Parting the Waters (106 page)

Now he rushed feverishly to a closing, four-word slogan: “All. Here. And now.” Rhythmic applause allowed him to speak only one sentence between bursts of mass emotion. “We want
all
of our rights,” he shouted. “…We want our freedom
here
in America, here in the black belt of Mississippi, here behind the cotton curtain of Alabama, here on the red clay of Georgia…We have lived with gradualism, and we know that it is nothing but do-nothingism and escapism which ends up in standstillism!” This pseudo-pedantic Negroism added laughter to the shouting. “No, we are not willing to wait any longer,” King cried. “We want freedom now!” This set off a pandemonium that King stilled only with a solemn reprise on the likelihood of persecution and death, and he closed with a flourish of inspiration from the prophets. He had done it again—come into the NAACP's own house and stolen a crowd. Although his summons was objectionable to NAACP leaders in spirit and direction, it contained too much power and too little specific heresy to be challenged.

His NAACP speech did not register in the white world. As with many sensational scenes from his life, it remained a matter of journalistic whimsy whether interest crossed the racial line, and the only kind of event almost guaranteed to command an audience on both sides was the drama of white force seizing personally on King's body. Even followers of civil rights had hazy memories about whether King had been involved in the Freedom Rides, as he had never been arrested then, but plain citizens and every cub reporter knew about King's manacled trip to Reidsville. It was news when he went to jail.

It could have happened at Shreveport or at any stop on the “People-to-People” registration tours, but King expected the pinch in Albany. Among the court dates circled on his calendar was the July 10 sentencing from his arrest on Albany's streets the previous December. For such a minor misdemeanor by a gainfully employed person, Judge Durden might ordinarily have dismissed the case or suspended sentence—if not for mercy, then to spare Albany the publicity of having King in its jail. This did not seem likely, however, in light of the harsh mood that had descended upon Albany's politics in the past seven months. Not long before King's sentencing, Georgia Democratic Party chairman James Gray wrote a special front-page editorial in his Albany
Herald
, in which he denounced Albany Negroes' complaints as “the Hitlerian tactic of the ‘Big Lie'…The Negroes are lying. The Department of Justice knows they are lying…. This sordid effort will fail, as all of the craft and cunning the Negro agitators have employed in their plottings for months have failed…. It will fail because its motivation is essentially evil.”

King had little reason to hope for enlightened leniency in such a city. Before he and Walker and Abernathy drove down for the hearing—back to the dirt side streets and the
a capella
hymns at Shiloh—King told his secretary, Dora McDonald, that most likely he would have to cancel his engagement at Washington's National Press Club. Judge Durden proved him correct by sentencing King and Abernathy to pay a $178 fine or serve forty-five days in jail. Both said they would serve the time rather than cooperate with injustice, and by the time they had been searched and processed into their green jail fatigues, Dora McDonald in Atlanta was composing her daily report on the phone calls that had swamped King's office since the first news bulletins. One Washington reporter, she wrote, was “shocked beyond words” to hear that King was in jail, while an official of the National Press Club only wanted to know why King had not waited until after his speech there on July 19. McDonald advised King that she had already arranged for him to receive the Atlanta
Constitution
at the jail, and for Abernathy to get
The New York Times
. “Rev. Abernathy and you would be very proud of me today,” she wrote. “I have not cried—not even a little bit.”

King and Abernathy went to jail on the historic day when live television pictures first leaped across an ocean, via Telstar satellite. All three television networks broke into their evening programs with a picture that appeared simultaneously on French and American screens: Vice President Lyndon Johnson was shown huddling with excited scientists, all watching themselves on television in the act of watching themselves, in the infinite regression of the media age. For the return transmission, French authorities selected a simple head shot of actor Yves Montand singing “The Little Song.” The content of the beams was trivial in comparison with the feat itself, which the
Times
hailed as “rivaling in significance the first telegraphed transmission by Samuel F. B. Morse more than a century ago.”

Such frontier technology did not yet reach to Albany, Georgia. There, television reporters still had to break off by early afternoon so that they could fly with their exposed film by charter airplane to Atlanta, where facilities existed for “feeding” news footage to New York in time for possible use on the evening news. Only extraordinary events justified such expensive effort, which meant that developments in remote areas had to reach high levels of visual drama. The King jailing was not a television news story.

But it did set off tremors along more traditional lines. The news played on the front page of the Albany
Herald
, under the sarcastic headline “King Languishes in Bastille,” and it also played just under the Telstar story in papers across the country. The account in
The New York Times
reminded readers that a previous jailing of King had proved critical to the outcome of the 1960 presidential election. Both the
Herald
and the
Times
noted significantly that Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a presidential aspirant, had released a telegram urging Attorney General Kennedy “to assure the physical safety of Dr. King and his companions,” and to “investigate whether constitutional rights of peaceable assembly have been violated.” Early the next morning, Harvey Shapiro of
The New York Times Magazine
became the first of several newspaper editors calling the SCLC in the hope of publishing a “letter from prison” by King. Dora McDonald immediately relayed Shapiro's proposal to Chauncey Eskridge, and by noon Eskridge was analyzing it with Billy Graham's public relations specialist. His advice—“Nothing should be published while you are in prison…hold everything until released”—postponed a notion that would reappear within a year as King's “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Dr. Anderson summoned Albany Movement supporters back to Shiloh that morning to prepare for what he called a “now or never effort” to break segregation. His speech met with little enthusiasm. The emotions of the previous year's marches had cooled over months of waiting, and perhaps his listeners were numbed by the harsh realization that the city had dared to jail a celebrity like King on charges which still hung over some seven hundred of them too. In any case, only thirty-two people stepped forward, and they came only upon exhortation by King's friend and colleague C. K. Steele, who had led a bus boycott in Tallahassee parallel to King's in Montgomery. The diminutive Reverend Steele offered a final prayer in the church:

At 10:53
A.M.
, they marched out behind Steele toward the city jail, where King and Abernathy were on cell-scrubbing detail, and while they were being arrested under the gaze of reporters and bystanders they sang “We Shall Overcome,” in the hope that the prisoners already inside would take heart.

In Washington, reporters were questioning White House press secretary Pierre Salinger at the morning briefing about what the President would do on King's behalf. The news angle was obvious: would Kennedy do more or less as President than he had done as a candidate in 1960? By the end of the day, Salinger announced that President Kennedy had asked the Attorney General to prepare a full report on the King situation. Privately, the President called Burke Marshall at his vacation fishing pond in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. For Marshall, this rare contact with the President was bracing, but Kennedy was worried. In several calls that day, he instructed Marshall to speak with Coretta in Atlanta and with public officials in Albany. Essentially, the strategy was for Marshall to assume the sympathetic campaign posture of 1960, leaving the Kennedys themselves in reserve.

President Kennedy also took a phone call from James Gray, his old college acquaintance who was now chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party. Gray said he was calling with Mayor Kelley standing there in his office. “Jack, we've got Martin Luther King in jail,” he said, stating the obvious. “The damn media is having a field day. We don't want him in jail, but what can we do? He violated our law. I'll tell you. It would be very nice if you sent somebody down here to pick him up.”

The President agreed that it was very bad to have King in jail, but he did not embrace the idea of having him released for some presidential purpose. They faced an impasse that was politically delicate. King refused to compromise with segregation. Albany refused to compromise with integration. And the Administration was determined to maintain an image of masterful control without intervening forcefully on either side. These constraints called for trust and stealthy maneuver. President Kennedy promised to send someone to Albany, and he advised Gray to consult immediately with the Attorney General. By midday, a hastily recruited Gray emissary was on a flight to Washington.

B. C. Gardner, a senior partner in Mayor Kelley's three-man law firm, represented nearby Baker County, the Ichuaway plantation, and most major interests not represented by his partners. His father was a judge. In his office he kept a picture of himself shaking Senator John F. Kennedy's hand at Gray's private party in 1958. As the city's unofficial ambassador, Gardner brought a message that Robert Kennedy heartily seconded. King's jailing, they agreed, was an embarrassment to everybody—to Albany, to the Kennedys, to Georgia, and to the entire United States in the court of world opinion. Therefore, it must be terminated by any means necessary. Gardner flew home that same night with a plan.

There was a mass meeting at Shiloh. A crowd of six hundred began to recapture the emotion of the December meetings, and now in the summer heat the people waved hand fans painted with Bible scenes and mopped their brows with handkerchiefs. Outside, a smaller crowd of juke-joint Negroes and early-evening drinkers took it upon themselves to drive the police observers out of the Harlem section of town. They lofted bricks and bottles at the squad cars. The first loud noises of dented metal attracted a sizable crowd from the surrounding neighborhood. By unspoken rules, the authorities had allowed the city's Negroes certain license inside Harlem—King and other marchers had been arrested only when they reached the boundary of white Albany—but now spontaneous hostilities erupted against the very presence of the police on Negro territory. Heavily armed but also heavily outnumbered, officers sought shelter against random bombardment. The shouts and thuds of the violence pulled people out of Shiloh in droves, with the church people shouting at the others for calm.

Chief Pritchett huddled with his besieged men, who were in a war mood. Ordering them to refrain from retaliation, he asked his most trusted officer, Captain Ed Friend, to follow him into the hostile Negro crowd. “If you get hit, don't stop,” Pritchett told Friend, then pushed his way to the closed front door of the church and shouted, “Bo, I'm coming in.” Emmanuel “Bo” Jackson, the unofficial sergeant-at-arms for the Albany Movement, shouted back, “Come on in!” and the two policemen entered the sanctum of the opposition in full uniform, with guns on their hips. Slater King called out over the commotion, “I notice we have in our presence Chief Pritchett!” When he offered the chief Shiloh's pulpit, the crowd fell into a dead silence. Then, as Pritchett made his way forward to speak, someone shouted, “Let's give him a hand!” and an ovation rolled on for fully half a minute. Those outside who had expected to hear angry words, perhaps even gunshots, could only stare at each other in wonder.

Pritchett reached the pulpit with his neck, face, and ears flushed deep red. “I appreciate the opportunity to be here,” he said, half smiling. “I have often been told I would be welcome. I didn't know whether I would or not.” Reporter Pat Watters, while marveling at the chief's bravery, perceived a rich mixture of tone in his voice. There was some gratitude and respect, even some fellowship, he thought, combined with an edge of half-humorous sarcasm that Watters saw as the protective coating for Pritchett's racial authority. “I never have interrupted your peaceful assemblies,” Pritchett told the crowd. “…Many people misunderstand your philosophy of nonviolence, but we respect your policy. I ask your cooperation in keeping Albany peaceful. This business of throwing rocks is not good.” The crowd applauded again. Pritchett contained his relief until he reached the police huddle outside. Captain Friend confessed to wobbly legs. “Don't take me back in there, Chief,” he said, trying to grin. “Nobody but the laundry man will know how scared I was.”

Once the rock throwers had melted away, Slater King returned to the Shiloh pulpit to lay bare a conflicted appraisal. On the one hand, he praised the congregation for welcoming Chief Pritchett in the charitable spirit of nonviolence, and for proving that the movement people inside were not like the hoodlums outside. On the other hand, he lamented the signs of sycophantic admiration for Pritchett. These were deep roots of segregation, he said. After all, the very purpose of their meeting had been to exhort people to challenge Pritchett's authority by offering up their bodies to his jail. “We want to give him respect,” said Slater King, “but not like he's some kind of God. Maybe I am guilty of this myself. It's the system we've been conditioned by—like we've been brainwashed.”

Later that night, Pritchett and Albany's leading white citizens did some soul-searching of their own. B. C. Gardner was back from Washington with a stark proposal: they should pay Martin Luther King's fine surreptitiously and then expel him from the jail. There was no other way, he explained, and they must be prepared to lie about it. If it became known that the city fathers of Albany had imprisoned King and then paid to free him, they would become a laughingstock. For men who prided themselves on their Southern code of honor, the lying part was a sour requirement indeed—all the more so because it was a Negro who forced the awful choice upon them. Still, they could not very well pressure the Kennedys to spring King, as it would look like a defeat for Albany at federal hands. Besides, the Kennedys were doing all they could. They had refrained from intervening or speaking out on King's behalf; they had tacitly endorsed the scheme, and promised not to expose it. Robert Kennedy had impressed on them that the national security and prestige of the United States suffered every day that King was in jail. This provided a patriotic salve, making their hoax certainly bearable and almost noble. Chief Pritchett consulted Mayor Kelley about how to reduce the elements of outright falsehood in the scheme. Then he summoned his desk sergeant to give him stern instructions on how Martin Luther King was to be released from jail.

At dawn the next morning, July 12, B. C. Gardner appeared at the deserted jail desk with $356 in cash. “Here's Martin Luther King's fine,” he said “Turn him out.” By prearrangement, the desk sergeant made out the receipt not to Gardner but to King and Abernathy. Gardner then disappeared, his part completed. At 7:30
A.M.
, Pritchett sent to the cell-block for King and Abernathy, instructing them to change into their own clothes for a meeting in his office. When they arrived there, thinking the clothes were for the benefit of some important intermediary, Pritchett informed them that their fines had been paid and they were free to go. In fact, they had to go.

The two stunned preachers demanded an explanation, whereupon Pritchett gave them what was to be his stock response through the ensuing publicity storm. All he knew, he said, was that the jailer had told him that “an unidentified, well-dressed Negro male” had paid the fines, asking not to be identified, and Pritchett did not want to question the jailer further about it, for fear of subjecting him to reprisal. Two of Pritchett's detectives drove King and Abernathy to Dr. Anderson's house, where Wyatt Walker slammed the door against the reporters who came just behind. The reporters overheard spirited arguments about what had happened. Was it possible that the Albany whites had an accomplice among the city's professional Negroes? If Pritchett was lying, how could they prove it?