At Canaan's Edge (22 page)

K
ING EMPHASIZED
the stakes of historical choice. “We've come a long way since that travesty of justice was perpetrated on the American mind,” he told the rally. “James Weldon Johnson put it eloquently. He said:

The crowd fell silent as King touched bottom. Whatever had created segregation from slavery, both durable beyond the life span of totalitarian inventions since, he looked unflinching at the consequences. Far from crafting artificial comfort for white listeners, he was quoting a portion of Johnson's “Lift Every Voice and Sing” that recalled degradation too harshly for many slave descendants themselves. Often omitted from performance, the middle stanza of the accepted “Negro National Anthem” evoked formless ghosts of the ancient Middle Passage into slavery, with sharp echoes more recently from the eras of lynching and Civil War. Outside Fort Pillow, Tennessee, where his Confederates massacred surrendered black troops, General Nathan Bedford Forrest had written straightforwardly in his battle report: “The river was dyed red with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards.” The wife of the white Union commander interceded with Abraham Lincoln on behalf of fresh sister widows who, as fugitive chattel under state laws, had no more right to veterans' benefits than did animals or furniture, and Congress, answering Lincoln's proposal to treat ex-slave orphans and widows “as though their marriages were legal,” granted family status to Negroes by law passed on July 2, 1864, a century to the day ahead of the Civil Rights Act that abolished segregation in the summer before Selma.

In Montgomery, King continued from the hymn:

His mood snapped forward: “Today I want to tell the city of Selma.”

“Tell 'em, now,” came a shout.

“Today I want to say to the State of Alabama.”

“Yes,
sir.”

“Today I want to say to the people of America, and the nations of the world, that we are not about to turn around. We are on the move now. Yes, we are on the move, and no wave of racism can stop us.”

“Yes,
sir.”

“We are on the move now. And the burning of our churches will not deter us. We are on the move now…” His voice rose steadily in pitch as he pictured an inexorable move through obstacle and sacrifice, then shifted his drumbeat phrase to a march. “Let us march on segregated housing,” King intoned. “Let us march on segregated schools, until…. Let us march on poverty, until…. Let us march on ballot boxes, until we send men…who will not fear to ‘do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.'”

After embellishing the march on ballot boxes seven times near the peak of his baritone register, King slowed to give respite. “There is nothing wrong with marching in this sense,” he said. “The Bible tells us that the mighty men of Joshua merely walked about the walled city of Jericho, and the barriers for freedom came tumbling down.” He quoted words of the old slave spiritual slowly and intimately in dialect, “just as they were given us:

King asked his listeners to honor the “unknown, long gone black bard” with a worthy reply. “The battle is in our hands,” he said. “We can answer with creative nonviolence the call to higher ground.” He lifted up personal memories of Montgomery's bus boycotters as “wondrous signs of our times, so full of hope…the faces so bright,” and added to the answering roll the names of martyrs down to Jimmie Lee Jackson and James Reeb. “The patter of their feet…is the thunder of the marching men of Joshua, and the world rocks beneath their tread,” he sang out solemnly. “My people, my people, listen. The battle
is
in our hands.”

King paused briefly, having run out of prepared text. He improvised first to answer persistent appeals by critics and bystanders for an end to troubling agitation. He rejected their rhetorical image of prior tranquillity, saying normalcy had shrugged off brutal terror and merely frowned over bombed churches. “It is normalcy all over Alabama that prevents the Negro from becoming a registered voter,” he said. His distinctive, anguished voice heated the word “normalcy” into an improbable engine of speech momentum, fired fifteen times over ten consecutive sentences. “The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that allows judgment to run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” King shouted, transposing the prophet Amos. He rushed on from memory to make three final appeals for nonviolence in the struggle to build “a society at peace with itself,” then spoke to yearnings within. “I know you are asking today, how long will it take?” he confessed. “Somebody's asking, how long will prejudice blind the visions…. Somebody's asking…”

Only then did King let loose words that would be remembered from the zenith of the freedom movement. Nearly everything else soon dissipated in the flux of perception on all sides. Inside the capitol, Governor Wallace watched three television sets and peeked at the future electorate through an aide's window blinds, so as not to be seen shuttered in his own office. Outside, King's presentation cut across tender seams of comfort and color among his own sympathizers—too black in tone, too nonviolent, too dark and tendentious in warning from Reconstruction history against another slow erosion of hope. The preserved record of King's speech would be messier than his hastily thrown-together text, reflecting an era in upheaval. Passages were adjusted or skipped. What lasted in print
*
was not what he said. What lasted in memory was not what he wrote in advance.

“How long will justice be crucified and truth buried?” King cried out in Montgomery. “I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long. Because truth crushed to earth will rise again. How long?
Not
long! Because no lie can live forever. How long?
Not
long! Because you shall reap what you sow. How long?”

Already shouts echoed and anticipated his refrain at a driving pace, above cries of encouragement and a low roar of anticipation. King dispensed with the names of the authors from his treasured string of classical quotations, to streamline a final run of oratory into ninety seconds.
“Not
long!”

“Not long!” answered a female voice above the others.

“‘Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne,'” he recited in passion from the poet James Russell Lowell. “‘Yet that scaffold sways the future and / Behind the dim unknown stands God / Within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.' How long?
Not
long! Because the arc of the moral universe is
long,
but it bends toward justice. How long?
Not
long! Because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of
wrath
are stored. He has loosed the fateful lightning of his
terrible
swift sword. His truth is marching on.”

King kept on at a gallop through another stanza of the “Battle Hymn.” He slowed only to hurl himself into selected words, trembling at the limit, and to climb still higher through a spoken chorus.

Crowd noise dropped away until this third cannon cry of “Glory,” then spilled over the end of the long march.

March 25–30, 1965

B
ROADCASTS
faded from Montgomery with Ralph Abernathy leading tributes to King in the background. “Who is our leader?” he kept shouting over the loudspeakers. “God bless him!” He cultivated cheers of genuflection with a characteristic zeal that grated on SNCC activists, in part for Abernathy's embrace of reflected praise. “I know of no other woman in America who has suffered as much as she has for freedom,” he declared with a closing nod to his wife, Juanita. “She is not a speaker very much, but she can kiss me!” Abernathy dismissed the crowd with reminders of their printed march instructions to disperse quietly and rapidly—“Stragglers must not remain”—so as to empty the city of potential targets before dark. “Within ten minutes,” reported an eyewitness with some exaggeration, “Dexter Avenue was cleared of all but the press and the troopers.”

In Washington, President Johnson ducked into the Cabinet Room to tease reporters reeling under a volley of announcements from top government officials: notice of a multibillion-dollar trade shift and a hundred-mayor summit meeting, an offer of massive economic aid to North Vietnam if violent conflict should cease, plus a statement that the Ranger space mission had found “two or three places” where astronauts might land on the moon. “God have mercy on your souls,” quipped Johnson, who had ordered a “heavy budget of news” to reclaim national attention after the march. Former governor Collins of Florida admitted to the assembled press that the federal agencies around Montgomery remained largely segregated, and pledged specific reform. This was a mild version of what Collins had just told the Cabinet secretaries in their closed meeting, with Johnson's encouragement. Repeated intercession with local white ministers yielded only a few willing to preach “against rowdiness,” and none yet who would “go so far as to speak up for brotherhood,” Collins confessed, and his mediators encountered heavy resistance from white Alabama contacts “conditioned to think of the federal government and of the march leadership as forces of evil.” Collins told the reporters that he and Attorney General Katzenbach hoped for a “respite” from months of racial tension.

In Montgomery, seminarian Jonathan Daniels knelt quietly on the pavement among thinning crowds beneath the capitol. Having encountered one of his Boston professors among the hundreds of Episcopal clergy at the march, Daniels asked for and received a formal blessing to stay behind on what he conceived as a religious mission, forgoing the remainder of the school term. He and companion Judith Upham loaded Upham's Volkswagen with teenagers returning to Selma for stored belongings. Two volunteer drivers, collecting others who needed rides, recognized Viola Liuzzo of Detroit among the sick and footsore nearby at a makeshift clinic in Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. When she asked about her Oldsmobile, which she had donated all week to the transportation committee, they advised candidly that the car had been reassigned more than once in all the confusion, and further that she should hasten to retrieve it because the current driver was rumored to have no license.

Liuzzo roused herself. By late afternoon, she spotted her Oldsmobile packed with departing marchers at the St. Jude staging area. She took the steering wheel from nineteen-year-old volunteer Leroy Moton, saying politely that she wanted to practice for the long journey back to Michigan. On the way to Selma, after they dropped a man from New York at the Montgomery airport, two cars tailgated them with bright headlights flashing. Liuzzo tried to calm her passengers with feisty comments about a lack of good sense in hostile white people, speeding up and slowing down evasively until the pursuers dropped away. She and Moton arrived safely at Brown Chapel with a Negro man from Selma and three white females from Pennsylvania. They rested, then started a final run to gather marchers stranded in Montgomery.

An “action team,” or “missionary squad,” of four Birmingham Klansmen suffered letdown instead of relief. They had harassed marchers along the route into Montgomery, and once came close to dragging off a Negro who ventured into a gasoline station, but real or imagined military patrols stymied them. Then, on their way to check for lapses of security in Selma, they had been stopped on Highway 80 by an Alabama trooper, and Klansman Eugene Thomas had been obliged to display a police auxiliary badge and two special deputy commissions to get off with a warning ticket about the glass-pack muffler on his car. At Selma's Silver Moon Café, they were brooding over the collapse of a day they had built up among themselves as the biggest ever, when Elmer Cook, one of three men charged in the beating death of James Reeb on the sidewalk just outside the Silver Moon, dropped by to visit the out-of-towners whose presence caused a stir. “I did my job,” said Cook, patting them on the back. “Now you go and do yours.” While he asked nothing, and said no more, his encouragement helped the Birmingham team look for renewed opportunities after dark. They briefly targeted isolated pedestrians near Brown Chapel, only to break away at the sight of a National Guard jeep with a mounted machine gun. At a stoplight on Broad Street, noticing the occupants of a car with Michigan plates, one of them sharply remarked, “Well, I'll be damned.” Energized, they speculated about lewd acts the racially mixed couple must have in mind, and Eugene Thomas said, “This looks like some of the brass.”

The Klansmen followed Liuzzo and Leroy Moton over Pettus Bridge back toward Montgomery. Thomas told his companions to conceal their number by ducking beneath the window line. Of the two Klansmen lying across the back seat, one promised the other a gift trophy of “the nigger's sport coat” from the car ahead. “This is it,” they said, peeking to fathom painful delays once they cleared congestion east of Selma. They slowed down past Craig Air Force Base, where it appeared briefly that the Oldsmobile might turn off for shelter, then dropped back again when they passed the state trooper radar unit that had stopped them two hours earlier, its dome light twirling alongside another detained car on the two-lane portion of Highway 80. After that, with the quarry in flight well above the speed limit, the Klansmen did not overtake them for miles into the rural isolation of Lowndes County. Collie Wilkins shouted for Thomas not to bang the Oldsmobile off the road, lest their own car be identified by paint and chrome chips. Thomas handed him a pistol from the glove box. William Eaton and Tommy Rowe drew theirs. Over one hilly straightaway, jammed against rolled-down windows on the passenger side, they held on for a passing run with three guns poked into the howling wind.

Leroy Moton was absorbed with the radio dial, making an effort to accept Liuzzo's hope that the pursuers might be “some of our own people,” when glass exploded over the front seat. Realizing that the car still hurtled along with Liuzzo slumped under the wheel, he grabbed from the side and steered blindly off the right shoulder over violent bumps to a tilted stop along the embankment of a fenced pasture. Moton managed to turn off the engine and headlights, blacked out for some time from the look of Liuzzo's dead face, then ran toward Montgomery. Not for several miles of empty night did a truck come along driven by a Disciples of Christ minister from Richmond, California, Leon Riley, who backed up to investigate the frantically waving, blood-splattered young beanpole—nearly six feet four, less than 140 pounds. Pulled aboard the open flatbed, Moton screamed that the forty assorted marchers should lie low across each other and cover their heads. He collapsed on sight of the first headlights, saying they looked like the shooters' car circling back again, and there was furious debate before they agreed to stop in Lowndes County even long enough to let two nieces of Napoleon Mays jump off for home, crying with fear.

President Johnson called Katzenbach within two hours about bulletins moving on the newswires. “The woman is from Michigan?” he asked.

“From Michigan, yeah,” said Katzenbach.

“Somebody out from the—out
ambushed
'em or something?”

“Yes,” said Katzenbach, adding that he did not yet know the extent of the woman's injuries or “any further details.”

“I didn't wake you up, did I?” asked the President.

Katzenbach laughed. He said he had asked the FBI to have a full report to the White House before breakfast, but the President could not wait to do something. Even mediation, he told Katzenbach—sending Governor Collins back overnight—was “worth a damn in theory, to succeed military intervention.”

Just before one o'clock, President Johnson startled the overnight duty officer at FBI headquarters with a personal call for an update. Night supervisor Harold Swanson was rousted to give the President basic facts at 1:07, then again at 1:11
A.M
. The Michigan victim was deceased, autopsy underway, bullet fragments and a clipboard headed “transportation committee” recovered from the car. Swanson emphasized that FBI inspector Joe Sullivan, in Selma for the Reeb case, commanded the investigation and already had secured the Liuzzo crime scene. Johnson admired Sullivan for his work on the murders of the three civil rights workers the previous summer in Mississippi, but he demanded news at any hour.

At 1:49
A.M.
, Diane Nash bulldozed a telephone call into FBI headquarters with notice that Leroy Moton had been jailed in Selma. Beyond the blatant injustice of it, she warned of the grave danger to the only known witness in the shooting, especially if Alabama authorities managed to get him transferred to the jurisdiction of the crime in Lowndes County. Supervisor Swanson refused Nash's request to track down John Doar for her, but he did find out that Inspector Sullivan already knew about Moton. With Sullivan's approval, Moton was being interviewed by FBI agents in the protective custody of Wilson Baker, safe from the Klan and Lowndes County, as well as from Sheriff Clark.

Swanson contacted Sullivan later with a terse announcement: “The president just called me and said you should work all night.”

L
ONG EXPERIENCE
inside the FBI enabled Sullivan to sense something extraordinary before morning on Friday. The buzz of a high-profile investigation mysteriously shifted elsewhere. Colleagues undercut him instead of competing to help. High officials summoned to headquarters in the night were evasive, and only reluctantly did a friend confide that Birmingham agents had commandeered the FBI action on his case.

Director Hoover carefully emitted the bare minimum of his radioactive secret before breakfast, calling the White House residence to tell President Johnson that the case was nearly solved because the FBI had “one of our men
in
the car.” Inaccurately, Hoover said the insider “of course had no gun and did no shooting.” He continued in breathless staccato that the killers planned to “throw the guns into the blast furnace where they work, in those steel mills down there, and that's what we're laying for now, to uh, head off these individuals when they come to work this morning and shake 'em down…. We've got the informant in the office, and we're talking to him, because uh, uh, he's scared to death, naturally, because he fears for his life.” The Director assured President Johnson that Inspector Sullivan had taken charge of the investigation.

Johnson thanked Hoover—“As usual, you're right on top of it”—and asked about the difference between an infiltrator and an informant. “You hire someone? And they join the Klan and keep—”

“We only go to someone who's is, who is in the Klan,” Hoover replied, “and persuade him to work for the government. Uh, we pay him for it. Sometimes they demand a pretty high price, and sometimes they don't. Now, for instance, in those three bodies we found in Mississippi, we had to pay thirty thousand dollars for that.” In Alabama, the informant was “not a regular agent of the Bureau,” but “fortunately he happened to be in on this thing last night,” said Hoover. “Otherwise, we'd be looking for a needle in a haystack.”

President Johnson hung up the telephone and looked blankly at his aides. “Do you know Hoover had a guy, an informer, in that car that shot her?” he asked.

Johnson immediately called Katzenbach to test his knowledge: “Looks like we'll be pretty much on top of this one, doesn't it?”

“I say, I haven't heard a lot,” Katzenbach confessed. The entire Justice Department knew nothing of Hoover's secret, like Inspector Sullivan himself, and would remain sealed from its background.

“They had an informant in the car,” the President announced. He said the FBI was waiting to pick up the killers.

“Oh, that's good,” said Katzenbach. Asked whether the President should speak directly with Liuzzo's widower, Anthony Liuzzo, in Detroit, he advised a careful test of the FBI's negative recommendation. Johnson agreed. He tasked White House lawyer Lee White to make a preliminary call, with instructions loaded toward FBI warnings that Liuzzo was dangerously bitter. Minutes later, White reported with surprise that he found Liuzzo to be “much in control of himself, very relaxed, and sounded like a pretty fine fellow.” Liuzzo was grieving with five children, and “had a few unkind things to say about Wallace,” White told Johnson, but “he was in sort of a reflective mood and wanted to know where do we go from here now…. My judgment, sir, is that if you did call him, that he's gonna be reasonable and not in any sense uncontrollable or wild.”

Hoover, meanwhile, called Attorney General Katzenbach to say “we have to move very rapidly” to break the Liuzzo case, and that Justice Department lawyers needed to draw up charges to hold the suspects. He accepted Katzenbach's suggestion that only Doar was near enough to be mobilized instantly. Hoover tersely disclosed that there was an FBI informant. He explained with some exaggeration that President Johnson knew the substance ahead of the Attorney General only because he had called Hoover personally three or four times since midnight. For Katzenbach, the FBI Director added shocking arguments why the President should avoid the Liuzzo family, which Hoover promptly dictated to his top executives in a memo headed “9:32
A.M
.”: “I stated the man himself doesn't have too good a background and the woman had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope; that she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car; that it had the appearance of a necking party.” Katzenbach did not react to Hoover's slanderous Klan fantasy dressed as evidence,
*
but neither did he ask a single question about the FBI's surprise informant in the murder car. Naively, or protectively, he formed an impression that Rowe had only a casual relationship with the FBI until turning state's evidence after the crime. Like President Johnson, Katzenbach wanted to believe that the FBI discovered a miraculous star witness, and Hoover zealously aimed suspicion at the victim Liuzzo instead.