Parting the Waters (130 page)

 

Summoned by King, James Bevel arrived from Greenwood just in time to preach at the Birmingham mass meeting on Friday night, April 12, a few hours after King went to jail. He said he had heard about Birmingham and Bull Connor all his life. Birmingham was sick, he said. Its white people were sick with blind hatred, and its Negroes were sick because they would not take the step to freedom. Bevel looked out over three hundred people, who seemed lost in the cavernous Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and pronounced it a pitifully small crowd for so momentous a day. He pointed an accusing finger at the two white police detectives who were sitting in the audience with their tape-recording equipment. “The police can come to our meeting, bring their guns and their badges and little microphones to church,” Bevel declared, “but if you want to be free, there is nothing they can do about it.”

The crowd stirred as Bevel began to preach with his usual abandon. Both races must stop worrying about their conveniences, he cried (“If God can feed the cockroach, he can feed the Negro”), and open their eyes to spiritual healing. It was easy to be whole, he declared. Freedom was there for the taking. Quoting the words of Jesus to the lame man at the pool of Bethesda (“Rise, take up thy bed, and walk!”), Bevel began a cascade of oratory. To heal themselves with freedom, he cried, all they had to do was walk—walk to the mass meetings, walk to the courthouse, walk to jail. On this theme he “worked himself and the congregation into such a frenzie [
sic
] that we were unable to understand what he was saying,” the police detectives later confessed to Bull Connor. The crowd understood. Bevel was a spiritual kamikaze, shaking them loose. “The Negro has been sitting here dead for three hundred years,” he declared. “It is time he got up and walked.”

On Monday afternoon, King was overjoyed to see the handsome face of Clarence Jones at his cell door. Jones, hoping to ward off hostile treatment from the Birmingham jailers, was decked out in his finest New York lawyer clothes. He greeted King with the words he most wanted to hear: “Harry has been able to raise fifty thousand dollars for bail bonds.” And Belafonte had said he was good for more, for “whatever else you need.” King wrote later that these few words from Jones “lifted a thousand pounds from my heart.” They meant that those who wanted out of jail could get out, and that King could not now be second-guessed for going to jail instead of raising money.

Jones also told King that Belafonte and Walker were organizing a phone and telegram campaign to pressure the Kennedy Administration to seek decent treatment for King in the jail. So far King remained isolated in his cell, allowed no phone calls. He had no mattress or linen, and was sleeping on metal slats. Hearing of these conditions from Wyatt Walker, Belafonte had called Robert Kennedy. As King knew, the Attorney General strongly opposed the entire Birmingham campaign, let alone King's going to jail, and Kennedy had further reason to feel put upon because he knew that King could relieve his suffering at any time by posting bond and walking out of jail. Under these circumstances, Jones reported, Kennedy's response to Belafonte had been testy, but leavened with humor. “Tell Reverend King we're doing all we can,” Kennedy had told Belafonte, “but I'm not sure we can get into prison reform at this moment.”

After Jones departed, the jailers led King out of his cell to the prisoners' pay phone, saying it was time for him to call his wife. King, who had enough jail experience to know that guards normally do not nurture an inmate's family communications, suspected correctly that the sudden kindness was really for the convenience of the police department's wire-tap stenographers. When Coretta promptly informed him that the President had just called her, King did not reply. Stalling—caught between his hunger for her news and his reluctance to let Bull Connor know what President Kennedy was doing—King made small talk with his two older children. His evasive manner alerted Coretta.

“Are you being guarded?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Did they give you a time limit?”

“Not exactly, but hear everything, you know,” King said pointedly. “Who did you say called you?”

“Kennedy,” said Coretta. “The President.”

“Did he call you direct?”

“Yes. And he told me you were going to call in a few minutes. It was about thirty minutes ago.”

This was significant news, potentially a replay of President Kennedy's famous phone call before the 1960 election. “Let Wyatt know,” King instructed. “…Do that right now.”

Coretta recounted her conversation with President Kennedy, saying, “He told me the FBI talked with you last night. Is that right?”

“No, no,” said King. He told her again to get word of Kennedy's phone call to Walker so that Walker could issue a statement. Coretta did not agree to do so outright, sensing perhaps that she was in a bind because she had issued her own statement to
The New York Times
, whereas King wanted Walker to handle the matter. She kept adding details of President Kennedy's expressed concern, and of two earlier phone calls from Robert Kennedy, while King kept asking her to tell it all to Walker.

When the news did reach Birmingham, Walker seized hopefully on the White House involvement to proclaim the beginning of phase two in Birmingham—the national phase. Responses outside the mass meeting proved to be far less enthusiastic. News stories pointed out that President Kennedy had not initiated the phone contact, as he had done during the 1960 campaign. Instead, Kennedy had returned Coretta's urgent phone calls to the White House switchboard. This made Kennedy seem less resolutely sympathetic to King, and therefore made King's cause seem less worthy. Other, less subtle discrepancies appeared. With the Birmingham police department denying that FBI agents had visited King or that President Kennedy's influence had produced better treatment for King—and Chief Moore going so far as to declare that it had been his idea for King to call his wife, because he, Moore, was concerned about Coretta's postnatal condition—most newspapers concentrated their skepticism on the least authoritative party: Coretta. Reports tended to portray her as an anxious new mother who may have confused her White House fantasies with reality. She bore the brunt of condescension even though her version of the episode was closest to the truth. In Washington, the
Star
dismissed her entire story in a lead editorial entitled “Just a Bit Phony.”

General press reaction to the Birmingham campaign was no more favorable.
Time
called it a “poorly timed protest”: “To many Birmingham Negroes, King's drive inflamed tensions at a time when the city seemed to be making some progress, however small, in race relations.” A Washington
Post
editorial attacked King's Birmingham strategy as one of “doubtful utility,” and speculated that it was “prompted more by leadership rivalry than by the real need of the situation.”
The New York Times
, while playing down President Kennedy's phone call to Coretta, devoted a great deal of space to a press conference in which Burke Marshall said the federal government had no authority to take action in Birmingham. By contrast, the
Times
was almost gushingly optimistic about Birmingham's prospects under its new mayor, Albert Boutwell, who was sworn in on April 15 as Clarence Jones was visiting King in jail. “A warm sun was shining,” the
Times
reported. The swearing-in ceremony was “like a picnic,” with the “giggles of little girls” making a pleasant change from “the sounds of demonstrations carried on in the last 13 days,” and most Birmingham citizens of both races were looking to Boutwell for “a diminution, if not an end, to racial tensions that have grown alarmingly the last few days.” In an editorial declaring that it did not expect enlightenment to come to Birmingham “overnight,” the
Times
added that Martin Luther King “ought not to expect it either.”

For white Birmingham, the tone of Northern news coverage was a refreshing change, hailed that week in local news stories such as “Washington Liberals Ponder Wisdom of Demonstrations” and “Birmingham Image Gets Better Press.” All sides seemed to be converging upon a common ground of forward-looking vagueness, which the
Times
called “mutual respect and equality of opportunity” and Mayor Boutwell called “mutual respect and understanding.” Such a view rejected King and Bull Connor alike as dangerous, polar extremists.

 

King read these press reactions as fast as Clarence Jones could smuggle newspapers into his cell. They caused him the utmost dismay, especially since a diverse assortment of friends and enemies were using the same critical phrases almost interchangeably. King could have addressed his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to almost any of these—to Mayor Bout-well or Burke Marshall or A. G. Gaston, to the Birmingham
News
or
The New York Times
. He gave no thought to secular targets, however, after he saw page 2 of the April 13 Birmingham
News
. There, beneath two photographs of him and Abernathy on their Good Friday march to jail, appeared a story headlined “White Clergymen Urge Local Negroes to Withdraw from Demonstrations.” After attacking the Birmingham demonstrations as “unwise and untimely,” and commending the news media and the police for “the calm manner in which these demonstrations have been handled,” the clergymen invoked their religious authority against civil disobedience. “Just as we formerly pointed out that ‘hatred and violence have no sanction in our religious and political traditions,'” they wrote, “we also point out that such actions as incite hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be, have not contributed to the resolution of our local problems. We do not believe that these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified in Birmingham.”

The thirteen short paragraphs transfixed King. He was being rebuked on his own chosen ground. And these were liberal clergymen. Most of them had risked their reputations by criticizing Governor Wallace's “Segregation Forever!” inauguration speech in January. They were among the minority of white preachers who of late had admitted Andrew Young and other Negroes to specially roped off areas of their Sunday congregations. Yet to King, these preachers never had risked themselves for true morality through all the years when Shuttlesworth was being bombed, stabbed, and arrested, and even now could not make themselves state forthrightly what was just. Instead, they stood behind the injunction and the jailers to dismiss his spirit along with his body. King could not let it go. He sat down and began scribbling around the margins of the newspaper. “Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas,” he began.

By the time Clarence Jones visited the jail again that Tuesday, King had pushed a wandering skein of ink into every vacant corner. He surprised Jones by pulling the newspaper surreptitiously out of his shirt. “I'm writing this letter,” he said. “I want you to try to get it out, if you can.” To Jones, the “letter” was an indistinct jumble of biblical phrases wrapped around pest control ads and garden club news. He regarded the surprise as a distraction from the stack of urgent business he had brought with him—legal questions about King's upcoming criminal trials, plus money problems, Belafonte and Kennedy reports, and a host of movement grievances assembled by Walker. Waving these away, King spent most of the visit showing a nonplussed Jones how to follow the arrows and loops from dead ends to new starts. “I'm not finished yet,” King said. He borrowed a number of sheets of note paper from Jones, who left with a concealed newspaper and precious few answers for those awaiting King's dispositions at the Gaston Motel.

King wrote several scattered passages in response to the criticism that his demonstrations were “untimely.” He told the white clergymen that “time is neutral,” that waiting never produced inevitable progress, and that “we must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.” He feared that “the people of ill-will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will,” and pointed out that Negroes already had waited more than three hundred years for justice. “I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.'” Then, in a sentence of more than three hundred words, he tried to convey to the white preachers a feeling of time built upon a different alignment of emotions: