Parting the Waters (153 page)

The proposed indictments also caused distress in the Justice Department. Even the steeliest review attorneys felt qualms about charges that intruded so closely on lawyer-client privilege. Both the questions and answers at issue were vague, making perjury difficult to prove, and there were numerous quirks in the indictment package. Joni Rabinowitz, the only proposed white defendant, was a young SNCC volunteer whose father, Victor Rabinowitz, was a New York lawyer of an alleged Communist past, and for that reason she was being cast as a ringleader of the entire Albany Movement, acting on orders that may have come from Moscow. This was a J. Edgar Hoover twist designed to appeal to white segregationist juries, but it was highly implausible to lawyers who knew anything about the Albany Movement. Also among the defendants was an unconnected, miscellaneous Negro who was rumored to have angered FBI agents by telling them they had no right to conduct interviews in his barber shop. Only two of the nine defendants—Rabinowitz and Dr. W. G. Anderson—actually were alleged to have conspired against Carl Smith, the juror from the
Ware
v.
Johnson
case. Only Rabinowitz was alleged actually to have picketed the grocery store, and witnesses were divided on that elementary point. Other defendants appeared to have been singled out for political reasons. These included Rev. Samuel Wells, who had led one of the most spectacular jail marches of the previous summer, and Thomas Chatmon, the NAACP Youth Council leader who had suffered so many misgivings about letting his members join the original Albany Movement.

Inside a divided Justice Department, lawyers from the Criminal Division conceded flaws in the package but argued that the rash of equivocation over the legal meeting indicated that the defendants had guilty minds over the picketing of Smith. The U.S. Attorney's team was comforted by the excellent chances of obtaining convictions before a Georgia jury. Lawyers from the Civil Rights Division, on the other hand, argued strenuously against bringing such marginal charges against Albany Negroes while failing to indict the jailer who had beaten Slater King or the officers who had kicked Slater King's pregnant wife to the ground. When the conflict reached Robert Kennedy for decision, he realized that there was no subtle way to shelve the case. Only his explicit order to the U.S. Attorney could abort the indictments. Such an order would infuriate a number of government officials who had invested much labor in the prosecution, including the U.S. prosecutors in Georgia and Kennedy-appointed District Court judge Robert Elliott, who had pushed the investigation from the start. Once the Attorney General resolved not to block the indictments, it was politically expedient to be as noisy about the decision as he was quiet about civil rights enforcements on behalf of Negroes. Accepting an inevitable torrent of criticism from the civil rights movement, Kennedy moved boldly to capture the attention of those on the other side. As he was announcing the indictments at his press conference in Washington, U.S. marshals and FBI agents were hauling the nine defendants to jail in Georgia. Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach told reporters that the Albany Movement's picketing of Smith's grocery store “must become a matter of serious Federal legal concern.” The department further signaled the Administration's unwavering support by dispatching senior prosecutors to assist the U.S. Attorney in Georgia, where the first convictions would be recorded in November. The Washington
Star
congratulated Attorney General Kennedy for proving in the Albany Nine case that he did not stand “with the Negro against the white man.”

All through August, little pinpricks of back-page news joined the running stories from Americus and Albany. In Birmingham, a tear-gas cannister sent twenty shoppers to the hospital from Loveman's just after the store complied with integration conditions of the spring settlement, and a few days later a bomb demolished the entrance to the home of Arthur Shores, the city's best-known Negro lawyer. In Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana, James Farmer of CORE led a march of two hundred to jail, where he stayed all month through a sustained siege of mounted patrolmen and house searches and night riders so menacing that he eventually escaped the region concealed in the back of a hearse. These and other threatening episodes ran counter to the larger mood of a nation that was just adapting to the moral challenge of the civil rights bill, and in which the same Kennedys who were prosecuting the Albany Nine were widely disparaged as nigger-lovers. Perhaps no American felt the ragged edges of these contradictions more acutely than John Lewis, who spent the summer shuttling between Southern jails and luxurious salons of power. Don Harris, the most threatened and abused sedition defendant in the Americus jail, was his closest friend in SNCC. Lewis knew several of the Albany Nine personally, and scores of other prisoners were as real to him as freedom songs or the rattle of handcuffs. He identified with their latest ordeals even as he was rising to personal acquaintance with the President and the Attorney General.

Lewis was a gifted mimic. During the last executive planning sessions for the March on Washington, he was the guest of a wealthy family in Westchester County, New York, where in off hours he entertained sophisticated Northern students with his droll imitations of Robert Kennedy's choppy, distracted discourse and of King's pulpit cadences. Lewis beguiled the students as the irresistible Negro man-child, awed by everything and nothing. He radiated with the belief that power and luxury were immoral, and yet this conviction, filtered through James Lawson's teaching that there was virtue in all people, came out in Lewis as a gentle parody on the distractions of worldly success. On the Saturday before the march, he climbed into a tanning chair and floated out into the Westchester swimming pool. From this perch, he was holding forth on the vicissitudes of the movement when an emergency phone call came in from one of the Southern jails. As Lewis could not swim and the others were fully dressed, the task of fishing him out brought a few seconds of addled, crisis hilarity. Scrambling students tossed off jokes that the national chairman of SNCC would save the day just as soon as they could tow his chair to a poolside phone.

Lewis laughed too, but he soon took leave of his guests to prepare his speech for the March on Washington. Although the prospect was daunting for a young man with a speech impediment, Lewis had no trouble deciding what aspects of this historic moment he would try to highlight for a crowd that might be larger than the population of Idaho. He drafted a simple speech about the Americus prisoners and the Plaquemine cavalry charges. He invoked the plight of Slater King by name, summoning his audience to look more sharply for complicity in ostensible goodwill. “Do you know,” he asked, “that in Albany, Georgia, nine of our leaders have been indicted not by the Dixiecrats but by the Federal Government for peaceful protest?” He turned charges of equivocation and fuzzy purpose back upon the Administration. “I want to know,” he wrote, “which side is the Federal Government on?”

 

A week before the march, Clarence Jones ducked out of his office to call Stanley Levison from a pay phone. Dispensing with greeting or introduction, he said, “The only reason that I'm hounding you is that I would like to get what you have, and start getting it transcribed.”

“Well, I have to go over it,” Levison replied. He promised to “have something” by that night.

“Okay, but time runneth on,” said Jones.

Inside the New York FBI office, the Levison wiretappers decided that this cryptic caller must be Jones. They contacted the Jones wiretappers, who reported that Jones had been in his law firm just minutes before but that the Levison call had not gone out over Jones's office lines. Once the technicians confirmed by voice identification that the caller indeed was Jones, they noted the suspicious circumstances for their superiors: Jones and Levison clearly were taking precautions against wiretaps. For the Bureau, this gave a sinister cast even to Levison's effort to complete the crash book project on Birmingham. He was drafting passages to submit to King and the ghostwriter, Al Duckett, who were holed up at the Riverdale Motor Inn.

King broke away from Riverdale that night to give a speech in Chicago before the National Insurance Association. This was a big money event for the SCLC, as the NIA executives had guaranteed a minimum collection of $10,000 and Wyatt Walker had wangled free use of their mailing list. The event also carried personal and political significance for King, who greeted his audience as “the economic power structure of the Negro community.” These were the heirs of the pioneers who had forged the first major Negro business markets by writing dime-a-week life insurance and burial policies, often doubling as morticians and bill collectors or working in collaboration with preachers, such as Daddy King, to collect on pledges to the church coffers. “You know as well as I know that these vast economic resources that you've gained through pooled resources have come by and large from the masses of the Negro people,” King told them. “And you owe it to them to pour some of these resources back into the struggle.” The mood of the crowd was so bright that they burst into applause at this blunt assessment, and they applauded again when King warned that they could not have both integration and a protected Negro market. “Now if you have the illusion at any point that our job will be merely to compete with Negroes in this new age that is emerging,” he said, “you're sleeping through a revolution…We must set out to do our jobs so well that the living, the dead, or the unborn couldn't do them any better.”

Having admonished the Negro capitalists, King turned to easier targets. He denounced the white politicians in Congress for “playing around with one of the vital issues facing our nation and…our world.” Already those politicians were maneuvering to weaken the civil rights bill and delay its consideration at least into the next year, and King drew cheers from the insurance executives by vowing not to let it happen. A surge of emotion carried him through rather abstract remarks on the power of nonviolence. Almost defiantly, he invited them to contemplate the potential of a system that embraced no inherently repugnant means. “I believe that one of the weaknesses of communism is found right here,” King declared, citing Lenin's defense of deceit and violence toward the goal of a classless society. “And this is where nonviolence breaks with communism or any other system that would argue that the end justifies the means, for in the long run the end is pre-existent in the means, and the means represents the ideal in the making and the end in process.” As his content grew more technical and remote, King compensated with nearly desperate passion. “I have come to see
even more
,” he cried in a choking voice, “that as we move on toward the goal of justice, hatred must
never
be our motive.”

“I refuse to become bitter,” he said, then moved to a final peroration on a theme that had inspired the multitude at his Detroit speech in June. “And so tonight I say to you, as I have said before, I have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” he began. “I have a dream that one day, right down in Birmingham, Alabama, where the home of my good friend Arthur Shores was bombed just last night, white men and Negro men, white women and Negro women, will be able to walk together as brothers and sisters. I have a dream…” During the ovation that followed, the dapper Chicago emcee shouted that he wished he had King's eloquence in order to express his appreciation for the speech. “I don't have that eloquence, so you'll have to have another dream,” he quipped.

King returned to New York to join Roy Wilkins for a guest appearance on “Meet the Press.” In the first question, Lawrence Spivak spoke of the numerous authorities who “believe it would be impossible to bring more than 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incidents and possibly rioting,” and he asked Wilkins sourly what the country could possibly learn about civil rights that could justify such risks. Spivak asked no questions of King—perhaps still fuming over King's refusal to come out of jail for the show the previous summer—but the next panelist promptly asked King three times how the march's leadership could tolerate Bayard Rustin's background of subversion and character defects. The friendliest reporter, Robert MacNeil of NBC News, sparred with King over the meaning of “social equality” and wanted to know how the civil rights movement could survive the “psychological climax” of the march without either disbanding to rest or pushing on into violence. The fourth panelist pressed King to admit that the movement needed to eliminate extremism and “rowdyism,” such as the public booing of Mayor Daley and J. H. Jackson. “I wouldn't say that I condone every action that is taking place at this time,” King replied. “I think we must see that we are in the midst of a great social revolution, and no social revolution can be neat and tidy at every point.”

Wilkins and King did their cooperative best to project the march in a positive light—there was not a shaving's difference between them in tone or substance—but public expectations brimmed with apprehension. In Washington, authorities from all sectors guarded against the possibility that marauding Negroes might sack the capital like Moors or Visigoths reincarnate. The city banned liquor sales for the first time since Prohibition. President Kennedy and his military chiefs were poised with pre-drafted proclamations that would trigger suppression by 4,000 troops assembled in the suburbs, backed by 15,000 paratroopers on alert in North Carolina. Washington hospitals canceled elective surgery. Some storekeepers transferred merchandise to warehouses to safeguard against looting. Chief Judge John Lewis Smith, Jr., notified his fifteen colleagues to be prepared for all-night criminal hearings,
*
and practically no baseball fans protested when the Washington Senators postponed two days' games until Thursday, when the march would be safely over.