At Canaan's Edge (5 page)

King chose a path through the counsel of strong-willed advisers. He took Walter Fauntroy with him late Friday afternoon to the White House, past a line of uniformed American Nazis on Pennsylvania Avenue with picket signs—“Down With Martin Luther Koon,” “Who Needs Niggers”—to a contrasting welcome in the Fish Room of the West Wing. Then, alone with President Johnson, he followed Wachtel's advice to argue that any effective voting rights bill must include an ironclad provision to replace local officials with registrars accountable to the President. Johnson agreed that legislation was a better route to securing Negro voting rights than a proposed constitutional amendment, which would be slow, difficult to ratify, and redundant to the existing Fifteenth Amendment, but he declined to go beyond his public promise to submit a voting rights “message” to Congress. King, for his part, did not ask the President explicitly to submit a new bill, nor did he ask for federal marshals to protect the march on Sunday, so as not to force Johnson to ask for postponements and conditions, or to oppose such a protest altogether. Instead, King emerged from the White House Friday evening to emphasize carefully that he and Johnson had shared their respective troubles and come tantalizingly close to a common agenda. “The President told me that Senator [Everett] Dirksen had made a commitment to support a voting rights bill,” King told reporters of the pivotal Republican leader, but he could not say what bill or when. He missed his scheduled flight home that night and scrambled for a later one. Airline sources told FBI agents that King had a reservation from Atlanta to Montgomery at 8:35
A.M
. Sunday, in time to reach Selma for the march.

I
N THE
basement of Frazier's soul food café, near its Atlanta headquarters, the national executive committee of SNCC convened before ten o'clock Friday night with a convoluted debate about the rules of procedure—bylaws, credentials, determination of a quorum, standing to vote—that ran well past midnight, punctuated by a shout of “Who the hell is Robert, anyway?” from Courtland Cox, who noted wryly that the author of the book on parliamentary order was not a SNCC member. For five years, as they confronted race questions that long befuddled elder statesmen, the young SNCC activists had made decisions by informal consensus born of a common willingness to go to jail and risk their lives, which also winnowed out frivolous leadership claims. Cox, a veteran strategist out of Howard University, lamented a loss of family camaraderie that had accelerated since SNCC's 1964 Freedom Summer project in Mississippi. Disagreements festered over whether the project was a model for revolutionary change or a mistaken venture into national politics, and internal governance was paralyzed by collisions of numbers and ideology—how to apportion the influence of burgeoning staff members against the hoped-for participation of the poorest Negroes. Nearly a hundred of the summer volunteers had been inspired to stay on, which more than doubled the permanent staff and threatened to swamp SNCC with mostly white students from Northern colleges.

Beneath SNCC's vanguard devotion to racial harmony, anxieties about group control were concealed as issues of class or geography, and Bob Moses, one of the few SNCC leaders who addressed internal racial hostilities, had vanished in a cloud of paradox since his stunning withdrawal announcement at the previous meeting. Moses was the anti-King within SNCC. By immersing himself for years in the persecution of rural Mississippi, and subordinating his Harvard education to folk wisdom, he acquired stature that defined grassroots SNCC culture. By speaking softly, he gained a voice within SNCC far stronger than King's classical oratory. By eschewing the priestly hierarchy of King's leadership, he became a quiet icon who could pull off Freedom Summer—a desperate gamble to pierce national conscience through the sacrifice of elite students. By lifting up the innate capacities of all citizens, he helped discover pathbreaking democratic leaders such as an unlettered orator from Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer, but at least five colleagues followed his example to their martyrdom in Mississippi despite his insistence that they all make their own decisions. While classmates finished their degrees back on campus, Moses carried the moral weight of these losses plus the heavy expectations that he alone could bridge the growing fissures between sharecroppers, saints, and sharp-tongued dialecticians—until, breaking down in the midst of a February SNCC debate, he tried to escape his charisma by conducting a mysterious final ceremony of wine and cheese, during which he renounced his own name. Contenders threw up questions more urgently in his absence. What did it mean now to be a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and who should decide?

A ruling from the chair suspended procedural wrangles to hear from the new Selma project director. Silas Norman had left Wisconsin the previous summer to be a clandestine literacy tutor for potential voters in Selma, where he lost his cover when subjected to Sheriff Clark's cattle prod during a spontaneous demonstration, then joined SNCC in the fall and came to preside over the local office as it swelled during King's campaign. With a rich deep voice and precise diction, ingrained from family training in Augusta, Georgia,
*
Norman recommended that SNCC provide a minimum level of cooperation with the march on Sunday—lend walkie-talkies for logistics on the road, contribute cooking utensils, and handle medical support—which could be done merely by contacting volunteer nurses and doctors already on the way from New York. While making clear that the Selma project had opposed Bevel's plan altogether, Norman tempered criticism in his first presentation to national officers. “We have to go,” he said, partly out of deference to SNCC's public alliance with King.

In response, several officers rushed past his caution to ask why SNCC should participate at all. Norman's predecessor in Selma called the march a “joyride” for King's fund-raising apparatus at the expense of local Negroes. Executive Director James Forman, SNCC's organizational mainstay since 1961, raised the most basic issue by asking whether there could be validity in any movement for the right to vote in Alabama. To succeed required principled commitment and action from the federal government, for which hope had drained very low within SNCC by the end of Freedom Summer, and without such hope, deliberate sacrifice and risk looked pointless. Forman and others suggested that SNCC needed to find a more independent course. The executive committee voted to spell out its broader dissent against the strategy in Selma, and Norman spent what little remained of Friday night with Ivanhoe Donaldson, a quick-witted movement veteran of Jamaican descent, drafting a letter to Martin Luther King. It was Donaldson whose lecture at the University of Wisconsin had mesmerized Norman with transforming tales of suffering and mirth from SNCC's era of classical nonviolence, so much so that he resolved to leave his graduate studies in microbiology to come south. Only a year later, they collaborated in an attempt to explain the swift passing of a generation inside the movement.

March 6, 1965

P
RESIDENT
Johnson labored under pressure at the White House on Saturday. “Good God, I'd rather hear your voice than Jesus this morning,” he told his bosom friend Richard Russell of Georgia, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Russell had been breathing through a tracheotomy tube for a month, hospitalized with emphysema and pulmonary edema, and Johnson oozed genuine sympathy in his habitual prelude to serious business. “Dick, I haven't got anybody left like you,” said the President. “I've said more prayers about you than I have said since Lady Bird threatened to divorce me two years after we were married…and I'm so glad you've come through.” He offered to send an Air Force plane to move Russell during recuperation—“it'll go above the clouds and everything”—then plunged into his quandary about combat troops in Vietnam. Having commenced regular bombing, and established airbases to support it, Johnson was withholding final authority to send Marines to protect the bases. “I guess we got no choice, but it scares the death out of me,” he said.

Russell agreed on both counts. “These Marines, they'll be killing a whole lot of friendly Vietnamese,” he told Johnson from his sickbed in a raspy drawl. “They're gonna shoot everything that comes around those airplanes. They've been trained to do that. And that's their business.”

“Airplanes ain't worth a damn, Dick,” said Johnson. He and Russell swapped stories on the futility of sending bombers over jungle targets. “Hell, I had a hundred and sixty of 'em over a barracks of twenty-seven buildings,” said Johnson, “and they set two on fire. It's the damnedest thing I ever saw and the biggest fraud.” Bombing only “lets you get your hopes up,” he added, “that the Air Force is gonna defend us.”

“No, they're not at all,” said Russell. “Not at all. I know they're not.”

Summarizing “the great trouble I'm under,” Johnson told Russell that “a man can fight if he's got, if he can see daylight down the road somewhere, but there ain't no daylight in Vietnam.”

“There's no end to the road,” Russell concurred.

“The more bombs you drop, the more nations you scare,” said the President. “The more people you make mad, the more embassies you get mad—”

“We gon',” Russell interrupted. “We gon' wind up with the people mad as hell at us that we're saving by being in there…. It's the biggest and worst mess I ever saw in my life. You couldn't have inherited a worse mess.”

“Well, if they'd say I inherited it, I'd be lucky,” Johnson lamented. “But they all say I created it, and you know…”

The President paused, then snapped back to pleasantries at manic full speed. “You go get well and come back and I got a big bed for you and I want to see you and I got three women want to see you,” he said, signing off with regards from his wife, Lady Bird, and their two daughters.

Johnson alternated on Saturday between his morose stall on the Marine orders and hot pursuit of his legislative agenda. He called Vice President Hubert Humphrey to pepper him with lobbying instructions on the record number of 104 bills before Congress, stressing those that had languished in controversy for as long as forty years, such as landmark proposals to establish a medical care system (Medicare) for the elderly and provide the first federal assistance to public education. “If we don't pass anything but education, and medical care, and Appalachia,” Johnson said, referring to his poverty bill, “we have had a record that the Congressmen can be reelected on.”

The normally loquacious Humphrey struggled to squeeze in a word. “Well, Mr. President, I'll go right up there and be right on 'em all afternoon,” he said.

“You just be on 'em the next four years,” Johnson prodded. Urgency was his theme. More than once he exhorted his assembled Cabinet not to waste his landslide popular margin of 16 million votes from the 1964 election, predicting that he would lose strength in the polls at the rate of a million votes per month, and he told Martin Luther King of his hurry “to get these big things through” in a brief window of historic opportunity “before the vicious forces concentrate.”

Now the President told Humphrey there could be no excuses: “We're smarter than they are,” he said. “We've got more energy, we can work faster, we got all the machinery of the government.” He dangled a vision of glory for Humphrey from a presidential mandate to handle Congress, which Johnson said Kennedy had denied to him for fear that he, the former Senate leader, would get public credit for success. “You're the first vice president in the country that had responsibility for the—I don't care if it's the Humphrey-Johnson program,” Johnson declared. He personalized the quest for key votes such as that of Representative Edith Green, reducing her qualms about federal aid for education to a stubborn rivalry with a fellow Oregonian in Congress. “She hates [Senator Wayne] Morse,” advised the President, instructing Humphrey to court Green from every angle. “Lady Bird just took her to Florida,” he said. “I've had her down here. I've bragged on her. But she is just a mean woman, and she's gonna whip you, and if she does, why then I'm gonna get you in the five-cent cigar business.”

I
N
S
ELMA,
early Saturday afternoon, Rev. L. James Rongstad of St. John's Lutheran Church tried to head off a surprise intervention by white people from cities across Alabama. He found seventy-two of them assembled as inconspicuously as possible at Knox Reformed Presbyterian, an old mission congregation established for Negroes in the white part of town, and gained entry to deliver a warning speech that emphasized the Golden Rule. “We did not interfere in your problems, and we do not need your interference in our problems,” said Rongstad, who beseeched them not to provoke further conflict or violence. He addressed a fellow Lutheran minister personally, reminding Rev. Joseph Ellwanger that he was a graduate of Selma's Albert G. Parrish High School and that crossing lines in a hometown race crisis would upset Ellwanger's childhood friends, not to mention his parents, who still lived just three blocks away and were members of Rongstad's congregation. To tighten the pressure, he read a proclamation that only by genuine conversion, not politics or trouble, could the people of Alabama reach the desired “wholehearted willingness to love our neighbors as ourselves.” It was signed by the Negro minister of a local Lutheran congregation and by the man who recently replaced Ellwanger's father as head of the Alabama Lutheran Academy and College (for Negroes). The clear message to Ellwanger, who pastored an all-Negro congregation in Birmingham, was that he should not “go native” beyond the missionary boundaries of the Lutheran Church, lest he endanger the Negroes themselves and repudiate his own father's tradition of religious service.

“We are not here to point the finger at Selma,” Ellwanger replied. “We are here to point the finger at the state and at the nation.” He led the white demonstrators from the church in eighteen groups of four, spaced thirty feet apart so as to avoid violating the local parade ordinance. Marjorie Linn walked beside him, despite some grumbling in the group that it was neither wise nor chivalrous to honor the request of an inexperienced woman to share the lead. The prevailing view was that no one else was any more prepared than Linn, a reporter for a suburban newspaper outside Birmingham, and that she fairly represented the women who had worked for this moment since one of them stood up during a semiclandestine speech by King's aide Hosea Williams to ask how they could help the Selma movement, and Williams had invited them to “take some warm white bodies down there and show that you care.” A handful of women from the Alabama Human Relations Council had mounted a ten-day telephone blitz to recruit these assorted freethinkers—scientists from the U.S. rocket program in Huntsville, a professor of dentistry, a Methodist minister whose dog had been poisoned after sermons favorable to integration, several dozen Unitarians, the head of the university art department in Tuscaloosa—who agreed to go to jail, if necessary, though none had been arrested before and Ellwanger himself never had joined a racial demonstration.

They walked twelve blocks, from the church on Jefferson Davis Avenue to Broad Street, Selma's main thoroughfare, down past the bustling Saturday shoppers, who generally ignored them. Turning right on Alabama Avenue toward the Dallas County courthouse, those in front confronted roughly a hundred hostile white people with pipes, clubs, and chains—“most of them sturdily built and roughly dressed,” noted a reporter. They came alive with catcalls at their first sight of Ellwanger's group, in sharp contrast with the five hundred Negroes who stood across the street in silent contemplation, and some amazement, waiting to behold a white delegation from Alabama make public witness on their behalf. One minute later, as recorded by FBI agents, a battered jalopy stopped in the street with a deafening roar from a throaty engine. Its driver jumped out, threw up the hood, and poured a viscous liquid over the carburetor that sent clouds of acrid smoke billowing outward, first choking and screening the Negroes, then wafting with a shift of wind back over the angry whites. A few of the Negroes stifled laughter over this whimsical turn of menace, which somehow encouraged the Ellwanger group forward.

Chief Deputy Sheriff L. C. Crocker stopped them at the corner of Lauderdale Street, just before the courthouse. With a hand held up for silence, he read a telegram from Dr. Edgar Homrighausen, president of the Southern District Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, declaring that “in no way does Rev. Ellwanger represent the church.” For Ellwanger, this stinging disavowal was unusually swift and public but consistent with previous edicts from Homrighausen, who was effectively his bishop. Before the large funeral for the girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing, Homrighausen had served notice that Ellwanger's presence at the Baptist service would violate the ban on “unionism,” or joint worship with those outside the fold of Lutheran doctrine. Ellwanger had attended anyway, at the request of his Negro Lutheran parishioner who was father to one of the victims, and this first public witness had marked him not only as an isolated white face in Birmingham police photographs but as a dissident within his ministry. “Insofar as his goal is freedom for all under just legislation, we agree,” Homrighausen's telegram continued, “but we do not concur with or sponsor his philosophy or action of demonstration in this instance.”

Deputy Crocker finished reading and loudly addressed Ellwanger. “What do you think of that?” he asked.

“He is entitled to his opinion, but we are here to make clear our position,” Ellwanger replied, asking to pass by. Crocker shrugged, and motioned with a withering look of pity to a place on the courthouse steps near the crowd of roughnecks. Once assembled there, Ellwanger tried to shout out a prepared statement that “there are white people in Alabama who will speak out…. We consider it a shocking injustice that there are still counties in Alabama where there are no Negroes registered to vote…” His words were lost, FBI agents cabled headquarters, as “the whites hooted and yelled to such an extent that statement could not be heard.” Ellwanger's group tried to rise above the hecklers by singing “America the Beautiful,” only to be drowned out again by a spirited rendition of “Dixie.” Louder still, Negroes across the street joined spontaneously in “We Shall Overcome.” Above the cacophony of competing songs, some angry bystanders shouted threats to throw Ellwanger's race traitors into the nearby Alabama River, and others made lewd comments on their imagined sexual preferences. “Tears trickled down the cheeks of some of the women,” reported an AP correspondent, “as the crowd cursed, insulted, and jeered them.”

Wilson Baker, Selma's director of public safety, hurried through the yelling crowd to Ellwanger's side and spoke into his ear, saying he knew his parents and that it would be wise to return by way of Church Street rather than double back through the unruly whites to Broad Street. “You'd best hurry up,” Baker advised.

With the help of others nearby, Ellwanger skipped forward to the concluding lyrics they were determined to reach: “…and crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.” Then, as he led the marchers forward toward Church Street, angry whites darted in to jostle those behind, and James Robinson grabbed one of two SNCC photographers walking next to the lines. Baker shoved his way through again to arrest Robinson, a member of the violently anti-Negro and anti-Jewish National States Rights Party, who had become a familiar figure in Selma since slugging Martin Luther King after the first voting rights demonstration in January. While Baker stared down the surrounding crowd, the photographers broke away to friends in a passing car, only to have several dozen of Robinson's cohorts surround them and begin rocking the car to turn it over. They had lifted one set of wheels waist high before Baker arrived to place another man under arrest, which allowed the car to pull away.

Ellwanger's group escaped the Selma mob toward more subtle retributions ahead. The Methodist minister who had lost his dog would lose his pulpit, and Marjorie Linn would lose her job as well as a car, which vandals soon pushed from a parking space over a steep embankment. For the time being, they shared immense relief at Knox Reformed Presbyterian Church, both crying and laughing at the comic inspiration of James Bevel's sermon of praise about the celestial meaning of a freedom march by white people. Joyce Ellwanger, pregnant with her first child, made it back to the church in the embattled rear of the line, where her husband had placed her in hope of greater safety. Ironically, in view of Wilson Baker's exertions, she carried a placard saying, “Decent Alabamans Protest Police Brutality,” but Baker himself made a similar point when he reported breathless to his boss, Selma's mayor, Joe Smitherman, and learned that Smitherman had agreed to let Governor Wallace handle the next day's march toward Montgomery. Enraged, Baker said Wallace's people would brutalize the demonstrators no matter what they promised.