Parting the Waters (101 page)

Bull Connor noticed the boycott. “I don't intend to sit here and take it with a smile,” he said at a City Commission meeting on April 3. Connor then moved to cut off city distributions to the needy from the federal government's surplus food program, reasoning that most of the recipients were Negroes. The next day, his officers found Shuttlesworth and Phifer walking down the street and arrested them for blocking the sidewalk. On making bail, Shuttlesworth declared that Connor's reprisals would increase rather than decrease support for the new campaign. With defiant relish, he described the boycott as “like Ivory Soap—99 and 44/100ths percent pure.”

 

Birmingham was not yet the main focus of King's activities. He spent less time there than in many other cities, and he stayed nowhere very long. If there was anything new in his chaotic pursuits, it was a steady accumulation of evidence that there was life after all in the dreams of the past five years. The breakthroughs came in several areas almost at once—fund-raising, voter registration, the recruitment of professional cadres. Where there had formerly been pennies, fruitless committees, and pitiful delays, there suddenly sprang up a well-financed registration operation. Roughly speaking, the spark came from King. The fuel came from the new Voter Education Project grants, as supervised by a newcomer named Andrew Young. The payload came from Septima Clark's citizenship schools, which were training registration workers. And the indispensable mechanics came from Jack O'Dell, who was the manager of Stanley Levison's direct-mail operation in the New York SCLC office.

O'Dell soon became significant to the Kennedy Administration because of his Communist background. Five years King's senior, he had been left as a child to grow up in the home of his grandfather, a janitor in a Detroit public library, and grandmother, who raised him as a strict Catholic—so devout that O'Dell remained an altar boy even in college, at Xavier in New Orleans. During World War II, he ferried war cargoes under destroyer escort for the Coast Guard merchant marine, and, like Harry Belafonte, first encountered political history through Negro sailors who introduced him to the works of W. E. B. Du Bois. For nearly six years, he killed long hours below decks reading Du Bois on Reconstruction, world history, the NAACP, and the subjugation of Africa. Then he went back to New Orleans and found work as an organizer for his union, the National Maritime Union. It was renowned among Negroes as the first seamen's international to break the color line. Shipping jobs were not posted by race. One of its international executives was the first Negro to hold such a position in any trade union. In its racial advances, the NMU followed the policy of the Communist International. When an anti-Communist faction purged the union in 1950, O'Dell was expelled for circulating peace petitions.

He had found work selling burial insurance in Birmingham. By 1957, O'Dell's skill with numbers earned him a promotion to manager of the company's Montgomery office, and there, as a lapsed Catholic, he went several times to hear the newly famous Martin Luther King preach at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Later, while doing graduate work in New York, he volunteered to work under Bayard Rustin on the 1959 Youth March for integrated schools. Through Rustin, O'Dell met Stanley Levison, who later asked him to promote the 1961 Sammy Davis-Frank Sinatra benefit concert for the SCLC at Carnegie Hall, just after the Kennedy inauguration. That evening was a high point in the life of O'Dell, who was a most unusual man. He still retained his Communist friends, as well as his deep appreciation for the Communist Party's efforts in behalf of Negro sailors. At the same time he kept up his fraternity contacts, still felt the tugs of the Catholic faith, and treasured the memory of hearing Frank Sinatra sing “Moonlight in Vermont” at Carnegie Hall.

O'Dell had first met King as a colleague rather than a celebrity when Levison took him to present a report on the net receipts from the Carnegie Hall event. Financial success made it a festive occasion, and Levison pressed King to establish a more permanent fund-raising structure. He recommended O'Dell, with his experience in business management, as the ideal supervisor for an experimental program of fund-raising by mass mailings. King approved Levison's plan, and the mail solicitation proved successful beyond all expectation. O'Dell soon was working full time as director of the SCLC mail room in Harlem, drawing a small salary from the proceeds. He saw so much potential in the newfangled techniques that he took advanced marketing classes at the NYU Business School. By August 1961, Levison and O'Dell reported proudly to King that their little operation had raised $80,000 for the SCLC in the past year—more than half the SCLC budget—above expenses of less than $10,000. In the parlance of direct mail, they reported to King that they were adding every day to a “master list” of 12,000 “proven contributors.”

The New York SCLC office was a beehive of efficiency. Experience there as a typist and envelope stuffer had led Bob Moses to expect something similar at SCLC's Atlanta headquarters, where he found instead the languid atmosphere of a church social. The discrepancy discouraged Levison as well as Moses, and finally King himself concluded that the organization of the Atlanta office was critically flawed. In January 1962, anticipating large voter registration grants on the establishment of the VEP, King asked O'Dell to begin commuting between New York and Atlanta. His new assignment was to apply the lessons of his fund-raising project to voter registration. Wearing two hats, O'Dell became in effect the SCLC's first quartermaster. He was keeper of lists, statistician of votes, designer of systems.

Just before O'Dell started commuting, Andrew Young went South as the Field Foundation's new supervisor for Septima Clark's citizenship schools. Young was charged with the vital task of connecting New York philanthropy to the civil rights movement by steering tax-exempt money into voter registration. For the better part of a year, Young had vacillated over a career decision: should he leave the expense-account comforts of his job as associate director of the Department of Youth Work in the National Council of Churches for the risks and hardships of civil rights work in the segregated South? “Now I am forced to make a choice,” he had written in a letter to King, seeking advice. Never having met Young, King had asked Levison to meet and evaluate Young in New York. Levison found him competent but unfocused. Gardner Taylor gave King a more personal report, as Taylor had known the Youngs as one of the most distinguished Negro families in New Orleans. They were wealthy Congregationalists, from the highest and “lightest” of the churches, and a number of Young cousins were so light-skinned and respectable that they had passed over into the white world. Andrew Young, three years King's junior, had first thought he might join the idealism of the Southern movement by tutoring the unlettered preachers of the SCLC. “The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is made up largely of Baptist Churches and lower class Negroes,” he wrote a New York friend. “These clergy do not have the respect of the educated Negro, and there is almost no way for them to get together. They need each other desperately, though. This would be one of my objectives.”

Months of adjustment had followed, running parallel to the creation of the Voter Education Project. From Highlander, Myles Horton apologized to Young for the delays. Young apologized to philanthropists for the conceptual fuzziness of the voter education scheme, and confessed to Wyatt Walker that “we get more chicken about moving back to the center of the struggle.” The final arrangements between Young, the SCLC, the foundations, and the National Council of Churches amounted to an elaborate exchange of titles and obligations, comprehensible only to foundation experts. Young went on the Field Foundation payroll, but the SCLC paid his travel expenses and other budget items. Myles Horton helped weave a third institution into the patchwork by securing through the National Council of Churches an abandoned Congregationalist missionary school as a site for citizenship classes.

At Dorchester, the missionary school, not far from Savannah, Georgia, Young merged the old citizenship education program with voter registration, accepting Septima Clark as the undisputed schoolmistress of both. She took in adult students by the busload, a week at a time, and used the practical methods she had been developing for more than forty years. In math class, she taught her pupils how to figure out seed and fertilizer allotments. In literacy classes, she worked upward from street signs and newspapers to the portions of the state constitutions required for voter registration. Although her pedagogy commanded the attention of professionals like Young, her gift lay in recognizing natural leaders among the poorly educated yeomanry—midwives, old farmers and draymen, grandmothers who had pushed children and grandchildren through school—and imparting to them her unshakable confidence and respect. There was an invisible edge to her. Still touchy about being the daughter of a slave, she was quick to notice what she called pridefulness among her own people—taking it personally, for instance, that Mother King never invited her into the “drawing room” of the King home in Atlanta, and noting that powerful preachers of the movement were given to vainglory and often oblivious to the contributions of women.

At first, Clark treated her new boss almost as a pupil—all the more so since Andrew Young had accomplished nearly all his grant-knitting wizardry before she had even met him. Once, when a new busload arrived at Dorchester, Young flew in by chartered airplane for the opening ceremonies, and Clark intercepted him on the way to the pantry. He should not eat unless he shared the food with all the new arrivals, she said patiently, because they had been on a bus all night and were hungry. Young blinked. There was no money for a communal breakfast in the budget, he said, and besides, no one had complained about what was due him as the director. Clark said he must bear in mind that these were people who put sand in Coke bottles just to prove to the folks back home that they had seen the ocean. They would never dream of attending church at Ebenezer, let alone Young's elite congregation, because the worshippers there dressed up too much and were too refined for them, and if the recruits could not feel comfortable doing such simple things, how could they feel worthy to vote against the wishes of the white man? Clark said that the recruits noticed everything. Young's budget priorities and his lack of eagerness to mingle with his recruits spoke as eloquently as his speeches. “If you can pay all that money that the Marshall Field Foundation has sent us to rent a plane, why can't you give them two or three dollars to buy breakfast?” she asked. Failing that, he could share their discomfort.

“Septima, you are a saint,” said Young.

“No, I'm not a saint,” she replied. “I don't consider myself a saint. But I do know that what you are doing is not wise.”

“There are saints in hell, you know,” said Young, who was agile in theological debate.

“Well, then, I might be one of them,” said Clark. She already had ruined Young's appetite, and eventually the foundation director from New York found himself loosening his tie and eating bag lunches with citizenship students.

Such working adjustments were well under way by February—not only for Clark and Young but also for Jack O'Dell and Wiley Branton, the incoming director of the Voter Education Project. On February 2, 1962, all these people gathered at a meeting of SCLC affiliates in Atlanta. King made a speech. Septima Clark and Dorothy Cotton were introduced as the new citizenship teachers. James Lawson conducted workshops in nonviolence. Andrew Young attended as the representative of the Field Foundation. And Jack O'Dell, as director of SCLC voter registration, conducted the business sessions. O'Dell described a new flow chart for registration. First, King would speak on tour, using the power of his name and his message to solicit new volunteers. Then O'Dell and Young would send selected volunteers to Dorchester for citizenship training with Septima Clark. The most gifted trainees would take her methods back to their home areas as teachers. Finally, O'Dell would submit the records of trained, functioning workers to Wiley Branton for VEP funding as ongoing SCLC registration projects.

King left immediately on what he called variously a “People-to-People” tour, a “Southwide” tour, and a “Freedom Corps” drive. Beginning with a traditional rally in the First Baptist Church of Clarksdale, Mississippi, he spent three days whirling through the Delta's Third Congressional District, where James Bevel was working. To drive home the point that he was after more than big audiences and heavy collection plates, King held meetings at country stores as well as churches, and stopped at the smallest hamlets as well as the ones with paved roads. While James Lawson held nonviolence workshops at Tougaloo College, King preached registration politics to awed farmers in Jonestown. In tiny Sherard, he gave a pep talk to an audience of exactly one old man, who proudly claimed to have walked thirteen miles to meet King. With Wyatt Walker and Dorothy Cotton, King recruited in three days some 150 people willing to make the long journey to Septima Clark's citizenship school in Georgia.

He went on to new tours through South Carolina and Georgia. By February 22, when Wiley Branton announced that at long last the Voter Education Project was “open for business,” the SCLC hit the ground running for the newly available funds. More than a thousand people quickly signed up for the Freedom Corps. Hundreds of them passed through Septima Clark's training program at Dorchester. The Voter Education Project secured three initial grants totaling $162,000 from the Taconic, Field, and Stern foundations, with the promise of much more to come, and the SCLC almost instantly received an advance of $11,000 against its first-year request of $60,000.
Jet
magazine, the largest Negro weekly, published a story entitled “Dr. King Uniting Greatest Force Since Reconstruction,” observing that King was touring the South “in a manner more familiar to an office-seeker than a man of the cloth…in the best traditions of a political machine.”