At Canaan's Edge (4 page)

A small caravan of reporters and federal observers followed King out of Selma for an afternoon pilgrimage to outlying areas, first south to the Wilcox County seat of Camden, which had been named in 1842 for the city in South Carolina. Many of the early Wilcox settlers brought from South Carolina the zeal of its famous “fire-eaters,” who championed slavery and secession toward the Civil War in an era when one isolated Unionist balefully observed that his state was “too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum.” Although no Negro had voted in Wilcox County since an accommodating barber
*
in 1901, the white minority still raised apoplectic cries from time to time. One prominent local senator issued a proclamation that the racial voting margin—“2,250 whites registered, AND NOT ONE NEGRO”—would be unsafe against “the onrushing black horde” without new character requirements, which he advocated as “our only hope for white supremacy, our only hope for peace, our only protection against a race war.” Ghosts of yesteryear remained close in a county that had no electric lights until 1925, where temperament flickered between homespun gentility and raw tribal aggression. Ben Miller, elected on an anti-Klan platform as “the sturdy oak of Wilcox,” took a cow with him to supply milk at the governor's mansion in 1930. Four years later into the Depression, a posse of mounted whites liquidated chattel liens in Wilcox County by seizing every crop, chicken, wagon, and plow from sixty-eight families of Negro sharecroppers, then setting them adrift on the Alabama River. Some of those who survived still never had seen a water faucet when King arrived at the Camden courthouse in 1965. He walked along a line of two hundred Negroes waiting in the rain—“Doin' all right. How you feeling?”—and sought out P. C. “Lummie” Jenkins, county sheriff since 1937. Voluble and commanding, boasting that he had never carried a gun, Jenkins fretted about wasted time for everybody. To be registered, he said, each applicant needed not only to pass the literacy and citizenship tests but also to present a current local voter who would vouch for good character.

“Well, how about you acting as voucher?” asked King.

“I'm not allowed,” Jenkins replied. Elected officials were barred in order to avoid conflicts over vote trading.

“Mind if I look around town for vouchers?” asked King.

“Inquire around,” Jenkins invited. He called King “preacher,” and candidly advised that it might not “look right” for anyone to sponsor these new voters.

Practiced, jovial banter masked the edge of tension. One awed woman would summarize in her words King's quiet plea for them to put away anything that could cause harm or excuse violence: “Don't even carry a hair clamp in your head.” Those in line eyed the fifty wet Alabama state troopers who stood vigil over them with guns and nightsticks, many knowing that a similar detachment had run violently amok in nearby Perry County when Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot. King himself was keenly aware of intensified threats against him, partly from Attorney General Katzenbach's confidential notice that two riflemen intended to shoot him on his previous visit to the counties around Selma. He climbed a stoop at the jail to pay tribute to those who “turned out in the rain” where no Negro had voted for decades. “This is a magnificent thing,” he told those in line. Only ten were allowed to apply for registration, but this was a seismic number in Wilcox County. “Keep walking, children,” King called out in his familiar closing from the spirituals. “Don'cha get weary.”

T
HERE WAS
no public spectacle at the last stop. The sleepy courthouse lawn was drained of everything but fear when King arrived at Hayneville, where John Hulett's group had been sent away hours ago. Lowndes County shared a South Carolina heritage with adjacent Wilcox but ranked higher on the intimidation scale. The county seat was named for Robert Y. Hayne, once South Carolina's junior U.S. senator to John C. Calhoun, the county itself for South Carolina congressman William Lowndes, namesake relative of Alabama's own fire-eating Senator William Lowndes Yancey, who in 1848 had advanced a Southern demand to extend slaveholding rights throughout newly settled territories. Racial solidarity remained a prime civic duty among local whites, resting on memories and practices that sometimes were peculiar or invisible to outsiders. No merchant in Lowndes County would sell Marlboro cigarettes or Falstaff beer, for instance, because of a report from the 1950s—unnoticed or long forgotten everywhere else—that the companies once made donations to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Mysteriously, the lone official who halted King's party in the courthouse corridor refused to give his name or title. He did allow that other Negroes might have come to the courthouse on their own that day. If they did, he added, they wanted nothing to do with outsiders.

King replied that local people had asked for help, but were frightened. “We had heard that if we work here, there would be violence,” he said.

“I heard there would be violence, too,” said the man. “And you can agitate that. Everywhere you have been, there has been violence.”

King sparred about seeking justice instead of trouble. As minutes passed, his persistently mild words echoed down the hallway and the man's temper seemed to rise. Asked about religion, he said he was a Methodist but demanded to know what Christianity had to do with the vote. Asked about the county's voting procedures, he said testily that the information was reserved for county citizens.

“We don't understand,” said King.

“You are damned dumb, then, if you don't understand,” the man said angrily. Photographers snapped a picture of him pointing an index finger closely at King's nose as he denounced him for interfering where he had no business. “None of you can help the Negroes of Lowndes County,” he said to Abernathy, Andrew Young, and observers close by. After he declared the courthouse closed and walked away, reporters identified the pointer as car dealer Carl Golson, a former state senator and one of three county registrars.

King returned safely from the outlying counties late Monday afternoon, March 1, completing a circuit of better than a hundred miles. He crossed the Alabama River over the Edmund Pettus Bridge into Selma on U.S. Highway 80, by the same route that Lorenzo Harrison had fled from Lowndes County into the previous night's mass meeting. The deposed minister was fired from his regular job as a bush-hog operator for a construction company.

FBI agents cabled headquarters that their personal observations “revealed no incidents throughout day.” They reported that King left Sullivan Jackson's house after supper for Brown Chapel, arriving at 8:28
P.M
. Monday evening, but he did not follow his usual practice of slipping into the pastor's study before making an entrance to the mass meeting. James Bevel was exhorting a crowd of five hundred to be ready for a foot pilgrimage all the way to Montgomery, and King debated how and when to respond from the pulpit. Still undecided whether to embrace or deflect the call for such prolonged, vulnerable exposure on Alabama highways, he hesitated for six minutes on the steps outside the church, then climbed back in his car to catch a night flight from the Montgomery airport.

March 2–5, 1965

K
ING
landed in Washington for Tuesday's hundred-year anniversary observance at Howard University, which had been chartered under the Freedmen's Bureau and named for its first appointed head under Abraham Lincoln, Union General Oliver Howard. In full academic regalia, he delivered a reprise on his Nobel Peace Prize lecture from December—urgently recommending nonviolence to combat what he called mankind's three related scourges of racial injustice, poverty, and war. He spoke broadly on survival and moral progress in a shrinking world, and reacted to sketchy reports of that day's first massive U.S. air strike under a new policy of sustained military attack upon North Vietnam. “I know that President Johnson has a serious problem here, and naturally I am sympathetic to that,” King told the Howard convocation, but said he saw no solution in violence. “The war in Vietnam is accomplishing nothing.”

King's first public comment about Vietnam, like his speech at Howard, escaped notice in a press climate that looked to him for confrontational stories about race in the South. Attention to the war itself remained muted by later standards: a one-inch story noted that two deaths that week brought the number of Americans killed through five years of military support to 402, including 124 who perished in accidents. In some respects, neither King nor President Johnson wanted to advertise inner conflict about strategy. Johnson made sure that the United States and South Vietnam made no formal announcement of the new bombing policy, nor of the actual strike earlier that day by 104 Air Force jets, six of which were lost, and reporters were obliged to piece together the story indirectly. King, for his part, did not mention his apprehensions about the proposed march out of Selma any more than he dwelled on the forty policemen who stood guard around him on the Howard campus because of numerous death threats received in Washington. If he was not safe at a Negro college in Lincoln's capital, what could be gained by an exposed hike through rural Alabama?

Privately, King spent Tuesday in the capital seeking counsel about his dilemma. He arranged to meet with his Northern advisers later that week and sought another audience with President Johnson. Events pushed him to decide, but disputes and confusion made him hesitate. Bad weather delayed his return flight through Atlanta to Montgomery on Wednesday morning, March 3, and he circled in the air while two thousand mourners filed past Jimmie Lee Jackson's casket at Brown Chapel in Selma. King missed the morning service there, as well as the thirty-mile procession by hearse and caravan northwest from Selma to Perry County, but reached Jackson's hometown of Marion in time to join the afternoon funeral procession that moved into Zion's Chapel Methodist through an overflow crowd of nearly a thousand Negroes standing outside. Some four hundred people were packed into the tiny structure of rough-cut planks, built for half that number. Jackson's mother, Viola, and his eighty-two-year-old grandfather, Cager Lee, wept openly in the front pews, still bearing signs of violence from the attack on the march out of this church two weeks earlier.

King was accustomed to funerals, and normally kept his trained composure in the pulpit, but a correspondent noted that “a tear glistened from the corner of his eye as he rose to speak.” Recycling the text of his brief eulogy for the young girls killed by dynamite in their Birmingham church, he parceled out blame for the funeral among the hatred in some segregationists, the passivity in moderates, the “timidity” of the federal government, and “the cowardice of every Negro” who “stands on the sidelines in the struggle for justice.” He acknowledged the unfathomable depth of the moment—“At times life is hard, hard as crucible steel”—and reached high and wide for consolation. “God still has a way of wringing good out of evil,” he said. “History has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive.” Finally, King added a personal tribute with a conclusion that also addressed his own dilemma. “Jimmie Lee Jackson is speaking to us from the casket,” he said, “and he is saying to us that we must substitute courage for caution…. We must not be bitter, and we must not harbor ideas of retaliating with violence. We must not lose faith in our white brothers.”

King recessed behind the pallbearers out through the courthouse square, past the café where Jackson had been shot, out of town on muddy roads to Heard Cemetery. “More than 1,000 walked three miles in rain to bury him on a pine hill,” the
New York Times
recorded simply of Jackson's interment. Some of those in the long line had marched in the Selma campaign since January, including nine-year-old Sheyann Webb, whose example had melted the fearful nonparticipation of her parents. “What time they be marchin'?” her father asked her at last, and John Webb walked memorably this day in a new suit so thin that rain rinsed its blue dye all through his white shirt. The humblest citizens of two counties mingled in a burial procession that stretched nearly half a mile, confronting reminders of lethal, semiofficial violence in such numbers as to invite greater leaps of faith. King passed word to schedule the fifty-four-mile march from Selma to Montgomery. He set the starting date for Sunday, March 7, only four days away, and Bevel announced the first detailed plans that night in Selma. Again, however, King decided not to speak at the mass meeting. To give himself some wiggle room about Lowndes County, he told reporters that he might break away from the four-day pilgrimage and rejoin its conclusion in Montgomery.

K
ING RUSHED
to catch a plane for New York, leaving behind the frantic logistical preparations and ferocious debates that were triggered by his commitment to the Sunday march. Staff members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) branded his announcement another high-handed betrayal by King of their working agreement to make joint decisions. At a crisis staff meeting in Selma, Fay Bellamy voiced the prevailing opinion that the proposed march would be a publicity stunt. Bellamy was twenty-six. Gripped by news images of the Birmingham church bombing, she had made her way east from San Francisco in search of the movement, and in January had secured her first field assignment among roughly a dozen SNCC workers added to Selma since King opened his campaign there, grabbing space willy-nilly on cots and bedrolls in SNCC's Freedom House at 2021 Eugene Street, with no telephone and virtually no heat, drawing a weekly SNCC paycheck of $9.64 when lucky. She and other newcomers absorbed SNCC's five-year institutional memory of subdued grievance against King—that he reaped public glory from their sacrifice as shock troops since the sit-ins and Freedom Rides, that his hit-and-run celebrity priesthood undercut their long-term efforts to build local leadership. By natural temperament, or out of emotional exhaustion from prolonged exposure to suffering, they also chafed against the nonviolent doctrines SNCC shared publicly with King and his preacher-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In February, Bellamy had introduced herself to Malcolm X at Tuskegee and boldly importuned him to discuss alternatives to nonviolence in Selma, scaring people for and against the movement. She and most SNCC colleagues, having fought rearguard battles against the innovation of night marches before Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed in one, saw King's plan as an invitation to punishment on a grand scale. Lacking the means to stop it, however, they were sharply divided about whether to split the movement by public dissent, and tactical arguments raged until project director Silas Norman arranged for the national officers of SNCC to address the emergency issue Friday night in Atlanta.

I
N
M
ONTGOMERY
, where an opposing war council convened behind closed doors, Governor George Wallace and his deputies, especially Colonel Al Lingo of the state troopers, debated a surprise suggestion to let the march go forward unmolested. Staff advisers explained the scheme as a mousetrap for King. They proposed to lure his group onto the highway and then stop all vehicular traffic between Selma and Montgomery behind trooper roadblocks. Not even reporters would be allowed to follow, except on foot, and King's ragtag pilgrims would find themselves cut off from motorized support or relief, facing fifty miles of hostile country. Press secretary Bill Jones confidently predicted that the Negroes would abandon voting rights and limp back to Selma as the “laughingstock of the nation.” The Alabama officials warmed to the propaganda value of defeating King with a shrewdly tailored version of what he wanted, and chortled over refinements such as temporary signs to mark Highway 80 as a “Jefferson Davis footpath” for these pedestrians. By midnight Thursday, Wallace approved deceptive news leaks that Alabama would
not
allow Sunday's march to leave Selma. This feint might induce Negroes to show up low on water and travel supplies, expecting no march, and it gave Wallace a strong position for maneuver if he changed his mind about the laughingstock option.

I
N
N
EW
York, at 12:31
P.M.
on Thursday, March 4, FBI surveillance agents carefully noted that Stanley Levison rode an elevator to the forty-third floor of the Americana Hotel and walked into Room 4323, where Andrew Young and King's travel aide Bernard Lee were waiting. The agents recorded that King himself arrived at 12:56 from a speaking engagement before a federation of Jewish women, followed by King's lawyer Clarence Jones at 1:25 and actor Ossie Davis at 3:20. Since Saturday, when Davis had delivered the principal eulogy for Malcolm X, agents had intercepted conversations over the wiretapped phone lines of Jones in which Davis worried about threats against King's life in Alabama, saying, “We cannot afford to lose him at this juncture.” These spare gleanings were flashed to headquarters and distilled from the FBI point of view into an overnight warning to President Johnson that forthcoming requests for federal protection of King would be subversive in origin. Director Hoover's note included boilerplate allegations: Clarence Jones had reportedly belonged to a suspect college youth group, and a source in 1963 had called Ossie Davis a Communist.

A separate letter from Hoover, hand-delivered to the White House and classified secret, reported that King was resuming contact with Stanley Levison a year and a half after breaking off all communication under heavy pressure from President Kennedy. Hoover had source information that Levison had been a Communist fund-raiser in the early 1950s, which he preserved secretly as the official predicate not only for the pressure through Kennedy and for the authorized wiretaps on Jones, King, and others who knew Levison, but also for Hoover's extralegal harassment of King. Alerted by wiretaps, for instance, FBI headquarters only the day before had instructed the head of the Boston office to try to scuttle a “Martin Luther King Day” scheduled for April by arranging a derogatory briefing about King for Governor John Volpe of Massachusetts, “on a highly confidential basis and with the proviso that under no circumstances may there ever be any attribution to the FBI.”

FBI surveillance agents lacked an opportunity to plant microphone bugs in the Americana walls that could record these two-day deliberations behind closed doors. Wiretaps on telephones missed celebrations over the return of Levison to the inner circle, but they did pick up undercurrents of friction as the volunteer advisers readjusted to King's closest white friend in the movement. Since February, when he insisted that the advisers “clear” Levison back into their informal councils—saying he still regretted giving in to the government's arbitrary and unprincipled banishment, whether or not it helped secure passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—King had ached to resume his late-night telephone chats. Levison, a lifelong activist and semiretired investor, was bluntly straightforward and yet avuncular by nature. “Escalation [in Southeast Asia] in the manner recently conducted is more suited to small boys than great powers,” he advised President Johnson two weeks earlier in a typically brief, handwritten letter. “Walter Lippman[n] is one hundred percent right in asserting that our national interests are not critically involved in the jungles of Viet Nam, particularly since our naval power is unhampered off its shores. Your election was characterized by the clearest mandate for peace since World War II. Please execute it fearlessly.”

Clarence Jones arrived at the Americana with his own draft letter for President Johnson “to express my vigorous dissent and alarm over the conduct of present United States foreign policy in South Vietnam.” Jones differed markedly from Levison in style—more formal and polished, from upbringing in a chauffeur's household and hard-won training in entertainment law—yet gravitated to him in the current alignment of the Northern council. Assuming that Wallace would stop Sunday's march, which could not thereafter reach Montgomery without federal intervention, the advisers heatedly debated ways to apportion risk and hardship among people from different worlds. Should they postpone for safety while seeking a federal protective order? Or try to march, perhaps to rally support by enduring another mass incarceration, and then go to court?

Levison opposed the quest of his “twin” Jewish adviser, Harry Wachtel, to become the designated liaison with Attorney General Katzenbach, in a side dispute that awkwardly followed Wachtel's assignment to cajole Levison back from exile. Granted, King's Washington representative Walter Fauntroy was out of his depth on legislative matters before Congress, but Wachtel was too eager to replace the young Negro minister rather than develop Fauntroy's voice alongside Wachtel's influence as a Wall Street law partner. Together with Jones, Levison similarly criticized Bayard Rustin's tendency of late to dismiss student complaints about the Selma movement as naive or obstructionist. With Rustin, architect of the 1963 March on Washington, Wachtel pushed King toward a larger role in national politics while Levison and Jones tilted for patchwork unity in the protest movement. Where one side saw colleagues limiting King, the other thought he was being used.