Parting the Waters (147 page)

Wilkins was met there by his nephew Roger, a lawyer in the State Department, who was struck by a change in his uncle's lifelong demeanor. Roy Wilkins had always been a man of formal, laconic reserve, who showed little of himself to anyone and practically nothing to his juniors, but now he could not stop unburdening himself of his troubles, most especially of his torture by King. “Can you imagine it?” he asked his nephew. “Medgar was an NAACP man all the way, and King comes in and tries to take the money.” The younger Wilkins had never seen his uncle so angry or so raw. Grief, pressure, and the ghoulish turf war had worn the polish off the fierce institutional pride of Wilkins' thirty years with the NAACP. While the Medgar Evers funeral train was chugging toward Washington, he lashed out in a public speech. “The other organizations furnish the noise and get the publicity,” he said, “while the NAACP furnishes the manpower and pays the bills…. They are here today and gone tomorrow. There is only one organization that can handle a long, sustained fight—the NAACP.” Belittling the small memberships of the other groups, Wilkins urged the crowd not to stray. “Don't go giving them your money when it should be given to us,” he admonished. “Don't get so excited.”

While in Washington, Wilkins pressed upon the Kennedy Administration his view that no civil rights crisis was more important than the one in Evers' hometown, where failure to reach a negotiated settlement on segregation would encourage extremists of both races toward violence or demonstrations. Kennedy officials agreed. With the NAACP leaders, they sought answers to the tactical conundrum of Jackson: how to use federal leverage without attracting attention. Their best answer was to walk a tightrope. Robert Kennedy and then the President received the NAACP preachers from Jackson for White House conferences that raised their stature as successors to Medgar Evers. Simultaneously the Attorney General pressured Mayor Thompson, saying that unless he made concessions to the Negro preachers, he would not long be able to contain the young people who were straining to march. Finally, President Kennedy himself made two phone calls to Mayor Thompson.

Thompson was a garrulous and optimistic sort who kept telling the President he was wonderful and not to “get your feelings hurt” by the nasty things Thompson might have to say on political occasions, such as the rally he was attending with Governor Wallace that day, “because I think the world of you.” Kennedy laughed and gave Thompson “full permission to denounce me in public as long as you don't in private.” As to the negotiations, Thompson managed to pass off his refusal to seek desegregation of the downtown stores as a positive achievement: “I told the merchants…it's entirely up to them—if they want to sell to whites, sell to Negroes, or fish, or anything in the world, it's up to them, and I'm going to protect them with every force that's in my command.” He told Kennedy he had “answered every other thing” on the Negro preachers' list “except the biracial committee, and I just can't do that right now.” When the President asked about one of the items on the list—hiring the city's first Negro policemen—Thompson nearly purred over the wire. “Oh, I've got that!” he exclaimed. He was planning to take that step and several other big ones, he assured the President, but stressed that “we
have
to do it
our
way.”

Thompson asked President Kennedy to help things along by trying to persuade the Negroes to “go through the courts, and not have marches and intimidation.” He said Jackson was in an “explosive situation” because of the young Negroes “being used as shields, and they have just gone wild. They have got it in their system, and the people can't control them or anything.” On this point, President Kennedy asked for Mayor Thompson's evaluation of the Jackson preachers who had come to the White House—which one should he talk to, who had most control, was Rev. R. L. T. Smith “the stud duck down there?” Thompson replied that “the power” was not Smith but a Rev. G. R. Haughton, who “is the one that causes problems, and he's real smart and they look to him a lot.”

The next night, Reverend Haughton rose to present the final result of the negotiations to a mass meeting in his own Pearl Street A.M.E. Church. Groans and hoots rose up from the crowd even before he finished reading the four-point package: (1) six Negro policemen “to be used in the Negro areas,” (2) eight Negro school-crossing guards at Negro schools, (3) eight Negro promotions in the city sanitation department, and (4) “the city will continue to hear Negro grievances.” Why was there no biracial committee? someone asked. Why were the Negro policemen to be segregated? Why was there no mention of segregation in the downtown stores? Against the onslaught, Haughton defended the settlement as a starting place. He preached, invoked the approval of Attorney General Kennedy, and finally offered up his pastoral honor. “I'm not getting one penny,” he cried. “My hair's getting whiter every day. I'm missing my meals. My family is worried about me, here and elsewhere. Some of us want to make a big noise and that's all, but we're here for
business
!”

Large numbers of supporters cheered Haughton. Another preacher pressed his advantage by challenging anyone to say that the steering committee would betray the movement. Then Arthur Jones rose as the authorized NAACP spokesman to say that the settlement honored Medgar Evers, who was just then being buried in Washington. He reminded the crowd that Evers had said from the beginning that he did not want another Birmingham in Jackson, and “if we want freedom for Medgar's sake, we
still
don't want a Birmingham.”

The patchy settlement held against all discontents. On Thursday, the Negro preachers and the city fathers applauded each other at a ceremony in which Mayor Thompson swore in Jackson's first Negro policeman, stressing as assets his 250-pound weight and his trustworthy record. This was a mawkishly empty victory to most of the young activists who had gone to jail, but they bowed to it, retreating to their workshops and registration projects in the Mississippi countryside. CORE's David Dennis told a gathering why they had not challenged the settlement with demonstrations: “I think everyone can see that a split between the organizations at this particular point could do us no good,” he said. Tim Jenkins, down from Yale Law School, declared in a speech that organizational rivalries were no more fatal in civil rights than in the Pentagon or the peace movement. Jerome Smith, less than a month after his parlor confrontation with Robert Kennedy in New York, brought his battering intensity back to his CORE project in Canton, one of Mississippi's toughest towns. “Our religion must not just become empty prayers,” he told a mass meeting, “but our religion must become a living vote, you see, because if the church was right, and if the church would not conform to the whims of a sick society…we would not be here and Medgar would not be there.”

In Washington, integrated troops fired a last salute and buried Medgar Evers with full military honors on June 19, eight days after the assassination. Twenty-five thousand people had viewed the body in a two-day processional, and the burial service at Arlington Cemetery was the largest since that of John Foster Dulles. President Kennedy did not attend, but afterward he sent a limousine for the widow and her two older children. He gave them kind words of condolence, and for the kids there were PT-109 souvenirs plus a scoot across the bed on which Queen Elizabeth had slept.

 

For President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the alternating doses of euphoria and rude shock built toward a profound, historic climax. On the very morning after the Evers assassination, Kennedy invited King to join him for a discussion of civil rights at the White House the following Monday, June 17. King eagerly agreed, then abruptly rescinded his acceptance by telegram the next day. In the brief interim, the ugly feud over the Evers Bail Fund erupted, and King, with the march on Washington at issue, wanted to delay meeting the President until he at least had a chance to patch up the internal wounds. Also, he learned that he was to be only one of some 250 religious leaders received by the President in the East Room. Discovery of this mass audience punctured hopes for a working alliance. Put down, King rejected Kennedy's invitation, ending his telegram with the pointed suggestion: “I hope we will be able to talk privately in the not too distant future.”

King and Kennedy were like a pair of ill-fated lovers, with similar interests but mismatched passions. Having embraced, even imitated, King's message on television, Kennedy now was pulling back. Entrenched Southerners were revolting against him in Congress. Everett Dirksen, the windy Republican leader of the Senate, proclaimed himself against the public accommodations centerpiece of Kennedy's new bill as a violation of property rights. Kennedy's speech had failed to check the epidemic of Negro protest, and scattered campaigns ripened into new mass protest nearly every day. Hosea Williams sent more than 200 children to jail in Savannah, then joined them. In Gadsden, Alabama, police arrested 450 students trying to renew the William Moore memorial march. Police in Danville broke down church doors to seize protest leaders. In Albany, Laurie Pritchett's men arrested nearly 150 over the next week. Negroes threw up picket lines around police stations in Kansas City, and New York's front pages showed local politicians scrambling to head off marches against segregated housing and employment. All this was distressing to Kennedy. Through Secretary of State Rusk, he secretly ordered all U.S. ambassadors to mount a concerted diplomatic effort to counter the “extremely negative reactions” overseas. (John Kenneth Galbraith, ambassador to India, replied tartly that “such crash effort would be wholly devoid of conviction,” and advised the Administration not to panic.) Meanwhile, the President did his best to concentrate public attention elsewhere.

King was slogging through enervating distractions in his own world—a money quarrel in Birmingham, the closing of Atlanta's Funtown to thwart an integrated handful of patrons, the publication of a
Saturday Evening Post
profile accusing King of “arrogance and opportunism,” which wounded him to the brink of filing a libel action. He was still the outsider. But he could not long be denied a White House meeting now that the President had invited no fewer than 1,500 national leaders to discuss civil rights in the month since the Birmingham settlement. Kennedy aides finally scheduled King's private audience with the President, early on a weekend morning. Then, having secured King's acceptance, they sandwiched him between an even earlier presidential meeting with Roy Wilkins and a later one with all the major civil rights leaders, plus UAW president Walter Reuther. Only then did Kenneth O'Donnell notify King that he was expected to stay on for the larger meeting, which White House press officials presented publicly as the major story—the paired sessions with King and Wilkins being a kind of administrative preparation. All these pains reflected his leverage as well as the aroused opposition among his allies. Taking the best he could get, King kept his White House appointment on Saturday, June 22.

While Roy Wilkins met first with President Kennedy, Burke Marshall gathered privately with King and several SCLC aides, including Andrew Young and Walter Fauntroy. Marshall took King aside for one of those urgently confidential government discussions, which turned out to be the first whispered ambush of the day. King could no longer defer the threat of Communist infiltration in the SCLC, Marshall warned. Specifically, he must sever relations with Stanley Levison, who was a Communist functionary, and with Jack O'Dell, whom Levison had “planted” inside the SCLC to influence the civil rights movement. King's first reaction was to shrug in amused disbelief. He was nonplussed, caught between the utter gravity of Marshall's tone and his own instinctive dismissal of the claims. No doubt he felt disoriented by whiplash: having come at last to make his case that the glory of the national freedom movement was at hand, King met instead the preemptive charge that he was harboring the most sinister enemies of peace and freedom. When he tried to tell Marshall that there must be some mistake, some confusion perhaps between an outright Communist and a person who had sympathized with Marxist tenets, Marshall contradicted him. This was not paranoid mush, he said, but hard intelligence from the very pinnacle of the U.S. government. Levison was something much more dangerous than an old New York radical; he was “a paid agent of the Soviet Communist apparatus.” Marshall told King that he was authorized to say no more. When King asked to see proof, the point Marshall stressed was that neither he nor King was in a position to second-guess the highest U.S. national security experts, and even if they were, the politics of the moment rendered their doubts irrelevant. The controlling fact was that President Kennedy was about to “put his whole political life on the line” with the civil rights bill, and the President simply could not make himself vulnerable to charges of Communist association.

Seeing from King's face that he was not convinced, Marshall was obliged to deliver him straightaway to Robert Kennedy for another round on the same subject. The initiative for these confrontations had come from the Attorney General, who had called J. Edgar Hoover the previous Monday to arrange a special FBI briefing on just how dramatic and explicit he could make the new warning to King without endangering the Bureau's sources, principally the Childs brothers. Hoover was only too happy to comply, knowing that such favors weakened Kennedy's case for shifting Bureau manpower out of the internal security field. For once, Kennedy was pushing Hoover about the threat of domestic subversion instead of vice versa. Now the Attorney General found it worth paying tribute to Hoover in order to gain a measure of control over King. Here was a man who was boring in on the White House, threatening to transform or destroy its domestic political base, and yet he held no public office, displayed no personal ambitions that could be traded on, succeeded by methods such as going to jail, and thrived on the very upheavals that most unsettled the Administration. These qualities, on top of the prosaic fact that at first sight King would be mistaken for a waiter at most Washington establishments, put him beyond the reach of the Kennedys' political and social language. With King talking of a demonstration that might turn the capital into a giant Birmingham, Robert Kennedy sought to check his momentum. He would gain a bargaining hold if King admitted that his movement was poisoned. He would gain the upper hand if King conceded to the government the unilateral right to define what was poisonous.