Parting the Waters (139 page)

By the time he burst into Drew's house, still wearing hospital tags, Shuttlesworth was a cauldron of steam. He peppered King's explanations of the truce with mordant comments: “Say that again…. Did I hear you right?…Well, Martin,
who
decided?…You're in a hell of a fix, young man.” As King tried vainly to calm him, an aide pointed out that the matter was moot because King already had scheduled a press conference. This only inflamed Shuttlesworth's sarcasm. “Oh, you've got a
press conference
?” he asked in mock wonder. “I thought we were going to make joint statements.” Daring King to announce a truce, he promised to nullify it by leading the kids right back into the streets.

Of the mortified bystanders in the Drew living room, Shuttlesworth's threat most sorely alarmed Burke Marshall, who had been assuring Washington almost minute by minute that President Kennedy could announce a Birmingham truce to the nation at his televised press conference that day. Only such a dire emergency forced Marshall to interject his professorial voice into the raging distemper among the Negro preachers. He warned Shuttlesworth that a historic agreement was at stake, that promises had been given and commitments made. “What promises?” shouted Shuttlesworth. The reference to unknown understandings backfired, as did Abernathy's soothing suggestion that perhaps Shuttlesworth was sick after all and should go back to the hospital. He was leaving all right, Shuttlesworth stormed, but they had better understand that neither King nor President Kennedy himself could call off the afternoon march.

“Wait a minute, Fred,” King said softly. Over his shoulder to Marshall, he stressed the obvious vulnerabilities facing leaders of a small national minority. “We've got to have unity, Burke,” he said. “We've just got to have unity.”

Shuttlesworth bridled at hearing the call of unity imposed for once upon him. “I'll be damned if you'll have it like this!” he roared at King. “You're Mister Big, but you're going to be Mister S-H-I-T!”

No one knew exactly what King told Shuttlesworth when they retired to a back room. Most likely he stressed that the boycott was still on, that the white negotiators had given in on many points, that a day off from the previous day's nearly tragic explosions might be healthy. And perhaps he just passed time to let him settle down, believing as he did that it was difficult for Shuttlesworth to find himself ignored by the hordes of reporters—178 of them, by Wyatt Walker's latest count, from as far away as Japan and the Soviet Union—who came into town knowing little of Shuttlesworth's history in Birmingham. Whatever King said, it appeared to work, as the two leaders emerged in a sunny, performing mood. At the press conference shortly thereafter, Shuttlesworth took the lead in announcing the truce he had denounced so violently in private. “We do believe that honest efforts to negotiate in good faith are under way,” he told reporters.

Burke Marshall, who had warned Washington of a snag, now passed along the Justice Department's equivalent of a huge sigh, and President Kennedy stepped before the cameras half an hour later. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I'm gratified to note the progress in the efforts by white and Negro citizens to end an ugly situation in Birmingham, Alabama.” He praised Marshall for his tireless mediation effort to “halt a spectacle which was seriously damaging the reputation of both Birmingham and the country.” Noting that the Negro leaders had stopped the demonstrations, and that the incoming Boutwell administration had “committed itself wholeheartedly to continuing progress in this area,” the President said he hoped for a final settlement within a day.

President Kennedy had scarcely completed his masterly performance at the press conference—his first to be dominated by the subject of race—when a new snag imperiled the truce from the opposite direction. This time it was Governor Wallace, who announced that
he
certainly did not know of any negotiations to compromise segregation, nor did he think that Arthur Hanes and Bull Connor could approve of such. Hanes promptly challenged the “other” mayor, Boutwell, to admit that he was somehow involved in negotiations with Negroes. Governor Wallace's state troopers began military drills in Kelly Ingram Park, and Bull Connor sent his men to padlock the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The most decisive blow of the hard-line segregationists fell upon King and Abernathy: at a hearing on their unlawful-parade convictions from the Good Friday march, a local judge unexpectedly set their appeal bonds at the new legal maximum of $2,500 apiece. Before a shocked courtroom audience, the defendants pronounced themselves both unwilling and unable to pay, whereupon guards hauled them off to the Birmingham jail, shortly after President Kennedy's optimistic press conference.

Now a furious A. D. King jumped before the Birmingham press corps to declare that this betrayal voided the truce. He predicted huge demonstrations by the end of the day, the padlocked church notwithstanding, and Wyatt Walker said much of the same. Only the personal intercession of Attorney General Kennedy deflected Shuttlesworth from leading Bevel's reserves on a march downtown. Kennedy's theory was that Bull Connor was trying to provoke a riot as a pretext for martial law under his political ally, Governor Wallace, which would scuttle prospects for a settlement. Kennedy did not have to say that such an immediate and violent rebuttal of the President's position would be a disaster for the Administration. He felt obliged to defend the settlement, and he knew that King's imprisonment would stiffen the Negro terms just when the President was trying to soften both sides. Moreover, as Marshall had seen in the vivid confrontation with Shuttlesworth, the arrest removed the one presence that was indispensable for sustained Negro unity behind any settlement.

Once again, more urgently than ever, Robert Kennedy needed to get King out of jail. He called Harry Belafonte in New York with an emergency request: could Belafonte protect the movement, the country, and Dr. King all at once by raising $5,000 bond money—in cash, that same day, as every hour was precious? Belafonte agreed to try. The New York banks were closed, but he mobilized wealthy friends to pluck up loose cash in the city. By evening, Belafonte called Kennedy to say that the money soon would be on its way to the airport. In a telling aside, however, Belafonte added that he was still waiting to get confirmation from Wyatt Walker that Dr. King actually wanted to come out of jail. This was a clinker for Robert Kennedy. Of all the surprise twists of the day, the most vexing were the signals reaching Marshall that King wanted to stay locked up.

For King, the most difficult of the unresolved issues was the fate of some two thousand movement prisoners still jailed in Birmingham. He thought Bull Connor had made a mistake by arresting him, because the public stir strengthened his leverage to demand that all his fellow demonstrators leave jail with him, with the charges dropped as unjust, or, at a minimum, that bail be dropped so that they could gain release on personal recognizance. Robert Kennedy, for his part, was irked by the very idea that King wanted to use himself as a hostage. As stupid as it was for Connor to have engineered King's incarceration, Kennedy thought it was irresponsible of King to risk an explosion of racial violence in Birmingham over what Kennedy saw as a side issue to the segregation dispute. He told Belafonte to stand by with the money, and secretly pursued alternative methods to free King.

In Birmingham, the negotiating teams met into the night, the afterglow of President Kennedy's public endorsement spurring on their eagerness to finish. However, that same national spotlight made the businessmen instinctively wary, and the Negro strategists remained divided in King's absence. At the mass meeting, only James Bevel addressed the crowd, and, as though to demonstrate that anything could happen once people surrendered to the movement, a procession of nineteen white people entered the church, some of them wearing beards and rabbinical garb. They marched down the aisles of Sixth Avenue Baptist and up to the rostrum, where they embraced the preachers and the choir. “We came to applaud your courage and dignity in your struggle for everyone,” said a rabbi from New Jersey, introducing colleagues from as near as Memphis and as far away as Nova Scotia, saying they had been elected at a rabbinical conference to make a spontaneous pilgrimage in response to publicity about Birmingham. “I have never been moved more deeply in my life,” declared Rabbi Alex Shapiro, who said that as Jews who had seen the Germans overrun Europe, they hoped always to lend succor against oppression anywhere. “We shall do what you ask,” he said. “Our people are your people.” From the pulpit a cantor taught them a simple song of brotherhood in Hebrew, then directed the swaying congregation to embrace one another in the pews. For the ever-present Birmingham police detectives, this joyful hugging was the worst part of the night's surveillance. “Of course Officer Watkins and myself were sitting between two negroes,” Officer Allison reported to Bull Connor, “and they really gave us the treatment.”

A number of the Negro negotiators believed that King was wrong to stay in jail. With the active encouragement of Attorney General Kennedy, they prevailed upon A. G. Gaston to show up at the jail with $5,000 cash from his own bank. As in Albany ten months earlier, King and Abernathy found themselves ejected from their cells. This time there was no mystery, and the demands of unity prevented King from complaining publicly about the deception. Still, it was an unhappy King who returned to the Gaston Motel that night. He believed that his own misguided allies had deprived him of an advantage supplied by the cooperative foe, Bull Connor. Fittingly, a day that had begun with an enraged Shuttlesworth escaping from the hospital ended with an angry King trying to barricade himself in jail, and in between, the contending parties had zigzagged through a baffling series of press statements. After dark, farmer Shuttlesworth wound up talking urbanely about holding the course, while citified King wound up wanting to scald the other side of the hog. Late that night, King told reporters that if there was no settlement by eleven o'clock Thursday morning, the movement would mount its largest demonstration yet.

 

The deadline slid by without result. It was Thursday, May 9, 1963, one extraordinary week since the gamble of the D-Day children's march. In Moscow,
Pravda
ran a story headlined “Monstrous Crimes Among Racists in the United States.” Less vitriolic stories had become staples throughout Europe, and
The New York Times
reported that Birmingham was competing daily with an insurrection in Haiti for top news billing across non-Communist Asia. A majority of the news outlets, taking the merits of the Negro cause to be obvious, wondered why the Kennedy Administration failed to hasten a solution with a public assertion of authority.

In Birmingham, with negotiations still deadlocked on the issue of the demonstrators still in jail, the whites pointed out that in return for King's one-day moratorium they had quietly engineered the release pending trial of the five hundred youngest prisoners. Moreover, they said that after the settlement, and certainly upon the confirmation of the Boutwell administration, they could get the remaining bonds reduced drastically, perhaps even the charges dropped. But they were only businessmen, they insisted, and even if they could make puppets of the city courts and prosecutors, they could not boast of such powers in a public settlement. Surely King could understand that. The best they could do was to include a promise of concerted effort to get the demonstrators released.

This was not good enough for King. He recoiled from the thought of the great mass meeting at which he would tell the mothers and fathers that while they had cracked segregation in Birmingham, their children must stay in jail. Those people should not have been arrested in the first place, he insisted. On principle, and personal honor, King refused to settle. If the Senior Citizens could not get the prisoners released outright, then perhaps they could raise $250,000 to get them freed on bond. If they could not or would not do it, then perhaps the federal government could raise the money. After all, Robert Kennedy had raised more than $60
million
for the Bay of Pigs prisoners. To Kennedy's protestations, through Marshall, that the government role here was peacemaker and mediator, not bondsman, King replied that if the federal government had not already been a party to the conflict before President Kennedy's press conference, and before Robert Kennedy has pressured Gaston to bail him out against his will, then surely it was now, and ought to be more so.

These were prickly talks, laced with innuendo. To Kennedy's urgent warnings that the Negroes should settle before Governor Wallace's troopers crushed their hopes under martial law, King hinted that Governor Rockefeller might help with the bond funds if Kennedy refused. The threat of partisan revolt touched Kennedy where he was vulnerable, not only in presidential politics but even in the Democratic House, where hearings had opened only the previous day on Republican bills to outlaw segregation. Some days later, in a White House presentation before the entire cabinet, Robert Kennedy said he had told King repeatedly that his stubbornness “doesn't really make a lot of sense.”

King returned Kennedy's annoyance. At the Thursday press conference, at which he extended the truce another day, King publicly contradicted the Administration for the first time in Birmingham. “The President said that there were no federal statutes involved in most aspects of this struggle,” he said, “but I feel that there have been blatant violations of basic constitutional principles. I think also that we must recognize that some persons who have been arrested were arrested for going down to register to vote, and the federal government has done nothing about that. And some persons have been arrested in the Federal Building, at the lunch counter there. Nothing has been done.” He went on to assert that several other existing statutes plainly justified federal intervention.