Parting the Waters (124 page)

The next day, Kennedy called Nicholas Katzenbach at the Justice Department. “Is it real bad?” he asked, putting Katzenbach in an awkward spot. On one hand, Katzenbach knew full well that Rockefeller's attack actually had understated the Republican case against the Kennedy judges. The best civil rights judges in the South, and indeed the department's only hopes for racial justice through the courts, were Eisenhower appointees; the most egregious segregationists were Kennedy's, and they were more than four in number. On the other hand, Katzenbach was a subordinate officer whose boss, the President of the United States—who was probably staring at the front page of the morning
New York Times
, where his “remarkable job” quotation was splashed alongside unsavory descriptions of the judges—wanted reassurance that the dangerous Nelson Rockefeller had not made a fool of him. Katzenbach waffled, saying that one Kennedy appointment “hasn't been impossible.” Bravely he forced out some of the worst news—that Judge Cox of Mississippi “has not been good”—but when the President almost plaintively remarked that “our other appointments have, uh, uh, have done pretty well,” and then waited for a comment, Katzenbach turned bitter truth to sweetness. “I don't think we have anything to be embarrassed about on that,” he said.

 

This controversy over the Kennedy judges flared up in the beginning of March 1963. King preached at Ebenezer those first two Sundays. There was always a private, cocoon-like quality to his sermons before the home congregation. Now, having disappeared from public sight to purify himself for Birmingham, his tone was even more self-absorbed than usual. He preached on his lifelong preoccupation with the nature of evil in the world, using as his standard text the story from Matthew 17 about the disciples who were shaken because they could not exorcise the evil spirit from a madman. “Why could we not cast him out?” they asked.

In his sermon, King replied that evil was beyond the responsibility of God as well as beyond the reach of man. He ridiculed as hypocrites those who supinely left the cause of righteousness to supernatural beings. These were the “big Negro preachers” in Cadillacs and all the timid souls of false piety who allowed comfort or habit to subvert the demands of conscience. Hammering on his theme, King showed the passion that was driving him into Birmingham, but related passions were just as strong. They could not cast the demon out, he told the congregation, because evil was too deeply rooted in human character. No human faculty, known or unknown, developed or undeveloped, could touch it—not the liberal reason of a dozen Enlightenments, nor all the wildest dreams of scientific progress fulfilled. “The humanist hope is an illusion,” King said.

Then, to illustrate his point, he did not turn outward to the usual depravities of slavery, the Holocaust, or the atomic bomb. Instead, he invited the congregation to look inward with him at addictions that seemed simple at first but then grew slowly more tenacious until finally, overcoming all goodwill, they emerged almost innocently as invincible evil—alien, yet human as a toothache. “Many of you here know something of what it is to struggle with sin”:

King expressed another passion all too real—an empathy with evil that became relentless self-abasement, a cry for penance. Low and leveling, yielding to no one in keenness of feeling, this raging humility collided with high righteousness to produce a synthetic passion that was uniquely King's.

On one level, he resolved the conflict simply for the congregation. Neither God nor human beings would transform human nature alone; human beings must allow God to attack evil through them. “This is the only way to be delivered from the accumulated weight of evil,” he said. “It can only be done when we allow the energy of God to be let loose in our souls. May we go out today big in faith.” From there he began to fashion a closing based on the conventional theology of mankind's need to invite partnership with the divine. The humblest Ebenezer member could understand it, and the most devout fundamentalist could not object to the conclusion. Still, most members knew that this was no ordinary Baptist sermon. King's fiery attacks on the Cadillac preachers carried a frightening promise of true controversy; his meditations on evil conveyed authentic despair.

The examples of hope that King rolled out came not from the struggles of everyday life but from the pantheon of immortals. He spoke of “Simon of Sand” converted into “Peter of Rock,” of “persecuting Saul into an Apostle Paul,” and of “the lust-infested Augustine into a Saint Augustine.” He quoted Tolstoy's claim of utter transformation: “‘What was good and bad changed places…The things I used to do, I don't do them now. The places I used to go, I don't go there now. The thoughts I used to think, I don't think them now.'” King referred to legendary sinners who had redirected the torment of their inner confessions to produce historical miracles. The evidence of their conversions was a changed world. As King himself contemplated a historical miracle in Birmingham, his sermons revealed a turbulent conflict over the relationship between the public and private person. Perhaps it was possible by extraordinary feats and sacrifices for the public man to redeem the private man. Perhaps it was possible for private demons not only to drive the public man but also to help him—to leaven his hubris, allow him to see opponents instead of enemies. If King felt fury, it was not against Bull Connor or the most virulent of racists, as there were more unfathomable sins than theirs, but against the aloof moderates and blind pietists who refused to see that King was offering them a way out of a maddeningly obvious and relatively
easy
evil—the sins against brotherhood.

Here was direction for King, but not comfort or clarity. It was never comfortable for a man who spoke all his life of consuming guilt to be held up as a public saint. And his course made a paradox of King's fundamental conception of evil. In the manner of the nineteenth-century dialecticians, King seemed to be turning Reinhold Niebuhr on his head: the evil within individual people was more intractable than the injustices of society, not less. If a sinner like King could produce a miracle of public morality in Birmingham, what became of
Moral Man and Immoral Society
? What then became of Niebuhr's theology? Worshippers at Ebenezer often saw through such muddles. When King seemed depressed and out of sorts, they came out of his sermons shaking their heads over his powerful rumblings, remarking that he was a “God-troubled” man, surely on the verge of shaking up the white man's world.

 

After his sermon on evil, King hurried to preach that same day in Birmingham for Shuttlesworth's chief assistant in the ACMHR, Rev. Nelson “Fireball” Smith. Birmingham's special election fell on Tuesday of that week. By Wyatt Walker's original plans for Project C, the demonstrations were to have commenced the following day, March 6, but complaints from Birmingham Negroes already had forced a postponement until March 14. The idea was that they needed at least a week or two after the election to prepare for the campaign, and also to find out whether the election produced a more favorable political climate in Birmingham. The compromise target of March 14 left exactly one month in what Walker called the “prime shopping season” before Easter, during which the combination of an economic boycott and escalating demonstrations would have the maximum chance to break segregation in the city.

No clear winner emerged from the March 5 election, however, and a runoff between Bull Connor and Albert Boutwell was scheduled for April 2. With the limbo in Birmingham politics thus extended for another four weeks, the arguments for delay resurfaced within the King-Shuttles-worth alliance. All Birmingham was alive to the fateful choice on whether or not to end the Bull Connor era. Connor, by making himself the chief obstacle to the Chamber of Commerce as well as the civil rights movement, had united the downtrodden with the elite. Inside the unlikely, unspoken coalition against him—Negroes, labor unions, white newspapers, reformers, and image-conscious businessmen such as Sidney Smyer—everyone was compulsively on his best behavior. By their reckoning, the spring of 1963 suddenly became the worst possible time to launch racial demonstrations in Birmingham. A. G. Gaston strenuously opposed the campaign. Rev. J. L. Ware, president of the Baptist Ministers' Alliance, almost broke public silence on King's plans with near passage of a resolution that warned King to stay out of the city. Private opinion among Negro leaders ran so strongly that even Shuttlesworth—who normally belittled the difference between the runoff candidates, calling Bout-well merely a “dignified Connor”—hesitated to leap in against the tide. After all, he was in exile from Birmingham, living in Cincinnati.

James Lawson was prominent among the few who argued against postponement. Since the January retreat at Dorchester, he had been making periodic forays into Birmingham from his church in Memphis, conducting workshops in nonviolent methods for members of Shuttlesworth's ACMHR. Lawson's job was to train the foot soldiers for Project C, as he had trained those for the prolonged campaigns against segregation in Nashville and other cities. Meeting in church basements and private homes, often introduced by Wyatt Walker, Lawson had been recruiting, teaching, proselytizing for nonviolence. His goal was to find as many volunteers as possible who were willing to endure ten days in the Birmingham jail. If their initial inspiration survived the practice tests staged in the workshops, they signed the nonviolence pledge cards Lawson had designed. By March, Walker had some two hundred cards in his “jail file,” and Lawson opposed postponement on the grounds that these two hundred people—not the whims of Birmingham politics—should guide decisions. Their readiness and their morale were what mattered.

Walker heard people quoting his earlier exhortations on the vital importance of the Easter shopping season. But, since they now had to wait until after the April 2 runoff, they said, and since there wouldn't be enough time after that to build a good campaign before Easter, and since Birmingham's Negroes then would have spent all their money and therefore would not be able to boycott effectively until the Christmas shopping season, perhaps they should postpone until the end of 1963. The drift of such comments drove home Lawson's point that all these professed practicalities were nothing more than an outward sign of the fears that inhibited any mass protest. There was always good reason to postpone. But the stark realities of Birmingham so concentrated these inhibitions that they threatened to strip away the support of local Negro leaders, and this was a loss that King could not ignore. While he granted Lawson's point that it would be twice as difficult to re-recruit jailgoers after a long postponement, he also saw that recriminations were bubbling up with the arguments for postponement. Preachers were letting loose their resentments against Shuttlesworth, calling him an absentee autocrat. Even John Porter, King's protégé and former assistant pastor at Dexter Avenue, whom King had just installed personally in a Birmingham pulpit, was holding back from Project C. He said Shuttlesworth was an unstable dictator.

They teetered back and forth between the urge to go ahead and the pressure to postpone. On Saturday, March 9, the FBI monitors picked up an extremely guarded phone conversation between Jack O'Dell and Stanley Levison, in which Levison asked whether the campaign “in the unnamed city” was still scheduled as planned. O'Dell replied that it was. The next day, however, King himself told Levison that he had decided to “postpone that thing until the day after the election, because Bull Connor is in the runoff, and we feel that if we make a move before that time, he could use that to his advantage.” Another factor holding him back, King confessed to Levison, was his assumption that Birmingham whites would “do everything they can to destroy the image of the SCLC.” He mentioned specifically the Birmingham
News
and its published accusations that King employed Communist subversives such as O'Dell.

This intercepted conversation was the FBI's first notice that King was contemplating a new campaign, and the Bureau circulated an internal appeal for information on “King's purpose in going to Birmingham.” Meanwhile, at Ebenezer that Sunday, King preached his own version of Vernon Johns's “Segregation After Death” sermon on the parable of Lazarus and Dives. He did not go to Birmingham the next day for the regular mass meeting, but Shuttlesworth flew in from Cincinnati. Despite the runoff and despite King's wishes, the idea of an immediate launch was still alive in his mind. That night's meeting revealed a mixture of anticipation and coyness. “There will be no nigger any more,” one speaker promised. “It will be
mister
nigger.” Shuttlesworth, without disclosing any details to Connor's detectives in the audience, told the crowd that Attorney General Kennedy would protect them in the dangers ahead. The next day, Wyatt Walker and the Birmingham leaders continued to debate the wisdom of postponement, and not until that Friday did Shuttlesworth finally concur in the delay, which ran against his entire persona—his promises, famed bravado, and grand assurances of control over Birmingham's Negro preachers. His letter to King and Walker masked concessions to nerves or adversity behind a thick screen of vagueness.