Parting the Waters (111 page)

At the White House, a stunned Arthur Schlesinger wrote in his journal of his vivid memories of Monroe from the Kennedy birthday party in May: “I do not think I have seen anyone so beautiful; I was enchanted by her manner and her wit, at once so masked, so ingenuous and so penetrating. But one felt a terrible unreality about her—as if talking to someone under water. Bobby and I engaged in mock competition for her; she was most agreeable to him and pleasant to me—but then she receded into her own glittering mist.” From Atlanta, Dora McDonald sent her thoughts to King at the Albany jail. “Poor Marilyn Monroe,” she wrote. “She needed something to live for. It's a pity for anyone to feel that life is not worth living at 36.”

 

There were no marches in Albany that week, as no one could squeeze new volunteers out of the Shiloh mass meetings. With the reinforcements dried up, King's presence in jail carried a larger share of the pressure on Albany officials. William Kunstler prepared a habeas corpus motion to force the city to vacate its charges or bring him swiftly to trial, and when the recorder's court set the trial date for Friday, Anderson and Wyatt Walker fixed that day as the target for a renewed campaign. They would either celebrate King's victory in court or stage a protest march against his conviction.

With the showdown set, the triangular negotiations between the Albany Movement, the city, and the Justice Department intensified, and on Wednesday the Justice Department took its first public action in the protracted controversy. Jerry Heilbron, the mild-mannered Arkansan who was supposed to charm the Southerners out of segregation, went into Judge Elliott's court and filed an amicus brief in support of the Albany Movement, saying that the city of Albany did not come into court “with clean hands.” City officials already were using police power and local ordinances to negate federal court orders, Heilbron argued, and they should not be granted the additional weapon of a federal ban on “demonstrations seeking to introduce constitutional rights into Albany.”

Robert Kennedy felt strong practical incentives for making such a move. After all, if a federal injunction was granted and upheld, he and not Laurie Pritchett would become responsible for repressing demonstrations against segregation. Kennedy did not want that. Still, for all its care, the amicus brief spoke loudly to the press. “U.S. Intervenes on Negroes' Side,” announced the
Times
. King issued a statement hailing the Administration's “legal and moral support” for the Albany Movement. Volunteers raised their hands at the Shiloh mass meetings, which were full of spirit again. Wyatt Walker planned a Mothers' March in which the wives of the leaders—Coretta King, Juanita Abernathy, Jean Young, Norma Anderson, Ann Walker, Lotte Kunstler, Marion King, Carol (Mrs. C. B.) King, and even Diane Nash Bevel, with her infant daughter—would effect another dramatic change in the clientele of Laurie Pritchett's jail. All these fresh enthusiasms weighed on the calculations of the city officials.

Police guards escorted King and Abernathy from jail to the local recorder's court on Friday morning, August 10. It was the first day of the third week of their latest stretch in jail, and exactly one month since they had stepped into the same courtroom for sentencing on their original Albany arrests of the past December. The trial before Judge Durden did not last long. C. B. King, his head still wrapped in bandages, raised the defense that his clients had not been disorderly, and that the charges were a subterfuge for the city's actual purpose: to enforce segregation. He was encouraged by the city attorney's announcement that Albany no longer enforced any segregation laws against contrary federal rulings, but Judge Durden soon delivered a verdict that straddled the entrenched lines of the political siege. Finding King, Abernathy, Anderson, and Slater King guilty as charged, he imposed upon each of them a $200 fine and sixty days in jail. Then he suspended the sentences on condition that the defendants violate no laws.

Elated but wary, C. B. King spoke up to ask whether this condition meant that the defendants must obey the city's segregation ordinances. No, replied Judge Durden, because the Supreme Court had expressly overruled those ordinances. After this, the defendants filed out to celebrate. Two pillars of Albany politics had just renounced segregation. King announced that he would go home to preach at Ebenezer that Sunday, and Mayor Kelley all but acknowledged that his departure was part of a compromise package, offsetting the concessions. “I think the Attorney General's intervention…has given Dr. King plenty of reason to leave,” he told reporters. “He's accomplished his purpose.”

That afternoon, the FBI wiretap on Stanley Levison's office phone picked up a call to Levison at his home. His secretary, sounding uncomfortable, told her boss that she did not want to ruin his weekend, but a court summons had just arrived in connection with a financial dispute at one of his rental properties. Levison replied that nothing could spoil his weekend, “because they suspended sentence on Martin.” This was a “real victory,” he said, and not just in Albany, because King's stature now cast its shadow across the South. King's opponents only recently had thought he had overreached himself, Levison added, and that nobody would raise much of a fuss if they let him rot in jail. Now even Albany had admitted that it could not contain the “tornado” of locking King away in defense of segregation. Levison told his secretary not to fret over money or the summons. His analysis of the Albany verdict was one piece of Levison intelligence that Director Hoover did not see fit to pass on to the Attorney General.

 

Levison's long-range optimism about King's personal influence did not guarantee the success of the Albany Movement itself, which immediately began to sputter. When teams fanned out through the city on Saturday to test the city's sworn cancellation of the segregation laws, Laurie Pritchett and his police units scrambled after them. True to their promise, the city officials made no arrests under the segregation laws, but neither did they permit the slightest breach of the custom. They closed the city library to prevent the first Negro from checking out a book. They closed the white parks when integrated groups attempted to play tennis. When a doubles match retreated to the all-Negro George Washington Carver Park, city employees raced up to cut the nets just before the first integrated point could be played. Thwarted, William Kunstler angrily smashed a tennis ball high into the air. The racial dispute came to approximate a kindergarten standoff. “King or No King,” declared the
Herald
, “City Avows No Compromise.”

King was back in Atlanta, preaching at Ebenezer. The morning crowd spilled out of the church down into the basement auditorium. Daddy King presided happily. His good mood bubbled up repeatedly during his son's sermon, as he rapped his cane on the floor in agreement and shouted out a gruff command, “You hear that, deacons!” The younger King announced that he must return to Albany in light of the latest reversal.

He appeared the next night at Shiloh, while James Bevel preached to the spillover mass meeting across the street at Mount Zion. They delayed renewed demonstrations for two days, because the City Commission had granted them a major concession: the commission would receive its first delegation of local Negroes that Wednesday night for the presentation of grievances. Expectations of the historic occasion were justifiably low. At the appointed hour, with thick clusters of Albany Movement people waiting outside city hall in a rainstorm, Mayor Kelley recognized Marion Page. “I am M. S. Page, a law-abiding citizen of Albany,” Page began, emphasizing the fact that he had refrained from joining the protest marches. He read a petition urging the commission to consider the Albany Movement's original demands. When he finished, the mayor politely but firmly announced that such racial matters remained in litigation before Judge Elliott. Therefore, Kelley said, the commission deemed it improper to discuss or comment upon them. Page was excused.

At the same hour, King was returning from nearby Lee County, where the first jolt of late-summer violence hastened the decline of the Albany Movement. Arsonists had just firebombed the Shady Grove Baptist Church, in which SNCC volunteers had conducted a registration meeting four days earlier. The Lee County sheriff completed his investigation within two hours, speculating that an electrical storm might have started the fire, but FBI agents pursued leads pointing clearly to political sabotage. All that remained of the tiny church was a lonely chimney, and the charred remains of the clapboard walls and pine benches still were smoldering when King, wearing his customary suit and dress shoes, stepped gingerly across a dirt field off the remote stretch of Highway 195 to join a mournful group of church members at an impromptu memorial service.

Back in Albany, he faced gloomy tactical realities. It was obvious that the city officials, having made the compromises necessary to relieve the public pressure of King's imprisonment, were laying down a stern challenge to the Albany Movement. The whites were demonstrating that they too could be galvanized by humiliation and pain, and in the face of their raw power the Negroes found their options much reduced. Mass marches were out of the question, as the wrung-out souls at the mass meetings no longer volunteered for jail. King alone could retrieve headlines by marching back to jail, but the most he could hope to gain was another suspended sentence, with greatly diminished effect. King called for reinforcements, announcing a nationwide appeal to clergymen.

Two weeks later, seventy-four of them, including nine rabbis, eight Catholic laymen from Chicago, and more than forty Protestant ministers, followed the route from Shiloh to face Laurie Pritchett and his men. Their arrest sparked only minor interest, however, as everyone knew it was only a one-day jailing in the wake of much greater dramas. The mass arrest inspired the headline writers of the Albany
Herald
to merry alliteration: “Crowd Cheers as Cops Clap Clerical Crowd in Calaboose.” And it provoked a churlish debate on the floor of the United States Senate, where Georgia's senators told New York's senators that Albany-style law enforcement had made Albany safer than Central Park, preacher arrests or not.

Reviews of King's performance in Albany were harsh. Laurie Pritchett announced publicly that he knew—and that King knew—the cause of integration was set back “at least ten years” by events in Albany. The NAACP's Ruby Hurley observed tartly that “Albany was successful only if the objective was to go to jail.” Slater King concluded that the Albany Movement had spread its demands too broadly, and movement critics compiled a catalog of King's tactical mistakes. The NAACP's
Crisis
magazine was preparing an article by two movement professors at Spelman, Staughton Lynd and Vincent Harding, which encompassed nearly all the conflicting criticisms: King's shortcomings as an absentee media star, his failure to rely more heavily on the courts, his insensitivity to local whites, his reluctance to go to jail more frequently, errors in handling the bus strike, and so on. While the movement critics wrote from the urgent conviction that the Albany Movement might have succeeded with better leadership, the major press critics simply observed that King had lost and Albany had won.
The New York Times
, noting that “the public life of Albany remains segregated,” asserted that King's most exhaustive campaign had failed because of Pritchett's skillful opposition, “internal rivalries” among the Negroes, “tactical errors” by the Negroes, and the growing unity of hostile whites.

More burdensome to King than the multiplicity of his critics was their detachment. Since he viewed Albany as part of a universal moral issue, with only one clear and just resolution that ought to be as compelling to a white reporter in Iowa as to himself, it nettled him to see people of all opinions stand aside to analyze the results as though segregation might be vindicated, or nonviolence falsified, by his performance in Albany. King felt victimized at the hands of bystanders. He did not believe that the continued enforcement of segregation in Albany lessened the justice of his claims any more than a second-place finish by Jesse Owens would have ennobled Hitler's ideas. Still, he knew better than to stand completely on righteousness. The world tested causes by combat, and King had known since Montgomery that a movement even of the purest spirit cannot survive without victories.

In Birmingham, some six weeks after leaving the Albany jail, he reached for the politic view of Albany, insisting that the struggle already was a success. Negro voter registration had more than doubled there in 1962, King told his audience in Birmingham, and had risen by some 30,000 in all of Georgia. One result, he declared, was the victory of the racial moderate Carl Sanders in the recent governor's race. He said the movement already had won over Pritchett and other leading whites of Albany, who were going through the motions of defending a system they believed was, and ought to be, doomed. Fundamental issues were laid bare, hearts changed, backs straightened.

Having strained to put a positive face on Albany (Pritchett was obliged to deny that moderation had crossed his mind), King retired to analyze shortcomings of the Albany Movement by his own lights. Much of his appraisal was implicit in his conception of the next campaign. In strategy sessions, he said he wanted the SCLC in “on the ground floor.” Having learned that it took time to seize the attention of the outside world, he wanted to control the timing and rhythm of the next campaign. In Albany he had been a latecomer, arriving after the mass arrests had peaked, but he was drawing most of the criticism anyway. Nobody was calling Albany a tactical failure for SNCC or the NAACP.