Parting the Waters (108 page)

They could hear seven hundred people singing freedom songs and spirituals in the church. Whenever the singing died down, a speaker gave them a dose of rhetoric and something to pass for an update on the delays. Because most of the regular leadership was huddled around King, the speaking task fell most often to Rev. Samuel B. “Benny” Wells, a stocky, coal-black man of little education. He had immensely broad shoulders, which he used in his regular job as a freight loader at the U.S. Marine depot. On weekends, he pastored a tiny country church called Blue Spring Baptist out in Worth County, some twenty-five miles from Albany. Wells felt out of place in the councils of the city preachers. His strengths were a coarse eloquence and an earthy, forceful presence, plus a lack of inhibiting career goals.

“Take us up!” someone shouted from the congregation, and Wells did his best to oblige. Never had he faced such a crowd. He preached them to an emotional peak, hoping that the bedlam would entice King to make his entrance, but when nothing happened he was obliged to preach them back down again toward a prayer and a new song. Then Wells hastened to the wings for consultations. Once he made his way inside the study and said, “Dr. King, the world is waiting for a message. They are looking and listening for a message tonight.” King nodded. His aides told Wells to hold the crowd because they were not yet certain of the next move. Obliging, Wells stalled until the crowd grew restless, and then he preached them to another peak, and down again. After three or four times through the cycle, Wells could stand it no longer. “I've heard about an injunction, but I haven't seen one! I heard a few names, but my name hasn't been called!” he cried. “But I do know where my name
is
being called. My name is being called on the road to freedom. I can hear the blood of Emmett Till as it calls from the ground!” At this the church erupted in throaty courage that refused to die down until Wells proposed to march out with them. “We will go down to the City Hall,” he said, “and we will protest peacefully the evils that have been grinding the life out of our spirits for ninety-nine years.”

Nearly two hundred people, mostly teenagers, followed Wells out of the church and down the familiar route to the border of the white business district. When Chief Pritchett and a police squadron blocked them at the bus station, Wells fell to his knees in the street. Sweaty, overwrought, and plainly frightened, he prayed aloud for courage until Pritchett could take it no longer. Standing directly over Wells, the police chief said sourly, “All right, Rev, come on and get up, goddamn it. Let's go to jail.” One hundred thirteen people followed Wells into the cell blocks. Others retreated, but a burst of fervor soon moved another fifty to file across Oglethorpe Avenue to join them.

Inside Dr. Anderson's station wagon, King observed from a distance. Although he tried to avoid the note-taking FBI agents, lest they charge that he had violated Judge Elliott's injunction by encouraging the demonstration, he was overjoyed that the ordinary folk of the Albany Movement had marched on their own. “They can stop the leaders,” King said happily, “but they can't stop the people.” Albany's white officials, on the other hand, figured that the enjoined leaders must have connived in the march somehow, in violation of the injunction. They asked the FBI to investigate. Director Hoover shrewdly insisted upon direct orders from the Justice Department. Then FBI headquarters instructed agents to tell each Negro being questioned—including King—that a criminal contempt investigation was being conducted specifically for the Attorney General.

From the perspective of national politics, the main story was that King and the other named defendants had not defied the order. A legal crisis was averted. King was not in jail, and the Wells march was a minor event that the Administration could overlook because it raised no legal challenge or public clamor. “The Negroes finally decided to obey this injunction,” Burke Marshall reported simply to the Attorney General. Similarly, a
New York Times
editorial focused exclusively on King's confrontation with Judge Elliott. “We are glad he [King] is not…leading the Negroes of Albany, Ga., in defiance of a Federal court injunction,” the
Times
declared. “Whatever the shortcomings of local justice in the Deep South, certainly no one knows better than Dr. King that the Federal judiciary is a pillar of the constitutional safeguards his followers have so often been denied.”

 

On Sunday, with the new prisoners farmed out to jails in the surrounding counties, King and Anderson held a press conference. Describing Judge Elliott's injunction as “unjust and unconstitutional,” they told reporters that their lawyers were working to have it vacated by the federal appeals court, headed by Judge Elbert Tuttle, an Eisenhower appointee. It was an uncomfortable session for King. He could denounce the injunction all he wanted, but he felt constrained to say he respected it. He could not advocate any demonstrations or urge his followers to do anything but wait, lest he be found in contempt of Judge Elliott's court. White reporters from Albany pressed him to explain why he had not done more to stop the Wells march.

King began a far more harrowing ordeal late that afternoon when he agreed to sit for a private gripe session with the SNCC leaders in Albany—Sherrod, Jones, Reagon, and Forman, plus Yale Law School student Tim Jenkins, who had flown in for the crisis. It began politely enough in Slater King's backyard, with the students restating their reasons why King had erred in submitting to Judge Elliott's injunction. This was familiar ground for King, as he half agreed with them, but the criticism escalated rapidly into a general attack on King's character and methods.

The SNCC leaders were in a bind. They wanted a “people's movement,” like SNCC itself, and yet without King, the Wells march had had little impact on the outside world, and without such impact it was nearly impossible to inspire more of Albany's ordinary people to take up the crusade. What they needed was the use of King's influence without his suffocating glory, and it was all the more galling that they were obliged to ask King to reform himself accordingly. To these political differences, each of the SNCC leaders added an acute, private complaint against King. For Charles Sherrod, it was King's pragmatism, his habit of second-guessing the great mystical tide of the movement. For Tim Jenkins, it was King's aura of religion and suffering, which Jenkins thought stigmatized Negroes as an emotional people unequipped for the rigors of politics. For James Forman, it was being older than King and yet dwarfed like a child by his heavily credentialed fame.

The students said King was too dreamy to have the cunning that the movement required, but they also said he was too attached to his worldly status to lose himself in zealous commitment. They told him they resented his control of the press—how much they hated it when reporters in Albany would phone King in Chicago or New York for an interpretation of events in Albany. Forman attacked his caution in the face of the Elliott injunction, saying that King only wanted to protect his “fund-raising base” among the white people who read
The New York Times
. They recounted their grievances over the division of movement funds, arguing that the money should be controlled by the Albany Movement instead of the SCLC. They denounced Wyatt Walker as Iago or a martinet, and King for hiring him. Above all, they said King was too middle-class. Using a favorite term of opprobrium among aristocrats and proletarians alike, they called him “bourgeois.”

It went on hour after hour, into the night. King flinched defensively but never flashed in anger. When indignant staff aides jumped in to defend him, King waved them aside. Marion King, Slater King's wife, kept bringing trays of food to sustain them through the argument, and each time she came outside from the kitchen she winced and nearly cried out against the scathing names she heard being heaped upon King. She held back, however, as did her husband and the other observers. King and the students had created their own charged space. Ironically, the confrontation gradually took on a kind of intimacy. As tempers and political labels gave way to introspection, King talked increasingly to Charles Jones, the student most like himself. Jones moved so near King's chair in the yard that he spoke nearly in a whisper.

“Martin, you are the symbol of spiritual integrity,” Jones said. “If
you
say this injunction is a tactical move to co-opt the movement, then everybody will listen and follow you to jail. And you then change the rules. You have done this before, and now we are at a point where you have to provide the leadership even for the Kennedys, as well as the movement. So let's go to jail, bro'. I'm gonna be going. We'll be there together.”

King smiled. “Chuck, do I have to?” he asked. He joked about how difficult it was even to shave in jail—he used an acrid powder to soften his tough beard—and how as a pastor he was accustomed to having his things laid out for him. He and Jones chatted about their experiences in jail, but they seemed to be speaking also of a symbolic level of surrender. Jones had just decided to give up the pulpit. Paradoxically, as only a young Brahmin preacher could do, he kept saying King had to choose his cross over his career.

“Even you have got to grow a little bit more,” Jones told King. “Please listen to me. I love you. You know that. Whenever you've called, I've been there. But now I'm saying this is ahead of you. You've got to accept it.” In the end, exhausted, Jones and King smiled silently at each other. Tim Jenkins later snapped Jones from a kind of trance by complaining that his pitch had been too religious.

King retired late Sunday night to the counsel of his lawyers at the Anderson house, across the street, where Coretta had come for a visit. Battered by criticism and stalemated by the injunction, he was tired. In later years, he jokingly gave thanks for the stamina that allowed him to accomplish something positive in Albany that weekend, when his fourth child, Bernice, was conceived.

On the following afternoon, Marion King drove through the country outside Albany to the Mitchell County jail in Camilla, where the daughter of her maid was among those incarcerated from Saturday's Wells march. Arriving at the hulking, whitewashed jail with plates of freshly baked food, she stood outside the chain-link fence in a throng of other Negroes from Albany, waiting for visitors' hour. They all sang freedom songs and scanned the jailhouse windows for familiar faces. Nothing about the crowd pleased the Mitchell County sheriff and his deputies, who were accustomed to a grimmer atmosphere. (Among their regular prisoners they counted the miserable Charlie Ware, still awaiting trial on attempted murder charges more than a year after the Baker County sheriff shot him three times in the neck.) The mass singing outside foretold another unbearable visitors' period in which the officers would be lost in a sea of Negroes fretting over mail privileges and lost pocket-books. Irritably, to cut down on the noise and bother, the deputies shooed the waiting visitors away from the fence. All skittered backward except for a woman with two small children, who backed up slowly and silently, seemingly unaware of the commotion.

Marion King did not move fast enough. Something about her prompted the sheriff and one uniformed deputy to walk briskly outside. “I mean you!” one shouted. King retreated steadily. She had seen Ella Mae in the jail window and did not want to set an example of cowering in fear. A split second later, the sheriff slapped her sharply across the face. Three-year-old Abena went sprawling from her arms to the pavement. One-year-old DuBois shrieked. As the sheriff slapped her again, the deputy kicked her in the shins, knocking her feet from beneath her, and then kicked her several times more on the ground. She lost an instant to blackout or shock, as the next thing she knew was the sharp pain in her knees, which had struck the pavement. The officers were going back through the gate, and the crowd behind was gasping in horror.

Slater King broke down and cried like a baby that night, so great was his rage at being helpless in the wake of the attack. To complete his frustration, his own brother, C.B., refused to bring a civil action against the assaulting officers. A year's suffering in the Ware case, he said, had convinced him that Negro lawsuits against rural sheriffs were a form of self-torture. Sometime after midnight, an FBI agent arrived to begin investigation of their complaint under the federal police brutality statutes. Marion Cheek, a native Atlantan even larger than Chief Pritchett, began asking questions of Marion King. His detached tone and his insistence on verifiable detail met with wounded outbursts from King and her relatives, who doubted that the federal government would take action in their behalf. Martin Luther King came to Cheek's defense. “Now this gentleman is just trying to do his job,” he said. “Tell him what happened.”

That night King sent off additions to his growing pile of telegrams at the Justice Department. These gained him only two more pro forma responses from Burke Marshall, one pledging to take “appropriate action” and the other stating that “the internal administration of a state penal institution is not a matter over which this Department would have any jurisdiction in the absence of an indication of a violation of federal law.”

 

In Atlanta, Judge Elbert Tuttle vacated Judge Elliott's temporary restraining order the next day, leaving the leaders of the Albany Movement free to demonstrate at least until Elliott held a proper hearing. Mayor Kelley called Tuttle's ruling “incredible.” The Albany
Herald
proclaimed shock at the betrayal (“Judge Tuttle Rules with Negro Leaders”), and editor Gray wrote a somber, front-page editorial entitled “Albany Will Stand.” King and Dr. Anderson, for the other side, sent Mayor Kelley a telegram that fairly dripped with graciousness. “We do not consider the lifting of the injunction a victory,” they wrote. “We…beg you once more, in the name of democracy, human decency and the welfare of Albany, to give us an opportunity to present our grievances to the City Commission immediately.”