Parting the Waters (120 page)

Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, who supervised the dissemination of the five articles, was at the same time lobbying to fend off Robert Kennedy's latest proposal for a government “white paper” on the U.S. Communist Party, which would reveal that the American Communists posed at most a minuscule threat of subversion. The Attorney General wanted to issue the document as a first step toward reducing the FBI's domestic security apparatus—the background checkers, wiretap transcribers, subversive thought specialists, Red squad handlers, and the like—which he considered a gigantic misapplication of manpower. On November 7, however, DeLoach flatly refused Kennedy's latest demand for a white paper. There was a “grave danger,” he wrote, that any such description of the Communist network “would compromise FBI informants.” Kennedy was caught in a classic spy trap: he could not reduce the mission of the informants without endangering them; therefore he must maintain the mission.

The running battle between Hoover and Kennedy defined the larger political context for the escalation of activity against King, as FBI officials were protecting their anti-Communist intelligence apparatus. Enmity toward King was a driving force. O'Dell was a fresh rationale. The missile crisis was a spur and an opportunity. Finally, the original Levison wiretap was up for six-month renewal, which generated bureaucratic pressures to justify past surveillance by extending it. Whatever the mix of these originating factors, the first King operations were highly satisfying from the Bureau's point of view. Not only did its clandestine newspaper attacks cause reverberating psychological distress, as documented by the wiretaps, but the taps also showed that King had no idea who was behind them. Neither King nor anyone else at the SCLC realized that the New Orleans story was merely one of five. Their suspicions of foul play centered on local police forces. King, like everyone else in the civil rights movement, thought of the FBI as an ally—a most reluctant one at times, and certainly the conservative wing of the federal presence, but nevertheless a force that made segregationists nervous. King sought a more active FBI intervention in the South.

That November, Robert Kennedy signed a request from J. Edgar Hoover authorizing the Bureau to add a fourth wiretap on Stanley Levison. This one covered Levison's home, and fulfilled the agents' hopes of intercepting conversations with King late at night. Such blanket eavesdropping was beyond the reach of King's vision. Even at “tip-toe stance,” he would not have been prepared for it. What he saw was a very different document signed that same day by a different Kennedy: President Kennedy issued his long-delayed executive order on racial discrimination in housing. King knew very well that it had been whittled down so that it barely resembled Kennedy's “stroke of a pen” promise from the 1960 campaign. The anti-discrimination order excluded all existing housing, and all new housing except that owned or financed directly by the federal government. King also knew that the order was issued as quietly as possible on the eve of Thanksgiving—“deliberately sandwiched,” as Ted Sorensen later wrote, between dramatic presidential announcements on Soviet bombers and the China-India border war. The White House excluded reporters from the signing ceremony, and restricted the event to civil rights staff people. Still, for all these drawbacks, King saw that Kennedy was more of a potential ally than enemy. Publicly, King praised the new order as a step that “carries the whole nation forward to the realization of the American dream.”

 

That Thanksgiving weekend, students gathered for SNCC's Southwide conference in Nashville, where James Lawson's movement was completing its third year of nonviolent demonstrations. After the conference, students from distant regions joined wave after wave of sit-ins against diehard segregationist establishments. The owner of the Tic-Toc Restaurant sprayed a fire extinguisher into the face of Sam Block, who was visiting from his voter registration project with Bob Moses in Greenwood, Mississippi. Two policemen dragged John Lewis to jail from the same restaurant a week later, as the daily demonstrations continued to draw headlines and huge crowds. Privately, there was gossip about a cultural divide along the picket lines. Lewis worried about a breakdown in nonviolent discipline, as evidenced by the casual dress, cigarette-smoking, and overall lack of reverence on the part of some guest demonstrators. In reply, some of the more sophisticated Northern students snickered at Nashville's schoolmarmish regimen, calling Lewis a “square.” Still, they all went to jail together.

The movement gossip about King focused upon his performance in Albany. It was a year since the formation of the Albany Movement, and the anniversary was honored by a week-long series of nightly mass meetings, patterned after a church revival. King, addressing the meeting at Third Kiokee Baptist Church, seemed ill at ease as he announced his intention to organize a boycott of segregated businesses “on the national economic level.” This proposal was no more than embryonic at the time, and destined to be rejected as impractical, but feelings of pride and delicate sentiment urged King to create the impression of something big. After all that had been said and done in Albany, he could not bring himself to tell those people that he was leaving them for another city, such as Birmingham. Nor could he admit that he had abandoned hopes of a breakthrough in Albany. Instead, he retreated behind a cloud of grandiose but vague plans. “I am willing to come back to Albany and go to jail, if necessary,” he assured them.

To coincide with the Albany Movement anniversary, the Southern Regional Council published a study that Claude Sitton summarized accurately in a
New York Times
story headlined “President Chided Over Albany, Ga.: Fails to Guard Negro Rights.” While the study criticized nearly every major party to Albany's year-long crisis—the Justice Department, the local police, the FBI, and the Negro leaders themselves—it laid primary responsibility upon President Kennedy for his Administration's failure to protect constitutional rights. Sitton quoted the study's assertion that the federal government “‘has hovered about Albany from the beginning. Incredibly, in this whole time, it has not acted.'” The record, contrasting sharply with President Kennedy's campaign promises of bold action, showed clearly that “the Government will not move in racial controversies unless there is uncontrolled violence.” Sitton's story, which played on the front page, lit a fuse of skittering, unbalanced racial perceptions.

King left Albany to preach at New York's Riverside Church on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, three days after the Sitton story was published. After the service, a
Times
reporter approached King while he was removing his clerical robes in the pastor's chambers and asked for comments on the Southern Regional Council's Albany study. In the story, which appeared the next day, King was depicted as endorsing the study in all its particulars, including the criticisms of his own strategic shortcomings. But the headline trumpeted a radical change of interpretation: “Dr. King Says F.B.I. in Albany, Ga., Favors Segregationists.” Suddenly the critic was King instead of the Southern Regional Council. More important, the target was the FBI instead of President Kennedy.

King might as well have hurled lightning bolts into J. Edgar Hoover's office. Hoover's top assistants immediately exchanged a flurry of indignant memos, as they did whenever the Bureau was criticized publicly. Assistant Director Alex Rosen interpreted the remarks attributed to King as further evidence that he was under Communist “domination.” Proposals for retaliation rose up through the Bureau's third-highest and second-highest officials, Alan Belmont and Clyde Tolson, to Hoover himself. Significantly, they chose to let the story stand in the white world, where public challenge risked upsetting segregationist whites as well as the Kennedy Administration. For tactical reasons, the Bureau channeled a vengeful response into the Negro world. As King well knew, the FBI did not lack friendly contacts in the upper reaches of the Negro press. Bureau officials prevailed on representatives of
Jet
and
Ebony
, on the publisher of the four
Afro-American
newspapers, and on John Sengstacke, Robert Abbott's heir at the Chicago
Defender
. The prompt result was a series of rejoinders to King in the nation's largest Negro journals. All the articles focused on one statement the
Times
attributed to King: “One of the great problems we face with the FBI in the South is that the agents are white Southerners who have been influenced by the mores of the community. To maintain their status, they have to be friendly with the local police and people who are promoting segregation. Every time I saw FBI men in Albany, they were with the local police force.”

From this complaint the FBI-inspired stories plucked the issue of birth: they pointed out that four of the five regular FBI agents in Albany were Northerners. Then, having refuted King on an issue of fact, the stories denied that the FBI had erred in the slightest.
Jet
declared accurately that the Justice Department, not the FBI, was holding up prosecution of Sheriff Campbell for beating C. B. King. The editors warned King against making the FBI a “scapegoat,” and advised him to “take the matter up with the President and the Attorney General, bub.” More stridently, the Chicago
Defender
story quoted Deke DeLoach's charge that the “statements by Dr. King reveal a total ignorance, not only of the true character of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, but also of the FBI record in protecting civil rights.”

The Bureau was correct that four of the five Albany agents were Northerners, but it was also true that Marion Cheek, the only Southerner, took personal charge of civil rights complaints. This proved very little in itself, as Cheek was proud of his record in cases of violent excesses by segregationists. As a key witness in the upcoming Charlie Ware lawsuit, he would tick off facts supporting his conclusion that Sheriff Johnson had shot Ware in cold blood, and would scoff at the respectable Albany segregationists who proclaimed Gator Johnson's innocence. At worst Cheek was a modified segregationist, who had gotten along fairly well with King. Now King's remarks embittered him, not just for the aspersions against his professional integrity but also for the affront to the Director. Cheek nearly worshipped Hoover, telling everyone how the old man had once granted him a station transfer when his wife was sick.

King made a mistake about the birthplaces of the agents. It was a less trivial mistake to be drawn into a dispute about whether Hoover or the Kennedy Administration was more to blame in Albany. On instructions from Hoover, DeLoach called King's office to seek an immediate appointment so that he and William Sullivan, head of the intelligence division, could set King straight on the facts. When Dora McDonald put him off, saying that King was secluded at work on a book of sermons, DeLoach asked the Atlanta SAC to set up the appointment for him. The SAC reported the next day that he had had no better luck—King was busy traveling. Although the request was presented as an informal one, not connected to any official FBI investigation, DeLoach huffily resented King's failure to schedule the interview. He never called King again. He did not write King a letter setting forth the Bureau's objections to the
Times
article. DeLoach did not attempt to verify the accuracy or balance of the story, nor consider that King had any but the basest motives for his comments. Instead, two months later, he closed the matter so suddenly and with such scalding prose as to suggest that he was content to preserve the purest grievance against King. “It would appear obvious that Rev. King does not desire to be told the true facts,” DeLoach wrote to his superiors. “He obviously uses deceit, lies and treachery as propaganda to further his own causes.” In the two remaining paragraphs of his memo, DeLoach used variants of the word “lie” five times in reference to King.

All this took place within the bowels of the government, precipitated by one newspaper article and two unreturned phone calls. This secret fury, in turn, was partially the result of the Southern Regional Council's hidden role in brokering the Voter Education Project. During that long process, Leslie Dunbar and other SRC officials had passed along to civil rights leaders the Kennedy Administration's assurances that voter registration would be a haven of federal protection. Now Dunbar, though a Kennedy supporter and a cautious man by nature, felt personally responsible for the unanswered violence coming down on the Moses project in Mississippi and the SNCC registration projects around Albany. His own frustrations with the Administration helped drive the Albany study to public light, but Dunbar could not refer explicitly to the broken promises without compromising the shaky tax arrangements on which VEP rested. Here again the public face of racial politics was fatefully disingenuous: everything seemed as obvious as black and white—tediously so—and yet the central dramas remained invisible.

 

From different worlds, King, Hoover, and the Kennedys took the measure of one another as they spun toward the new year. Each of them saw things that were concealed from the others, and ignored things that were plain. King alone knew they were heading for Birmingham; he could choose his ground so as to draw attention to freedom as he defined it. In December, he sent Wyatt Walker and Andrew Young there to recruit, plan, and prepare. King himself preached in Birmingham on Sunday, December 9, before flying to New York for a highly successful Sammy Davis fund-raiser—which came off without picket lines against Jack O'Dell—and then a board meeting of the Gandhi Society. On Friday, a bomb detonated outside Birmingham's Bethel Baptist, rattling the church so that the stained glass and all other breakables shattered and jagged fault lines ran up the walls. The concussion tore the roof off the parsonage next door, destroyed the pastor's car, knocked out power and telephone lines, and ripped holes in three other houses, sending two infants to the hospital with severe glass cuts. Bull Connor, now gearing up to run for mayor, arrived with firemen, detectives, and police dogs to take charge of the investigation, which accomplished nothing. “Dammit, they ought to be hung when they're caught,” Connor told reporters. The Birmingham
News
noted that Bethel Baptist was renowned as Shuttles-worth's church, the place of refuge for the battered Freedom Riders in May of 1961. It had been bombed twice before, but both the newspaper and Connor puzzled over why anyone would want to bomb it nearly a year after Shuttlesworth had departed for Cincinnati. The new pastor, dazed and shaken, was puzzled too, as he had permitted no civil rights meetings to be held there. “Once more we have been shocked by the bombing of Bethel Baptist Church,” King wired President Kennedy. He appealed for help in Birmingham, which he described as “by far the worst big city in race relations in the United States. Much of what has gone on has had the tacit consent of high public officials.”