Parting the Waters (113 page)

This was President Kennedy's strongest statement on civil rights to date. Given a shining opportunity to address the issues at the center of the Administration's civil rights strategy—violence and voting rights—Kennedy responded unequivocally. “We appreciate the strong and forthright words from the President of our nation,” King said the next night. “We need his moral support. We are praying that these words will be translated into powerful action.” He spoke at a prayer service at the ruins of Mount Olive Baptist Church, having led a nighttime car caravan out into Terrell County from Albany. The caravan itself was a daring act, inconceivable before the transformations of the Albany Movement. King announced that Nelson Rockefeller had pledged $10,000 to rebuild the three burned churches, and he presented each of the three pastors with a $1,000 check from the SCLC toward the same purpose.

The Kennedy and King statements proved to be no more than a rhetorical interlude between church burnings, as the I Hope Baptist Church of Terrell County was consumed by flame three nights later, torched by a kerosene bomb. This time, four of the arsonists were so brazen that the first FBI agents on the scene found them still there watching the blaze, drinking beer. Arrested, the four suspects confessed to the FBI. Justice Department lawyers, scrutinizing their statements as to motive, found them difficult to translate in the idiom of the Supreme Court's opaque ruling in the 1944
Screws
case, but in general they had more to do with hating Negroes than with voting rights. At any rate, this was the interpretation placed upon them in Washington when the Attorney General revealed that the federal government, having solved the case in one day, was surrendering the suspects to Sheriff Mathews for trial in state court. The Justice Department's announcement explained the move as follows: “The evidence in this case was given to local authorities because the FBI investigation established that the persons responsible did not burn the church specifically to intimidate Negroes from registering to vote, Attorney General Kennedy said…. The Attorney General personally called Mr. Hoover and commended the quick, decisive action by FBI agents involved in the investigation of this case.” Ironically, the four defendants in the arson would be convicted by a state jury—the only conviction in the many such cases in Georgia. All the major cases were “solved,” in the sense that the FBI produced a report naming the responsible parties, but few went to trial in federal court and there were no convictions, in part because of obstacles such as Judge Elliott in the federal trial courts.

The Justice Department and the FBI both faced extremely hostile conditions in Southern courts and Klan counties. Both performed poorly at times. In general, two years in office had made Justice officials more rather than less timid about criminal prosecutions in their showcase area of voting rights. Burke Marshall said as much in a private meeting with Fred Shuttlesworth and other civil rights leaders that September, when he warned that the Justice Department offered no “protection guarantees” to those running registration programs in the South. Federal powers were limited, he told them, and so essentially they must look out for themselves. Hearing this, the Negroes complained bitterly that Marshall and others had steered them into voter registration precisely because it was the area of clearest federal authority.

 

Four more Negro churches were burned in Georgia within ten days after the fire at I Hope Baptist. King was in New York at the time, accepting the death of his hopes for a Second Emancipation Proclamation from President Kennedy. This was difficult for him, as the idea of a great symbolic presidential stroke against segregation long had been dear not only to him but to officials within the Kennedy Administration. USIA Director Edward R. Murrow, for example, had urged the proposal on Kennedy since his first days in office. He said the centennial of Lincoln's attack on slavery offered an ideal opportunity to invoke the full authority of the White House against segregation.

In the summer of 1862, Lincoln had surprised his cabinet with a private reading of his original draft proclamation, which abolished slavery in the areas under Confederate rebellion. He defended it as a war measure that would weaken the Southern economy and force Jefferson Davis to divert more soldiers to security against slave rebellion. Moreover, Lincoln argued, the measure would give the Union war effort a public purpose that would make it impossible for European powers to intervene on the side of the Confederacy. For these reasons and others, Lincoln ignored the objections of some of his cabinet members, saying that he would make public his proclamation as soon as the Union Army achieved a victory in battle. Timing was important to Lincoln, because he did not want the proclamation to be seen as a desperate act. The humiliations of the second battle of Bull Run forced him to wait a month, but only days after the slaughterous stalemate at Antietam forced Robert E. Lee to retreat back to Virginia, Lincoln made good on his word.

Now, one hundred Septembers later, the debate within the Kennedy Administration had nothing to do with a new proclamation but whether President Kennedy should show up at the official ceremony honoring the last one. At a White House meeting, Kenneth O'Donnell startled planners of the event by announcing that he had never heard of plans for Kennedy to make the major address, and had in fact scheduled the President to make a speech outside Washington. “We were amazed,” responded a congressman from the delegation, in a letter listing no fewer than a dozen White House commitments made earlier that year, including two conversations with the President himself. Copies of the letter went to the three presidential aides most involved in planning for the centennial—Arthur Schlesinger, Ted Sorensen, and Lee White. A final round of internal lobbying ensued, but O'Donnell held his ground. For the President to appear was to draw attention to the occasion, and thus invite comparisons between Kennedy's performance and Lincoln's.

In New York, raising funds to rebuild the burned churches in Georgia, King had to balance Kennedy's coolness to the Emancipation celebration against Nelson Rockefeller's ardor. This was Rockefeller's day, honoring a president of his Republican Party and summoning up nearly a century of Rockefeller family interest in the welfare of the former slaves. Fittingly, Rockefeller possessed the original parchment of Lincoln's Proclamation. When he invited King to appear with him at the Emancipation dinner of the New York State Civil War Centennial Commission, King's advisers discussed the drawbacks at length. Kennedy still held the power, they said, and was notoriously sensitive about Rockefeller's presidential ambitions. If King embraced Rockefeller too closely, he risked driving Kennedy toward Southern Democrats.

The FBI wiretap on Stanley Levison picked up discussions of the Rockefeller invitation. Was the New York dinner too “Republican,” asked the advisers. Soothed by Clarence Jones's discovery that there were Democrats on the New York centennial commission, they turned to the delicate, complicating issue of money. So far, Nelson Rockefeller had delivered only $5,000 of the $50,000 that Wyatt Walker said he had promised to deliver to the SCLC and the Gandhi Society. Now Rockefeller had pledged another $10,000 toward the burned churches. His invitation to King conflicted with a scheduled fund-raiser in New York, so that in effect King was being asked to give up hard funds in part to cultivate the maker of delinquent pledges. This presented a dilemma common to those dependent on philanthropy: whether to call a rich man on his promises. They also debated whether they could safely push to solicit the Emancipation dinner guests—Rockefeller's political friends. Legally, they could not pass the hat at the dinner itself, which was a state function, but could they ask for the mailing list, or perhaps even invite the guests to an SCLC reception across the street? “I don't think…this choice [is] as hard as you are making it,” Levison advised them. “Governor Rockefeller is a sophisticated man. He knows the need for funds, that that money is in that crowd and it would be a pity not to get it. There isn't a multi-millionaire I know that didn't want to see other people contributing when he contributed. Anything they hate is for them to contribute alone. I don't think it would sit badly unless it was said crudely that Dr. King would not come unless he is assured [of funds].”

At the Emancipation dinner, King criticized President Kennedy's sluggishness on civil rights, pointing among other things to his unfulfilled “stroke of the pen” campaign promise on housing discrimination. Rockefeller followed King with similar criticisms of Kennedy, then packed up the Emancipation Proclamation and headed for the centennial celebration in Washington on Saturday, September 22. He joined a fervent but relatively small crowd on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Archibald MacLeish read a poem on Lincoln. Adlai Stevenson eulogized the Emancipator as the pride of Illinois. Robert Kennedy represented the Administration but did not speak; instead a tape-recorded message came over the loudspeakers from President Kennedy himself, who was spending the weekend in Newport, Rhode Island. The tape-recorded speech—final product of all the lobbying—was a skillful address, stirring in its evocations of history. Only specialists in civil rights bridled at the President's summary of events since Lincoln's Proclamation, which consigned race problems generally to the past. “A structure of segregation divided the Negro from his fellow American citizen,” Kennedy's voice told the crowd. “He was denied equal opportunity in education and employment. In many places he could not vote. For a long time, he was exposed to violence and to terror. These were bitter years of humiliation and deprivation. Looking back at this period…it can be said, I believe, that Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves, but that in this century since, our Negro citizens have emancipated themselves.” Rockefeller then made a brief speech on the Proclamation itself. Partisan rivalries among the politicians were subdued by the state occasion, then washed completely aside by Mahalia Jackson's performance of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

King did not appear at the Lincoln Memorial. He had gone to jail twice more since handing President Kennedy his own dream proclamation, and now he turned with chastened expectations to January 1, 1963—the centennial of the Proclamation's effective date, the Day of Jubilee itself. He hoped Kennedy could be persuaded to do something more dramatic then. More immediately, King was headed for Birmingham, where President Kennedy sent him a warm telegram “on the occasion of the sixth annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” Kennedy praised King's “personal conduct and your dynamic leadership,” which had gained “the respect and admiration of the great majority of the people of the United States.” This telegram was a trophy of the convention, read publicly to the four hundred delegates gathering that September in the heartland of segregation.

The balmy shower of official telegrams was becoming a welcome staple at SCLC conventions. What was new in Birmingham was an undercurrent of impending collision that belied the surface calm of the gala banquets and the usual long-winded committee meetings. For the first time, FBI agents planted informants inside the SCLC convention and sent daily reports to headquarters. And for the first time, the mere fact that King was scheduled to visit a segregated city already had led to an unprecedented—and tentatively productive—round of negotiations with white leaders. In this respect, King achieved more in Birmingham before his plane touched the ground than he had during all the months of battering in Albany.

The tension was the result of two currents that had been eating slowly at the stability of Bull Connor's segregation—one uniting the city's Negroes for protest, the other dividing its whites. Birmingham's parks had been closed all year. Its baseball team was gone. Sporadic Klan violence continued. Since the jailing of Fred Shuttlesworth in January, Negroes had supported what began as a student boycott of downtown stores; at its peak the boycott caused some merchants to complain of a 40 percent decline in sales. And King had planned all year to come to Birmingham—not just with his convention's business but with its manpower, to support Shuttlesworth in his long-awaited showdown with Connor. Moreover, King planned to return in 1963 “for a real mobilization of our civil rights forces,” he wrote William Shortridge early in September. Shortridge was Shuttlesworth's treasurer and “connectional man,” a whirlwind funeral director of Daddy King's generation, Howard '23, and King Jr.'s fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha. When night riders sprayed his home with gunfire the previous March, Shortridge had dived safely for cover behind the wall of his front porch as the first slug zipped through the front wall and knocked the telephone receiver from his wife's hand. Since then, Shortridge had erected a small extra bedroom on the side of his porch to house the volunteers who guarded his house every night.

On the whites' side, Chamber of Commerce president Sidney Smyer had been groping slowly for eighteen months—since the shock of seeing front-page photographs in Japanese newspapers of the Birmingham mob attacking the Freedom Riders—toward a solution of the cliffhanger riddle: how to get rid of Bull Connor without so much as mentioning his name. Conceding that Connor was politically untouchable as the elected, independent police commissioner, Smyer and his allies hatched a circuitous plan to remove the office instead of the man. Over months of meetings with lawyers, teachers, civics professors, and assorted do-gooder groups, they developed the idea that Birmingham urgently needed a modern, “mayor-city council” form of government, such as Atlanta and other prosperous cities possessed.

There was realpolitik behind the façade of reform. People could campaign for the new structure without overtly challenging Connor or segregation; they could even tout him for the new office of mayor. If the new city government was ratified, however, the reformers could hope that the marginal Birmingham voter might look for more polish in a mayor than in a police commissioner.
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To implement the plan, Smyer first tried to recruit a committee of twenty-five “silk-stocking people” to head a public committee, but the nominees all declined with regret, knowing that Smyer's sleight of hand would not fool Connor. Then Smyer had settled for a committee of five hundred “anybodies,” headed by a house painter named William A. Jenkins. There were small businessmen, disc jockeys, union stewards, and even the head of the local Nixon campaign from the last election. Early that September, the committee achieved its first miracle by filing a petition signed by some 12,000 citizens, more than enough to trigger a special election on the proposal for a new city constitution.