Parting the Waters (146 page)

 

The Evers murder came at the midpoint of a ten-week period after the Birmingham settlement when statisticians counted 758 racial demonstrations and 14,733 arrests in 186 American cities. Two men demanding integration chained themselves to the gallery of the Ohio legislature. An Alabama mob stoned the home of a white preacher who suggested that Negroes be allowed to worship in his church. Ironically, one of the few places that was quiet for a time was Greenwood, Mississippi, where Bob Moses and Bernice Robinson held their training workshops “in spite of the chaos all around us,” which included the four-day disappearance of their friends, who finally were sprung from the Winona jail on the day Evers was shot. “They were a horrible sight,” Robinson reported to Myles Horton. “Annell Ponder's eyes were swollen and bloodshot from the beatings, and one hip was swollen twice the size of the other. Mrs. Hamer had bruises all over her head, and her hips were bruised.” They closed the week's session a little early so that everyone could go down to the Evers funeral in Jackson, but these intimidations caused no one to drop out, and twelve more people around Greenwood came forward to become registration teachers. By the time Robinson's report reached Highlander, Horton had abundant troubles of his own: a posse of ten sheriff's deputies had staged a blitzkrieg raid on his relocated camp near Knoxville and arrested all twenty-seven members of the weekly workshop for unchaperoned interracial conduct. The local sheriff announced that he had authorized the raid to forestall vigilante action by angry, fearful constituents, including one who had threatened to “take shotguns and there will be Negro blood running down the mountain.” The sheriff padlocked the Highlander camp, which arsonists burned to the ground four days later.

In Winona alone, John Doar worked on no fewer than three federal suits: one to order local officials not to interfere with integration at the bus station, another to overturn the criminal convictions of the Negroes, and a third, futile one to punish the officers who had administered the jailhouse beatings. Doar snatched a private moment to attend the funeral in Jackson—he had considered Medgar Evers a friend and ally since his clandestine scouting trip two years earlier—but emergency duties followed him even there. At the end of a silent memorial march through town, the dignitaries disappeared inside the Collins Funeral Home for a small private service, leaving most of the huge crowd of five thousand marchers outside to disperse. Of these, some one hundred young people defied the court order that made public silence a condition of their gathering. They sang “Oh Freedom” as a dirge, and then, when someone broke into an up-tempo version of “This Little Light of Mine,” a hand-clapping mass edged back into the street. “Now they're making their way downtown,” an apprehensive radio announcer told his listeners in San Francisco, “and my guess is that a demonstration is under way.”

The noise of sirens and screams broke out over the singing, as the Negroes marched to a halt, nose to nose with a gathering phalanx of fire trucks and policemen armed with shotguns. The temperature was 103 degrees. Some of the Negroes shouted, “We want the killer! We want freedom!” These were the young movement people who had been forbidden to march for two weeks now, since the children's march of June 1. Even on Flag Day, June 14, pairs of them had been arrested off the streets for carrying little American flags, as Jackson's white officials allowed Negroes no public display of any kind. The police regarded the spontaneous demonstration as the bitter but predictable result of the city's decision to allow the Negroes to memorialize Medgar Evers. They brought up pumper trucks and dogs, and they charged when some of the young marchers began to throw rocks at them. They had clubbed several and arrested nearly thirty when, suddenly, the man who talked like Gary Cooper appeared in a showdown scene from one of his movies.

An astonished Claude Sitton wrote in
The New York Times
that Doar walked into the flashpoint of a riot, hands raised above his head “with bottles and bricks crashing around him.” Shouting his name, he told them this was not the way, and the very sight of him stilled the crowd so that he could be heard. An angry young woman came up to him. “We get our rumps shot up!” she yelled in his face, and then, stammering with disgust, “And what are
they
gonna do…and what are
we
, are we gonna wait for the
Justice Department
?” “Aw, give us a break,” pleaded Doar. One of the Jackson officers, looking to the uncertain Negroes behind, shouted that Doar should make sure they all knew who he was. “My name is John Doar!” he yelled. “D-O-A-R. I'm in the Justice Department in Washington. And anybody around here knows that I stand for what's right!” He walked forward, calling out the names of Dave Dennis and other movement leaders he knew and how many times they had been arrested, saying they too wanted the crowd to disperse. Miraculously, they did. Doar scarcely paused after his famous “stroll” that day. His month-old son back in Washington was still nameless, and remained so for another two weeks until Doar's colleagues made him take time literally to pull a name from a hat.

In Jackson, the unburied corpse of Medgar Evers already was a shrine to the altered state of American race relations. His murder was eerie and providential, so flushed with history as to seem perversely proper—shot in the back on the very night President Kennedy embraced racial democracy as a moral cause. This was a mythical event of race, the first national one since Emmett Till's death trip into the Tallahatchie River. In a subtle but important turn of perception, people referred to the killing as a political assassination instead of a lynching, adding both personal and historical connotations. White people who had never heard of Medgar Evers spoke his name over and over, as though the words themselves had the ring of legend. It seemed fitting that the casket was placed on a slow train through the South, bound for Washington so that the body could lie in state. In death, Evers inspired reappraisals, conversions, and heroics on a grand scale, but the extraordinary emotions also produced raw adjustments among the leaders. Some of them were at each other's throats before the funeral train left Jackson.

 

On the morning after the Evers murder, Majority Leader Carl Albert called President Kennedy to apologize for the Democratic defectors who unexpectedly rejected a $450 million section of the Administration's public works bill. “I couldn't do a damn thing with them, you know,” said Albert, and the President instantly understood. “Civil rights did it,” Kennedy replied. Albert expressed amazement that even committee chairmen, “some of the top men in the House,” had deserted the Administration to support toughening or weakening amendments on racial policy. The issue split the Democrats. “I'm awfully sorry,” Albert said sheepishly, and the President tried to console him. “Just events are making our problems,” Kennedy said wearily. “Christ, you know, it's like they shoot this guy in Mississippi…I mean, it's just in everything. I mean, this has become everything.” Albert agreed that the civil rights uproar was “overwhelming the whole program.” He told the President it would be nearly impossible to pass farm bills or mass-transit funding. On every close question from foreign aid to the space budget, civil rights loomed as the margin of defeat.

Robert Kennedy reached a point of overload the next day, when three thousand anti-segregation pickets showed up outside his office on Pennsylvania Avenue. He tried to win them over with a speech about how demonstrations were unnecessary because the Administration was on their side, as evidenced by the President's television speech. But this was a brash crowd, and the more vociferous ones shouted questions at Kennedy about the Greenwood shootings and the Winona beatings. What especially annoyed the Attorney General was his inability to refute the placards that accused the Justice Department of racial discrimination in its own hiring. Kennedy knew how hard he had worked on this issue. He had ordered internal surveys and recruitment drives, exploded in tantrums over the slowness of the bureaucracy. However, disclosure of such efforts would lead to painful facts—Burke Marshall had just reported that the Civil Rights Division itself had hired almost a dozen Negro clerks but not a single lawyer or administrator above Civil Service grade 11. Worse, the facts would invite harsh questions about Kennedy's command of his own department. Inevitably, it seemed, a politician in confession was a politician without power, and the prestige of his office was not served by the Attorney General scrapping with street demonstrators. When he tried to finesse the hiring issue with boasts of percentage gains over the Eisenhower record, a shouting picketer retorted that he saw precious few Negroes coming out the Justice Department's doors. Kennedy snapped, preferring to scorn than to bend to such critics. “Individuals will be hired according to their ability, not their color,” he said icily, provoking loud jeers from the crowd.

King was attending the Gandhi Society's first-anniversary fund-raiser at New York's Americana Hotel when reports confirmed the death of Medgar Evers. Among the messages that reached him through Clarence Jones was a suggestion relayed from the Jackson movement that the Gandhi Society should name its bail fund for Evers. After all, Evers had given his life in a crusade that had brought nonviolent direct action to the heart of the beast—Mississippi—with six hundred Mississippians arrested in one day. King liked the idea, especially since one of his own Gandhian mentors, Mordecai Johnson, was present at the fund-raiser and pronounced himself pleased to head such a project. Together, they announced the Gandhi Society's new “Medgar Evers Memorial Bail Fund” after the luncheon that same day.

To Roy Wilkins, King might as well have stolen Evers' body. It was bad enough that King had practically killed Evers—sending demonstration fever from Birmingham into Mississippi, forcing Evers to accommodate tactics that led swiftly to violent white retribution, as Wilkins had predicted. It was worse that King tried to make an NAACP man into a symbol of direct action with a bail fund, of all things. And it was worse still that King was rushing in to raise money off his intrusions. Other Evers funds were springing up independently of the NAACP—including one at the Chicago
Defender
, which solicited on its front page—but it was King's fund that brought down the wrath of the NAACP hierarchy. Wilkins instructed his aides to contact the widow that first evening after the murder. They secured her written agreement that funds honoring her husband should be controlled by the NAACP rather than by “King's organization.”
*

The Gandhi Society surrendered instantly to this demand, but resentments had been unleashed. In an otherwise unctuous letter of capitulation, president Theodore Kheel of the Gandhi Society subtly tweaked Wilkins for carrying on a vendetta through the newspapers. When Stanley Levison first heard the rumbles, he told his friend Frank Montero that “the furor that you are talking about has long and very much deeper roots. The antagonism towards Martin at NAA[CP] has been a disgrace for a long time.” Montero, who was both an old friend of Wilkins and the man who had presented Mordecai Johnson at King's Gandhi Society luncheon, tried to pass off the dispute as the result of hypercompetition by underlings on both sides. No, Levison insisted, the malice and backbiting were “all on one side, although I admit that this will sound very unusual.” To the startled Montero, Levison poured out a long tale of grievance against Wilkins. “Roy and every single member of his staff except John Morsell…have carried on against Martin,” he said. For years they had conducted a “dirty campaign” of gossip about King—for instance, spreading the “hair-raising” rumor that King moved to Atlanta in 1960 only because the Negro insurance companies paid him $1 million a month to “hold the Negroes back.” Through it all, said Levison, King kept speaking at NAACP functions, opening NAACP branches, and praising the NAACP in speeches. He did not understand how King had been “so patient with the amount of garbage that's heaped on him.” In fact, Levison said, King's patience “infuriates me.” This went on to be the longest and most emotional outburst from Levison ever picked up by the FBI wiretaps.

King himself nearly skipped the Evers funeral in Jackson for fear that his very presence would exacerbate the tensions. In the end, he went but made no speeches or statements. At the public service, he endured eulogies that trivialized his methods as pointedly as funereal dignity allowed. “Lest we forget, and it does appear that some people have forgotten, it was right here in Mississippi back in 1952 that the first statewide nonviolent protest was carried out,” declared T. R. M. Howard. “…We put out some 40,000 fluorescent bumper signs on cars, saying Don't Buy Gas Where You Can't Use the Restroom. Our martyred hero, Medgar Evers, was one of the individuals who participated in this first campaign, four years
before
Dr. King marched at Montgomery.” From the Masonic Temple, King marched through the Jackson heat beside Roy Wilkins in a show of unity, then ducked out to the airport. He was gone before John Doar's one-man performance at the spontaneous march downtown that Saturday, June 15.

King's discretion did him little good, perhaps because the very nature of the Jackson stalemate made him a continuous, galling challenge to the NAACP leaders filling in for Medgar Evers. Having stalled demonstrations until his death, and then postponed them pending his funeral, they were back in the vise. Mayor Thompson was offering no concessions on lunch counter segregation or other issues. The assassination created more movement pressure than ever to secure Birmingham-style results through Birmingham-style mass marches, but the NAACP leaders viewed such tactics as a suicidal obeisance to King—the more so, since they might adopt King's nonviolence and still fail to budge white Jackson. Their dilemma was so painfully obvious that the ever-independent James Meredith stepped forward to suggest a compromise—a general strike or work stoppage in honor of Medgar Evers. He thought the tactic might add pressure to the NAACP-sanctioned boycott, but his attempted diplomacy earned him only a scathing dismissal from Gloster Current. “We couldn't comment on any idea a student has…” said Current. “We're in a titanic struggle here, and it's not a struggle in which an amateur has to give advice to those who know what it's all about.” This was empty bravado, as Current was unable to say either that they would or would not resume demonstrations. He and the other national officers left for Washington the day after the Evers funeral.