At Canaan's Edge (3 page)

B
Y FAR
the most critical figure for him to read was President Lyndon Johnson, whose relations with King contrasted sharply with President John F. Kennedy's sympathetic, sophisticated aloofness. Whereas Kennedy had charmed King while keeping him at a safe distance, harping in private on the political dangers of alleged subversives in the civil rights movement, Johnson in the White House was intensely personal but unpredictable—treating King variously to a Texas bear hug of shared dreams or a towering, wounded snit. After the assassination in Dallas, Johnson had burst with urgent intimacy in a telephone call, promising to show King “how worthy I'm going to try to be of all of your hopes,” and the new President indeed played skillfully upon national mourning to enact the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Then Johnson had turned suddenly coy and insecure. Having consciously alienated the century-old segregationist base of his Democratic Party, he refused to see King, pretended he had nothing to do with his own nominating convention, and lashed out privately at both King's Negroes and white Southerners. Just as suddenly, after his landslide election in November, Johnson had rushed past King's congratulations to confide a crowning ambition to win the right for Negroes to vote. “That will answer seventy percent of your problems,” he had said in January, rehearsing at breakneck speed speeches he urged on King to dramatize the idea that every American should “have a right to vote just like he has a right to fight, and that we just extend it whether it's a Negro or whether it's a Mexican or who it is.” King, on his heels, had mumbled approval. He did not mention that he was headed to Selma for that very purpose—knowing that Johnson would not welcome his tactics of street protest—and the President kept pressing him to aim higher than conventional civil rights goals such as a Negro Cabinet officer. “There's not gonna be anything, though, doctor, as effective as all of 'em votin',” Johnson had told King. “That'll get you a message that all the eloquence in the world won't bring…. I think this will be bigger, because it will do things that even that '64 act couldn't do.”

More recently, Johnson's mood had turned prickly again. When a haggard King placed an ad in the February 5, 1965,
New York Times
—THIS IS SELMA, ALABAMA. THERE ARE MORE NEGROES IN JAIL WITH ME THAN THERE ARE ON THE VOTING ROLLS—and posted bond to confer in Washington, White House aides had scolded him for presuming upon Johnson's schedule, adding to the grave burdens of state. Johnson had set for King an appointment with underlings, then concocted an “accidental” meeting at which he insisted upon his prerogative to choose the content and moment for any voting rights bill. This last encounter had put King back on edge with Johnson. Before he left California on Sunday, February 28, King called intermediaries to urge that prominent citizens send telegrams on his behalf, beseeching Johnson for federal protection of his life against death threats the next day in Alabama. He had no way of knowing that FBI agents overheard his call through a wiretap on the phone of his lawyer in New York, Clarence Jones, or that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reacted to the intercept by maneuvering to escape such duty. Nor could King realize how sharply Johnson felt the tenterhooks of two fateful decisions that same weekend.

The President ordered his staff to evaluate a proposal to suspend local literacy tests, and to provide for direct registration by federal officials, in those areas of the country where Negroes voted drastically under their percentage of the population. Senior speechwriter Horace Busby promptly warned that white Southern voters would deplore such drastic measures as “a return to Reconstruction.” More broadly, a stand for the rights of poorly educated and illiterate Negroes “will be unpopular far outside the South” as a “most radical intervention” in state affairs, Busby argued, and would jeopardize generations of accumulated public trust by touching the hot-button fear of government domination. Busby's objections circulated on Sunday, and Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach wrote a pained reply. Katzenbach himself strongly opposed any new civil rights initiative as premature. He believed the country had just begun to digest the law of 1964—moving toward gradual compliance in public accommodations but still segregated, now illegally, in nearly all schools and employment sectors, including the news media and government itself. He feared that another controversial race law would undermine the daunting task of enforcement, and meanwhile would snarl the Congress for months of a second consecutive year. Reluctantly, however, Katzenbach turned aside from Busby's tempting position that it was wiser to outlaw the “abuse” by state officials of their rightful duty to set standards for voters. Such abuse was forbidden already by statutes across two centuries, he said, but local officials consistently delayed, thwarted, and evaded prosecution by the Justice Department in dozens of recent marathon cases. He saw only a remote chance to win effective remedy under arrangements that “leave control of voting machinery in state hands,” given the pervasive obstacles in Southern statehouses and courtrooms. “Therefore,” Katzenbach concluded, “while I agree with Mr. Busby that the political consequences of the proposed message are serious, I see no alternative.” If Johnson really meant to secure the right of Negroes to vote, he must try to extend the reach of national government and trust posterity to judge whether the result enhanced freedom or tyranny.

K
ATZENBACH'S MEMORANDUM
landed on Monday at the White House, where officials bemoaned a simultaneous choice about whether American power should and could shape political order halfway around the world. In a cocoon of official secrecy, President Johnson was ending his own tormented war of decision before most people recognized anything of significance about distant Vietnam. “The game now is in the fourth quarter and it's about 78 to nothing,” he had lamented on Friday to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Beneath public assurances of stability, Johnson faced a bleak reality that guerrilla armies were defeating the partitioned South, and would unify Vietnam under Communist rule unless the United States swiftly intervened. Worse, his military experts advised that a commitment of blood and treasure could stave off immediate disaster in South Vietnam—but little more. Classified military projections stubbornly refuted the ingrained presumption that a flick of American power would prevail in backward Vietnam, and strategic plans failed to predict lasting success by warfare of any design, scale, or duration. Johnson, trapped between looming humiliation and futile war, erupted in moments of primal fury against resignation to Communist victory. This to him was spineless surrender and political suicide for the leader of a great power, because American voters would “forgive you for anything except being weak.” Yet he also recoiled from a vision of bloody stalemate, saying, “this is a terrible thing we're getting ready to do,” and that the prospect of sending American soldiers into Asia “makes the chills run up my back.”

Bad weather still delayed the start of sustained bombing against North Vietnam, destined to last eight years, which Johnson had approved secretly on February 13 amid warnings of impending collapse in the South. (It was this crisis that had shortened his patience for King's visit from Selma.) In the interim, another military coup by South Vietnamese allies installed the latest of six chronically unstable governments over the past eighteen months. Nerves tightened, the President made the best of a decision no longer deferred. “Now we're off to bombing those people and we're over that hurdle,” he told McNamara privately. “And I don't think anything is gonna be as bad as losing, and I don't see any way of winning, but I would sure want to feel that every person that had an idea, that his suggestion was fully explored.”

On Monday, March 1, when McNamara explained the latest weather postponement and obtained clearance to “go ahead tonight” with the first of the new air attacks, he found the President transfixed by a report in the
New York Times
of plans for these continuous air strikes as well as ground troops to follow. “Am I wrong in saying that this appears to be almost traitorous?” Johnson asked shortly before noon. News about Vietnam decisions risked disclosure of the mountainous doubt and brutally frank pessimism inside his government—with Johnson and most of his advisers skeptical of airpower in this guerrilla war, with General Maxwell Taylor, ambassador in South Vietnam and America's most illustrious active soldier, warning sharply against the introduction of American troops. Almost any candor about actual deliberations would erase the appearance of sovereign control, violating Johnson's first rule of successful politics. He ached to introduce the conflict matter-of-factly, confidently, and even as quietly as possible, and pleaded with McNamara that Monday morning to track down those leaking war news to the press. “Somebody ought to be removed, Bob,” he said in a voice choked with emotion. “I just, you just can't, you can't exist this kind of thing…you just can't exist with it.”

By then, a draining twelve hours since Los Angeles, King began registration day in Alabama with an explicit prophecy of relief in the national arena. “We are going to bring a voting bill into being in the streets of Selma, Alabama,” he told a late-morning crowd at Brown Chapel AME Church, the twin-steepled gathering point for demonstrations in Selma. “President Johnson has a mandate from the American people.” Then he led an orderly double file of some three hundred volunteers on the familiar short walk through downtown Selma—a left turn from the church, two short blocks south on Sylvan Street, right on Alabama Avenue for five blocks to the Dallas County courthouse. Sheriff's deputies blocked the head of the line at the steps, and across the street, buffered behind a line of city police officers, clumps of reporters and bystanders waited to see what reception lay in store. Sheriff Clark had employed tactics of selective or mass arrest, elaborate stalls, and various forms of harassment including one surprise dispersal of some two hundred adolescent Negro demonstrators by forced march behind cattle prods for three miles, out beyond the city limits to the Cosby-Carmichael gravel pit. A cold rain fell steadily this Monday on observers and demonstrators alike. King, wearing a raincoat and felt hat, passed words of encouragement down the line of aspiring voters along the sidewalk.

D
URING THIS
wait in Selma, a slow accumulation of Negroes caused a hush to fall around the Lowndes County courthouse. As many as thirty-seven conspicuously nervous citizens arrived to mingle outside in the rain, unsure how or where to find the registrars and hesitant to enter without knowing. People stared from windows around the courthouse square. The Negroes formed a volunteer delegation of five that wandered the imposing halls, hats off, pausing at doorways. One of the white secretaries spoke to an office companion, asking, “Who is that little fella who keeps walking through the courthouse?” This gave John Hulett an opening to inquire about the registrars. He received no reply, but white men soon appeared to shoo the group back outside with a notepad and instructions to have all who wanted to register write down their names and come back in two weeks.

The Negro group huddled under the eaves for furtive debate. Were these really the registrars? If so, why did familiar white men including car dealer Carl Golson decline to identify themselves by name or title? They “refused to know their own selves,” later recalled Elzie McGill, a fifty-nine-year-old railroad worker who came with his daughter Lillian from the White Hall area around Mt. Gillard Church, where preacher Lorenzo Harrison had taken refuge the previous day. McGill did not know Hulett or his carload from Mt. Carmel Baptist very well—indeed, many in White Hall thought Negroes from Hulett's Gordonville area down Highway 17 spoke with an odd accent. They had been able to agree across community lines to show up this registration day in spite of the Klan scare, like regular citizens, with no outside civil rights workers to provoke the courthouse powers more than necessary. Such caution seemed especially prudent after the officials made goading remarks about whether the Negroes expected Martin Luther King to be the current local voter who would stand for their “good blood,” meaning vouch for their character, as local law required for each new registrant. This barrier helped confine Negro voting to the mists of faith for things unseen, which allowed for disagreement about the notepad. Some worried that those who signed would be marked for retribution. Others said they were identified already by standing there in daylight, and that nonsigners would be targeted as defiant, or as weak. Emma and Matthew Jackson of White Hall led a majority who signed, and Hulett's small delegation returned inside to deliver the notepad so they could leave.

I
N
S
ELMA,
where the line of potential registrants stretched more than a block around on Lauderdale Street by early afternoon, King knocked on the closed courthouse door and beseeched Sheriff Clark for shelter from the rain. Reporters pressed forward to hear some of their exchange. “In the name of humanity,” King called out, “we are asking you to let them come inside.” He said there was room for them to wait in the corridors and stairwells. “In the name of common sense,” Clark replied, “they will have to stay out there until their numbers are called.” The numbers, mandated by federal court, were the recent fruit of legal pounding by lawyers from the civil rights movement and the Justice Department, designed to prevent manipulation in the order of service and to discourage all-day filibusters by the registrars. Sheriff Clark improvised this day by calling out numbers for the registrar's office in a slurred whisper, then announcing that those who missed the call forfeited their number and must go to the back of a separate line for a new one. He dueled the movement staff in logistical maneuver until King led most of the sodden crowd in retreat back to Brown Chapel. No one knew whether any new applicants would be accepted as registered voters, if so, how many, or how long it would take to find out. These were separate, uphill battles. On balance, however, reporters judged the day's effort a success for the demonstrators. There were no arrests or casualties, and 266 people managed to finish the complicated application process—twice the previous record.