More substantively, Johnson had deleted a sentence that succinctly joined two causes. To advance freedom, wrote Goodwin, “Americans are risking their lives today in Vietnam—and in Selma.” This direct parallel thrust Vietnam as a twin issue that invited questions, such as why the lives risked should be soldiers in one instance, nonviolent Negroes and clergy in the other. Instead, Johnson's team composed a safer general call to “rally now together” in the spirit of common sacrifice, citing traditions of patriotic duty to which “the South made its contribution of honor and gallantry no less than any other region.”

At the Capitol, which buzzed more expectantly than usual over a boycott by the entire Mississippi and Virginia delegations along with scattered representatives from other Southern states, the congressional leadership greeted the President as always in the Speaker's chambers, while Mrs. Johnson went to a reserved box in the packed gallery with her daughter Lynda and guests including USIA director Carl Rowan, former Southern governors Buford Ellington and LeRoy Collins, Robert Spike among four prominent clergy from the vigil in Selma, and FBI director Hoover as the featured trophy on her front row. The President himself, heralded into the House for handshakes down the aisle past Cabinet officers and Supreme Court Justices, on through the ritual standing ovations, stood quiet again with his text at the lectern, before the assembled branches of government and his largest television audience—some seventy million viewers.

“I
SPEAK
tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” he began slowly.

“I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause.

“At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.

“There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed.

“There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans.

“But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight.

“For the cries of pain, and the hymns and protests of oppressed people, have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great government of the greatest nation on earth.”

Only a hush greeted the natural pause. The lyrical opening, which followed Goodwin's first draft almost to the word, sucked away the whole range of normal response from a chamber that seemed stunned and on edge, as though mesmerized to witness the gangling, slow-tongued President leaping suddenly to a rhetorical high wire without a net. Johnson, having claimed for Selma a place among historic moments, and pronounced it a test of free government itself, fastened both the moment and the test to the core of the nation's only story. “Rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself,” he said. “Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and purpose and the meaning of our beloved nation.

“The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.

“For with a country as with a person, ‘What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?'”

Into this pause fell a first lone clap, which spread through the House in tentative applause. Uncommonly, Johnson had pulled off the cadences of Lincoln and the intimacy of a quotation from St. Mark. For that alone he earned credit, and he proceeded to ground the spiritual lilt in the secular base of American ideology. “This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose,” he said. “The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: ‘All men are created equal,' ‘government by consent of the governed,' ‘give me liberty or give me death…'” Johnson defined his issue by the commitment to freedom, above any dodging confinement of section or race. “There is no Negro problem,” he said, “there is only an American problem, and we are met here tonight as Americans…to
solve
that problem.”

The address marched steadily through history into the thicket of modern politics. Johnson decried the “harsh fact” that “men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes.” He told plain stories to illustrate. “No law that we now have on the books—and I have helped to put three of them there
*
—can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it,” he asserted, then outlined his new bill to “strike down restrictions to voting in all elections—federal, state, and local—which have been used to deny Negroes the right to vote.” To confront the issue of federalism, he offered defenders of states' rights a simple way to nullify the brunt of enforcement: “Open your polling places to all of your people. Allow men and women to register and vote whatever the color of their skin. Extend the rights of citizenship to every citizen of this land.” But he pledged no more to defer the nation's constitutional mandate where states historically condoned tyranny. “We have already waited a hundred years and more,” President Johnson declared, “and the time for waiting is gone.”

The senior House Democrat, the seventy-seven-year-old Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn, rose to his feet and a standing ovation spread in waves with the conviction that Johnson was committing hard mechanics of government to his beguiling patriotic music. Above isolated cheers, the noise hung long enough that network cameras slowly panned to broadcast what the
New York Times
called “remarkable views of the reaction of Congress”: Celler clapping with hands high above his head, Senator Mike Mansfield visibly shaking with emotion, Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina “sitting with arms folded in massive disapproval.” For White House aide Jack Valenti, waiting desperately with a stopwatch, the panning cameras posed one of two threats of searing disgrace.

When couriers arrived with TelePrompTer tape composed from the only copy of revisions after page twelve, Valenti beseeched cameramen by whisper to focus closely on the podium, then crept unpictured through the well of the House to feed the tape into the TelePrompTer before the President ran naked off his partial text.

The vote was essential to the “far larger movement” of American Negroes to “secure for themselves the full blessings of American life,” Johnson resumed. “Their cause must be our cause, too,” he said slowly, placing his hands on the lectern. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And—we—shall—overcome.”

No one stood. Applause battled disbelief and renewed astonishment to hear such words from the first Southern President in a century. When it registered that Johnson with unmistakable intent had adopted the signature phrase of Negro protest, a Southern representative on the floor quietly muttered, “Goddam,” and fell numb. To friends in the U.S. Senate, Richard Russell sadly pronounced his dear friend and protege “a turncoat if there ever was one.” Watching in Selma, Mayor Joseph Smitherman recoiled as from “a dagger in your heart.” Still puzzled later, he said, “You know, the South is very patriotic, but it just destroyed everything you'd been fighting for.” Blocks away from Smitherman on Lapsley Street, pandemonium erupted in the living room of Sullivan and Jean Jackson, where colleagues of Martin Luther King stared at Johnson's image and shouted to each other, “Can you believe he said that?”

King himself, from an armchair drawn close to the Jackson television, wordlessly occupied a charged space apart. The address for him already was more than an answered prayer. Not only did Johnson embrace the fused spiritual and patriotic grounding of the nonviolent movement, but he committed the national government to vindicate its long-suffering promise of equal citizenship. A tear rolled down King's cheek.