Parting the Waters (135 page)

Birmingham's white leaders scrambled to head off a swell of public sympathy for King by denouncing his use of children. Mayor Boutwell told the city that “irresponsible and unthinking agitators” had made “tools” of children to threaten lives and property. “The respectable people of Birmingham, white or colored, did not create this danger,” he declared. “We are not contributing to it. We are innocent victims…I cannot condone, and you cannot condone, the use of children to these ends.” Judge Talbot Ellis, whose juvenile court was inundated with young Negro defendants, said that those who “misled these kids” into demonstrations “ought to be put under the jail.” In Washington, Robert Kennedy issued a statement of more balanced tone. “Continued refusal to grant equal rights and opportunities to Negroes makes increasing turmoil inevitable,” he announced. “However, the timing of the present demonstrations is open to question. School children participating in street demonstrations is a dangerous business. An injured, maimed or dead child is a price that none of us can afford to pay.” Kennedy stressed that the injustices of Birmingham were a local rather than a federal responsibility, to be resolved “in good faith negotiations, and not in the streets.” These attacks came too late to faze King. In caustic remarks, he and his fellow preachers noted that this tender solicitude for Negro children had never produced much concern over their consignment to miserable schools or other injuries of segregation.

Burke Marshall, who had called that morning to request that the demonstrations be suspended, called again more urgently, arguing on behalf of the Kennedy Administration that King must call a halt now because the rock-throwing by Negroes had contributed to the violence. King refused. Although he resented Marshall's attitude, he also sensed more pain in Marshall's voice than conviction. King interpreted this pain as the forerunner of enormous political pressure in Washington, which confirmed that the Birmingham movement was taking off. The burden of inertia was shifting. Marshall, having caught an earful from A. G. Gaston about the little girl being squirted down the street, was not far behind in perceiving that dissent against King was evaporating in Negro Birmingham. Hard upon this surge of internal strength radiated the national news that a thousand Negro children had marched to jail in two days, and before the far-flung American public could begin to absorb such a troubling novelty, violence, the universal messenger, was racing toward their living rooms with pictures of water hoses and dogs loosed on children. Marshall's pain, like the stridency of Birmingham's white leaders, revealed an underlying defensiveness, and their appeals to the welfare of Negro children drew them toward King's ground. To anticipate and experience these complex shifts of emotion was the essence of historic movement; to have caused them raised the sweet thrill of legend.

King knew that the people who cared most about the children were the mothers and fathers streaming all afternoon into the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to join hundreds of marchers and onlookers who simply stayed on for the mass meeting. The big church was packed long before evening. Passing the collection plates took a full hour, and the spirit of the congregation ran so high that Andrew Young came out to make a cautionary speech. “We have a nonviolent movement,” he said, “but it's not nonviolent enough.” He warned that no amount of provocation justified rock-throwing. “We must not boo the police when they bring up the dogs,” he added. “…We must praise them. The police don't know how to handle the situation governed by love, and the power of God. During these demonstrations we must tell the crowd to behave.”

A tumultuous cheer went up when King made his entrance. He too preached nonviolence, but at first his address was unusually informal and frisky. He told preacher jokes about the futility of trying to defeat Negro Baptists with water hoses, predicting that even Bull Connor would come to admit that “not only did they stand up in the water, they went UNDER the water!” “And dogs?” he asked. “Well, I'll tell you. When I was growing up, I was dog bitten”—he paused, as a horrified cry rose up—“for NOTHING! So I don't mind being bitten by a dog for standing up for freedom!”

He told them that not all whites were hostile, and that their movement was reaching people far away. “No, we are not alone in this,” he assured them. “Don't let anybody make you feel we are alone.” Birmingham had made the Huntley-Brinkley news show on NBC, he said. Help was on the way; they were moving. Then, in a single sentence, he swept aside the pressures for a moratorium on the demonstrations: “Now yesterday was D-Day, and tomorrow will be Double-D Day!”

The announcement that the jail marches would continue over the weekend drew deafening applause. Then King moved on almost quietly, dispensing with oratorical surges. He repeated his willingness to negotiate over the movement's four basic demands, which he reviewed at length. Only at the end did he mention the little catalysts who had ignited the city. “Now, finally, your children,” he said, “your daughters and sons are in jail, many of them, and I'm sure many of the parents are here tonight.” Then he said simply, “Don't worry about them.” That alone smothered some of the desperate fears and skittering rumors—tales true and false about rats, beatings, concrete beds, overflowing latrines, jailhouse assaults, and crude examinations for venereal disease. “They are suffering for what they believe,” he said, “and they are suffering to make this nation a better nation.” The crowd seemed soothed not just by his words but by his calmness. Having committed everything, holding nothing back, he touched the faith at his core. In fact, his great gamble looked so promising that he slipped almost into a reverie, assuring the parents that the Birmingham jail was not only bearable for their children but a “spiritual experience” to be welcomed, even longed for. “Jail helps you to rise above the miasma of everyday life,” he said. A thought distracted him. “If they want some books, we will get them,” he promised. “I catch up on my reading every time I go to jail.”

 

King and his advisers stayed up long past midnight plotting strategy for Saturday's march. Blessed with an abundance of volunteers, they devised schemes to divide or circumvent Bull Connor's blockading forces. Their goal was to put at least another five hundred young people in jail. All that night, the attention of the outside world gathered forcefully upon them. Irate Birmingham citizens strung up an effigy of King in the courtyard of a Catholic church, and news presses across the country mass-produced photographs of Friday's violence. The morning
New York Times
featured three of them stacked two columns wide on the front page: on the bottom, state troopers dragging the CORE-SNCC “freedom walkers” to jail in Fort Payne, Alabama; in the middle, Birmingham firemen straining to aim a monitor gun at demonstrators; on top, the police dog sinking its teeth into Walter Gadsden's midriff. The visual power of the Gadsden photograph was so profound that President Kennedy, like millions of readers, could see nothing else. The picture made him “sick,” he told a morning audience of ADA liberals at the White House. Although he lacked legal authority to do anything about Birmingham, Kennedy added, he was dispatching Burke Marshall and Joe Dolan as mediators that very day. This presidential mission, plus the established threat of violence, conferred a status on the Birmingham confrontations that greatly stimulated the influx of reporters. Claude Sitton of the
Times
abandoned the William Moore march in favor of Birmingham, as did Pat Watters of the Atlanta
Journal
. For Sitton, who had been in Greenwood, this marked the second time in a month that the Birmingham campaign had deflated an ongoing story. Watters came to Birmingham reluctantly; his fresh sympathy for the lonely students on the William Moore death trek, along with his glimpses of movement rivalries, convinced him that the children's marches were another attempt by a cynical or capricious King to undercut CORE and SNCC.

On Saturday afternoon, as tense police lines awaited the first sally from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Wyatt Walker engineered a surprise five blocks away. On a signal, several groups of ordinary-looking young pedestrians merged just outside city hall, and only then did a girl display a banner reading “Love God and Thy Neighbor.” Bull Connor emerged personally to investigate and, incensed by the trickery, ordered all twenty-five Negroes hauled off to jail. Almost immediately, a woman and a small girl without banners knelt on the steps of city hall to pray. They went off to jail too, whereupon Connor ordered his men to arrest or disperse all groups of “strolling Negroes” near city hall, with or without picket signs. In so doing he not only failed to keep Negroes from swamping his jails but also created a racial dragnet that went far beyond the limits of Judge Jenkins' court order.

King's strategists had achieved a tactical advantage by switching to guerrilla concealment, but Connor swiftly retaliated. When his men discovered that young demonstrators were slipping out of two different churches in twos and threes, he sent his men to seal off both churches. When, after some 150 arrests, the lock-in dried up the supply of volunteers headed toward city hall, the confrontation shifted across the street from Sixteenth Street Baptist to Kelly Ingram Park. There the adult Negro spectators watched policemen guard the exits to trap the young demonstrators inside, and rage spread among them as the monitor guns swept away the few young marchers who escaped. A cascade of rocks soon rained down on the uniformed officers.

Now the advantage shifted against the movement, whose leaders realized that their young marchers, schooled in nonviolence, were locked up inside the churches while adults armed with rocks, knives, and guns moved freely on the perimeter. James Bevel, alarmed that a riot would undo all their efforts to arouse public opinion against segregation, managed to talk a police lieutenant into lending him his bullhorn. “Everybody get off this corner!” he shouted. “If you're not going to demonstrate in a nonviolent way, then leave!” Bevel darted about like a sheepdog, effectively dispersing the troublemakers, some of whom recognized him as the madcap young preacher who had mobilized the youth demonstrations. When the anger subsided, he grandly announced that he was suspending all marches for the following day too, so that the movement could purify itself for a giant push on Monday. Later that day, hot words passed privately between Bevel and Wyatt Walker, who considered Bevel an insubordinate grandstander. It fell to King to arrange a truce between his two hot-tempered aides. While supporting Walker on procedure, he approved Bevel's one-day moratorium as a wise emergency move. Then King escaped the tension by flying home to preach at Ebenezer.

Birmingham swelled over the weekend. Along with Burke Marshall and scores of reporters, activists of all kinds arrived in the wake of the stunning children's marches. Ella Baker flew in from New York, as did pacifist Dave Dellinger. SNCC's James Forman, arrested on the William Moore march, bailed out and headed straight for Birmingham, as he had done a month earlier upon leaving jail in Greenwood. Dick Gregory made his way down from Chicago, and among the miscellaneous newcomers that Sunday were two folk singers, Guy Carawan and Joan Baez. Carawan came expressly to record a mass meeting for Folkways Records, Baez to give a concert, and they happened upon each other in the Gaston Motel. Baez was burning with curiosity about the civil rights movement, which was why she had booked a concert tour of Negro colleges in the South, but she was more than a little apprehensive about crossing the race barrier in a city poised for war. Even though Sunday was the truce day, helmeted police units patrolled the streets in force and hovered around the Negro test groups who sought to worship in white churches.

Baez was only too happy to accept Carawan's escort into the morning worship service and the afternoon mass meeting at New Pilgrim Church. There, as one of a handful of whites among two thousand Negroes, Baez first encountered soul music. The Birmingham movement's choir was a polished group in comparison with the spontaneous,
a capella
singers of Albany. It had a director, Carlton Reese, an organist, and established stars such as Mamie Brown and Cleo Kennedy. But its freedom music still astonished a folk purist such as Baez. There were sweet spirituals, arrhythmic blues solos, and thundering gospel numbers—all intensified by the imminent surrender to jail—and the power of it melted Baez's alien separateness so that she shouted and cried, and looked close enough to a happy seizure that she came briefly to the attention of the roving ushers. When a driver whisked her away to the haven of all-Negro Miles College, Baez was astonished again to discover that her concert audience maintained a steadfast disinterest in the cauldron of protest across town. The Birmingham
World
, which was not covering the demonstrations, sent its own reporter to this first concert by a white celebrity on the Miles campus, and the reviewer praised the performance, though noting tartly that the singer felt free to remove her shoes on stage.

Back at the mass meeting, a distraught Andrew Young interrupted to announce that the Birmingham police had just arrested Guy Carawan and his wife Candie on the steps of the church. “They are the ones who taught us many of the songs that we sing in the movement,” Young lamented, adding that the police were getting nervous, nasty, and unpredictable. Perhaps Bull Connor, interpreting the truce as a sign of weakness in the movement, was trying to intimidate the Negroes into submission. As the police hauled the Carawans off to jail, an angry-looking James Bevel strode swiftly to the pulpit with Bernard Lee. “We're tired of this mess!” he shouted. “Let's all get up!” Waving his arms, he directed the packed congregation to march around inside the church and then down to the city jail a few blocks away. They would encourage the movement prisoners inside, while showing the police that they were not afraid. Almost cackling, Bevel suggested that this spontaneous demonstration would not violate the conditions of his self-imposed truce. “Let's not march,” he called out. “Let's just walk.”