At Canaan's Edge (32 page)

The coming of age for the younger daughter, on her eighteenth birthday, also marked exactly ten years since Johnson suffered his 1955 heart attack and one year since he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Under that law, July 2 was the effective date for the Title VII provisions on fair employment, and lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed 476 discrimination complaints when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened for business. To their eventual regret, the lawyers initially emphasized Southern paper and textile mills that were declining, anyway, which hampered compliance, but they also targeted racial discrimination by employers and labor unions nationwide—in companies as large as General Motors, Union Carbide, and U.S. Steel, over practices as esoteric as segregated payroll windows and white-only job-site Bible classes. Another 14,000 complaints would overwhelm the fledgling EEOC over its first eighteen months. Lacking enforcement powers, the five EEOC mediators settled 110 of those complaints in that time, and referred only fifteen to the Justice Department for litigation over such issues as the need to prove discriminatory “intent in the state of mind” at hiring, and over the legitimacy of any specific remedy under law—whether any minimum of Negro jobs could suffice, whether any nonminimum number was a prohibited quota. Most of the early cases stayed in litigation past 1970, but NAACP lawyers would win
Quarles v. Philip Morris
early in 1968. With tobacco unions desegregated by the elimination of Negro locals, a federal appeals court ruled that Philip Morris and the consolidated union must allow seniority to transfer into formerly all-white departments, sparing veteran Negro employees the extra risk of “suicide leap” promotion into newly integrated positions most vulnerable to layoff.

O
NE QUESTION
briefly diverted the tumultuous July 2 press conference on the new national commitment to an integrated workforce: “What about sex?”

“Don't get me started,” replied Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. “I'm all for it.” By hinting playfully that duty as first chairman of the EEOC would not hinder his personal life, Roosevelt skirted reminders that Title VII also prohibited employment discrimination by gender.

Nearly all reporters shared Roosevelt's bemusement, although a few publications did warn that any sex reform would undercut the herculean task of breaking caste restrictions for Negroes. The
New York Times
detailed a series of outlandish “possible effects” gleaned from interviews with lawyers: “Executive training programs will have to be opened to women, who are almost universally excluded from them; barbershop owners must be prepared to take job applications from women who want to wield razor and scissors.”
The New Republic
magazine bluntly advised the EEOC not to take seriously “a mischievous joke perpetrated on the floor of the House of Representatives.” (Southerners had introduced sex equality in a failed, last-minute scheme to kill the civil rights bill with chivalry.)

Some newspapers required prodding under the new law to eliminate racially segregated want-ad sections (“Help Wanted—Colored”). Journals everywhere still divided the want-ads by gender (“Help Wanted—Female,” mostly for nurses, typists, and “Girl Friday” assistants), and even the soberest of them made sport of the sex amendment. Both the
Times
and
The Wall Street Journal
published front-page stories about a potential “bunny problem,” imagining, as the
Journal
put it, “a shapeless, knobby-kneed male ‘bunny' serving drinks to a group of stunned businessmen in a Playboy Club.” Another news story in the
Times
mocked a group of women who rallied for access to traditionally male jobs—“Amelia Jenks Bloomer (who gave her name to pantaloons) would have been proud”—and a jocular editorial suggested that Congress might as well “just abolish sex itself.”

Within the EEOC, a pose of virile insouciance spared employees from the prospect of opening nearly the entire American workforce by gender as well as race, over decades. “There are some people on this Commission who think that no man should be required to have a male secretary,” the staff director announced shortly to the press. “And I am one of them.”

July 2–August 2, 1965

O
N
July 2, the last of the Mississippi demonstrators obtained bonded release from the makeshift jail at the Jackson fairgrounds. As King passed through Virginia that day, FBI officials were scrambling to fashion a more productive line of attack on him than disappointing wire service profiles in June. These stories had listed King's accomplishments alongside a litany of charges based on FBI leaks, striking a balance that disgusted Director Hoover. (“A ‘whitewash' if there ever was one,” Hoover scrawled on a widely published UPI release.) To impeach one conclusion reported by the Associated Press—that King lived modestly, whatever his faults, and worked from a small office with “dingy green walls and a bare floor”—headquarters ordered overseas agents to search for wealth King might have concealed in Swiss bank accounts, but this perennial suspicion was proving groundless when Assistant Director DeLoach grasped a different approach. FBI agents retrieved three separate recordings of Ralph Abernathy's Atlanta press conference on otherwise commonplace incidents—a SCOPE volunteer and seven Negroes beaten inside Antioch Baptist Church in Wilcox County, Alabama, two SCOPE volunteers cut by flying glass in Americus, Georgia—to verify the reply to one question about how King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference screened associates for Communist ties. “We will check with FBI men and they will tell us if they have a Communist background,” Abernathy exaggerated grandly. “We don't want anything that is pink, much less anything that is red.”

A transcript rocketed to Washington within hours, fueled by predatory outrage within the FBI over Abernathy's careless claim to a cooperative relationship. Hoover scribbled a precautionary note that “if I find anyone furnishing information to SCLC he will be dismissed,” and DeLoach orchestrated an aggressive campaign to brand Abernathy's statement “absolutely untrue” behind the official stance that all FBI files were strictly confidential. His office distributed sharp, contemptuous statements to press contacts, DeLoach reported to colleagues, “so as to give the lie to Martin Luther King and his ilk.” On Hoover's orders, top FBI officials received notice of the media offensive by the close of business on July 2.

These attacks trailed King into Chicago on the night of July 6. A few outlets printed them (“Fast Refutation by FBI”), but most had trouble fashioning news out of a disputed aside by the little-known Abernathy. One Illinois paper conflated the FBI rebuke with a fresh outburst from Mayor Daley, who, exasperated by nineteen days of local civil rights demonstrations, issued his own public charge of subversion on July 2: “We know Communists infiltrate all these organizations.” For King, such controversy registered as familiar background nuisance. Flight delays pushed his arrival too late for a scheduled meeting with Al Raby at the Palmer House Hotel, and he was whisked into the ballroom to address the General Synod of the United Church of Christ. He saluted the mass witness of religious Americans over the past two years as an inspirational start. “The actual work to redeem the soul of America is before us,” declared King, hinting at constructive tasks across broken barriers of race nationwide. “Not only are millions deprived of formal education and proper health facilities, but our most fundamental social unit—the family—is tortured, corrupted, and weakened by economic injustice,” he said. “The church cannot look with indifference upon these glaring evils.”

From the crush of a reception among church delegates, King appeared briefly at a press conference. Reporters wanted to know whether he planned to “take over” the upstart civil rights campaign in Chicago, and, strangely, they pressed for his reaction to reports of internecine strife since the previous day's national CORE convention in Durham, North Carolina. King parried both questions, then withdrew for consultations late into the night with his Chicago lawyer Chauncey Eskridge, Al Raby, and local CORE leader Willie Blue. Raby had just filed a complaint with U.S. Education Commissioner Francis Keppel, based on studies since the 1958
Crisis
report, arguing that Chicago's effectively segregated schools should be “deprived of any and all Federal assistance” pursuant to Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This novel petition—the first aimed at a Northern school district—was certain to magnify the stakes of local protest.

As King's staff debated the chances for a Chicago movement, Blue interjected theories about why the national CORE delegates had passed a Vietnam resolution calling for “an immediate withdrawal of all American troops,” only to reconsider and table the same measure within hours on a personal appeal from James Farmer. There were grumblings implicating King's speech days earlier at all-Negro Virginia State College. A local reporter had picked up comments on Vietnam—“There is no reason why there cannot be peace rallies like we have freedom rallies…. We are not going to defeat Communism with bombs and guns and gases…. We must work this out in the framework of our democracy”—which moved over newswires to back pages in several newspapers. Gossip attributed the CORE reversal to hidden maneuvers and rivalries, which drew the press to whiffs of fresh controversy, but an incoming emergency call from Ralph Abernathy—intercepted by the Chicago police “Red Squad”—intervened after midnight with sickening word that Wilson Baker had arrested Rev. F. D. Reese for alleged embezzlement of the donations that had poured into Selma since the marches over Pettus Bridge. Press images of thieving Negro leaders loomed over a voting rights bill that was still stuck between the two houses of Congress.

J. Edgar Hoover was alerted to sensitivities over Vietnam that same evening of July 6. A solicitous call from Attorney General Katzenbach informed him that President Johnson and Secretary Rusk wanted an FBI investigation of the emerging King position on Vietnam, including possible Communist influences. Katzenbach confided that King's most prominent civil rights colleagues, Roy Wilkins and James Farmer, already had disparaged King for Vietnam comments they called wrongheaded and disloyal. For Hoover, the Katzenbach request landed as a welcome reversal by a nominal boss who had resisted his penchant for political intelligence to the point of barely civil relations. Far more important, it signaled a shift by the President, who had ignored scurrilous FBI reports on King since the day he entered the White House. Prior efforts to brand King subversive, which had bounced off Johnson's kindred domestic agenda, acquired sudden new promise across the trenches of the impending foreign war, and Hoover ordered overnight research on the obscure Asian country that might rescue FBI propaganda from flailing jabs at Ralph Abernathy. He delivered the next day a sanctioned, classified paper on “King's injection into the Vietnam situation.”

K
ING ANNOUNCED
that morning at the Palmer House that he had agreed “to spend some time in Chicago, beginning July 24.” To skeptical questions about the point of demonstrations in a city without segregation laws, he replied that many “persons of good will” did not yet understand the breadth of the nonviolent movement, and that there was “a great job of interpretation to be done” before his first major campaign in the North. “During entire press conference,” FBI observers cabled headquarters, “King was not questioned nor did he mention Viet Nam, or make any reference whatsoever to United States foreign policy.” Leaving Andrew Young with Bevel to prepare his Chicago canvass, King flew to New York for an afternoon engagement and promptly canceled his evening flight to Los Angeles. There were too many ominous signs radiating over telephone lines, seeping into news—and too many historic changes teetering—for him to be content with guesses about the single most crucial vector in democracy. When an incoming call rang through on July 7 at 8:05
P.M.
, the White House log recorded Lyndon Johnson's first phone conversation initiated by King.

The President came on the line distant and cold. He grunted without recognition until King confirmed his name: “This is Martin King.”

“Yes.”

“How do you do, sir?”

“Fine.”

“Fine,” said King. “Glad to hear your voice.”

“Thank you.”

Johnson's clipped monosyllables hung until King abandoned pleasantry to ask about the voting rights bill. “I want to get your advice on this,” he concluded.

Deference thawed the President. “I'll be glad to,” he said, cranking into political calculations of such sustained acceleration that King would speak only one word (“very”) over the next ten minutes. Johnson saw the opposing coalition of Republicans and crafty Southerners becoming more potent since Goldwater began to influence Republican leaders in Congress. “They're gonna quit the nigras,” he said. “They will not let a nigra vote for them.” Their current ploy was “to get a big fight started over which way to repeal the poll tax,” he summarized, telling King that the Senate very nearly passed an amendment to abolish poll taxes as a form of racial discrimination, but the administration detected a mousetrap. Vermont had a dormant poll tax law, and Katzenbach warned that segregationists would welcome the amendment as an opening to challenge the overall bill from a state with virtually no Negroes. “They'll bring the case on Vermont,” the President told King. “And that'll be the case that they'll take to the Court, and they will not hold that it is discriminatory in Vermont because it is not.” Having originally instructed Katzenbach “to get rid of the poll tax any way in the world he could without nullifying the whole law,” Johnson said Katzenbach's legal strategy was good politics. He vowed to keep the bill clean, and move separately to speed one of the pending Southern cases by which the Supreme Court was expected to void all poll taxes.

Johnson complained that House liberals could not resist temptation to add a poll tax amendment anyway. “[Speaker John] McCormack was afraid that somebody would be stronger for the Negro than he was,” he fumed, “so he came out red hot for complete repeal.” The imminent vote could be fatal, he told King, because any slight change in the Senate-passed bill would require a conference committee of both houses of Congress to reconcile differences. “So they get in an argument, and that delays it,” he said. “And maybe nothing comes out.” Any modified bill must repeat the legislative process in at least one chamber of Congress, and either hurdle a filibuster again in the Senate or “you got to go back to Judge [Howard] Smith” in the House. “You got to get a rule from him, and he won't give you a rule. He, he, he,” Johnson sputtered, on the pitfalls of recircumventing the implacable Rules Committee chairman from Virginia. “So you got to file a [discharge] petition and take another twenty-one days…and they want to get out of here Labor Day. And they're playin' for that time. Now they been doin' that for thirty-five years that I been here, and I been watchin' 'em do it.”

More than once Johnson reminded King of “my practical political problem” with the two Kennedy senators, both of whom supported poll tax repeal. He portrayed himself as a lonely President embattled on a dozen fronts while his civil rights allies were “all off celebratin'”—Wilkins at his convention, labor leaders George Meany and Walter Reuther on vacation, “and you're somewhere else.” The opposition was “playin' us,” said Johnson, “and we are not parliamentary smart enough, if you want to be honest—now you asked advice, I'm just tellin' you.” He worked up a lather of shrewdness, rage, and self-pity that tickled King in spite of himself. “They want your wife to go one direction and you to go the other,” said the President.

“Yes,” said King, chuckling.

“Then the kids don't know which one to follow,” added Johnson.

King laughed as the President rounded through his tactical blueprint. “Well, I certainly appreciate this, Mr. President,” he said, adding softly that he was confident in Katzenbach on “this whole voting bill,” and that always he had tried to make the movement helpful “as I was telling you when we started in Alabama.”

“You sure have and—” said Johnson. He checked himself, then responded more earnestly to King's personal reminder. “Well, you helped, I think, to dramatize and bring it to a point where I could go before the Congress in that night session, and I think that was one of the most effective things that ever happened,” he declared. “But uh, you had worked for months to help create the sentiment that supported it.”

“Yes,” said King.

“Now the trouble is that fire has gone out,” added Johnson, not lingering on sentiment. “We got a few coals on it,” he said, then reviewed his plan to stoke the embers with cedar and “a little coal oil” by full-scale civil rights lobby for a unified bill in the House.

“Yes, well, this has been very sound,” King replied, quickly interjecting “one other point that I wanted to mention to you, because it has begun to concern me a great deal, in the last uh, few days, in making my speeches, in making a speech in Virginia, where I made a statement concerning, uh, the Vietnam situation, and there have been some press statements about it.” The President kept silent through King's nervous monologue denying that he was “engaged in destructive criticism…that we should unilaterally withdraw troops from Vietnam, which I know is unreasonable.” He had been “speaking really as a minister of the gospel,” King said, and wanted to be clear. “It was merely a statement that
all
citizens of good will ought to be concerned about the problem that faces our world, the problem of war,” he added carefully, “and that, although uncomfortable, they ought to debate on this issue.” King coughed. “I just wanted to say that
to
you,” he said, “because I felt eventually that it would come to your attention—”