Parting the Waters (157 page)

A pall hung over the private discussion in the Cabinet Room. King opened with a gloomy monologue on the twenty-eight unsolved bombings in Birmingham and the current tinderbox of segregationist martial law. “There is a great deal of frustration and despair and confusion in the Negro community,” he told the President. “And there is a feeling of being alone and not being protected. If you walk the street, you're unsafe. If you stay at home, you're unsafe—there's a danger of a bombing. If you're in church, now it isn't safe. So that the Negro feels that everywhere he goes, or if he remains stationary, he's in danger of some physical violence.” President Kennedy said nothing until A. G. Gaston interrupted King to complain that insurance companies were canceling commercial policies on Negro businesses, and President Pitts of Miles College pointed out that he had been unable to secure insurance coverage for his new student union building. At this, Kennedy perked up to say here was a problem they could take care of. “I'll get it, Mr. President,” Burke Marshall said confidently.

But the President fell silent again when Shuttlesworth renewed King's argument for sending federal troops to replace the state troopers in Birmingham. He wanted to know why a city that was 40 percent Negro should live under the bayonets of an all-white force with a record of stark brutality and unsolved crimes. Ware took up the case, saying the local police had sunk almost to the level of Wallace's troopers. President Kennedy did not contest these assertions, but to him they only proved the implacable hatred toward Negroes by a powerful white majority. He interrupted Ware with marked irritation. “Well, if the local police are there and the State Police are there, what's the hope in Birmingham?” he asked. When Ware mumbled something about martial law, the President sternly pressed his point: “What is the long-range hope for Birmingham?”

The audience shrank from President Kennedy's distemper. King rose quietly to surrender the troop argument. “I still have faith in the vast possibilities of Birmingham,” he said. “There are many white people of good will in Birmingham. They need help. I think the situation that we are presenting now is an emergency crisis…Troops cannot solve the problem. And we know that. The problem with the mayor is that he's a weak man.”

President Kennedy said he understood their frustration. “Now it's tough for the Negro community,” he said. “…And I know that this bombing is particularly difficult. But if you look at any, as you know, of these struggles over a period, across the world, it's a very dangerous effort. So everybody just has to keep their nerve.” He commended his two new emissaries, saying their reputations gave them a chance to open communication between the races. “Royall is an outstanding fellow,” he said, “and Colonel Blaik's one of the finest men I've ever met.”

King soon faced the huge White House press corps outside. “This is the kind of federal concern needed,” he said.
The New York Times
and other major newspapers played the day's developments straight: “Kennedy Names 2…Negroes Applaud Move, Drop Appeal for Troops and Accept Panel.” However, dissent sprouted even during King's press conference. Reporters, especially the few Negro ones, asked pointedly if he really thought a “study team” was an appropriate response to the carnage at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Did he think a “segregated” pair of white Army retirees was a sensible way to promote racial harmony? Did King know that Royall was a corporate lawyer from North Carolina, or that no Negro ever played for “Red” Blaik's famous teams at West Point? Did King know these men, or anything about them? Did he think the appointments had been timed deliberately to show he had played no role in the decision? King defended himself lamely and escaped to the seclusion of the Justice Department, where the next day he protested the Albany Nine prosecutions without success. Clarence Jones warned King that James Baldwin and a group of New York intellectuals were furious that he had allowed President Kennedy to outmaneuver him so shamefully. Still, the Baldwin group's more “militant” response of a Christmas shopping boycott fizzled almost as quickly as it was announced. King was cornered between realism and ridicule.

That Sunday marked one week since the Birmingham church bombing. By then, news stories circulated symbolic details of the tragedy—the church clock stopped at 10:22
A.M.
, the face of Jesus was knocked cleanly from the only surviving stained-glass window in the east wall. On a New York television program, James Baldwin discussed the “missing face of Christ” with Reinhold Niebuhr. Their talk was suffused with the gathering emotion of the civil rights movement, which Niebuhr called a “revolution” that was bringing him out of retirement. Baldwin contended that suffering made Negroes “the only hope this country has,” not because of their race or inherent virtue but because only in extremity do people “discover what they really live by.” Most Americans, he added, “don't have any longer a real sense of what they live by. I really think it may be Coca-Cola.” Niebuhr, saying “history throws a light on this,” endorsed Baldwin's idea. “We are in a revolutionary situation,” he said, “and all through history, it was a despised minority—the proletarians, the peasants, the poor—who recaptured the heights and depths of faith. And the country itself choked in its own fat, as we are inclined to choke in our own fat.”

It was an extraordinary bit of television—a spontaneous, passionate, unlikely alliance between the plodding old Germanic theologian and the tormented young ghetto artist. The one crack of difference between them was a pregnant conundrum on nonviolence. Baldwin chafed at the limits of nonviolence, which he criticized as a psychological affliction peculiar to Negroes, saying that through all American history, “the only time that nonviolence has been admired is when the Negroes practice it.” In reply, Niebuhr gently chided Baldwin for adopting the prevailing condescension toward nonviolence as a ghetto of the weak. “People ask me,” said Niebuhr, “since I am such a strong anti-pacifist, how I can have this admiration for a pacifist? Well, I have a simple answer…King's doctrine of nonviolent resistance is not pacifism. Pacifism of really the classical kind is where you are concerned about your own purity and not responsibility. And the great ethical divide is between people who want to be pure and those who want to be responsible. And I think King has shown this difference.”

 

The spirit of resistance already seemed aroused among King's respectable opponents. On Monday, September 23, a five-man delegation of Birmingham officials marched into President Kennedy's office to present their side of the dispute, showing no trace of doubt or defensiveness. “Mr. President, we came here, sir, with big chips on our shoulder,” began Mayor Boutwell's spokesman, William Hamilton. He said the responsible whites of Birmingham deeply resented implications that they were somehow tarnished by the church bombing, that on the contrary they already had taken steps to solve racial problems but “have not, in a great many instances, been given credit for them,” and finally that what was holding back their progress was the lack of a peaceful working atmosphere, most especially a respite from Northern critics and outside agitators such as Martin Luther King.

President Kennedy doggedly followed the briefing agenda he had received from the Attorney General and Burke Marshall. He pressed the officials to take even one of three minimal, concrete steps that would ease national pressures since the bombing: (1) hire at least some of the Negro sales clerks promised in the May agreement, (2) begin biracial negotiations with
local
Negro leaders, or (3) hire at least one Negro policeman, as even Jackson, Mississippi, had done. “I'd like to see what steps you could take,” said the President, “even though you may feel that what you've done is enough.” The Birmingham delegates parried each salvo. As to a Negro policeman, Hamilton said Kennedy had no idea what personal abuse they were taking just for replacing Bull Connor. “I would say fifty percent of the morning force when I walk into City Hall, and when the mayor walks into City Hall, if I hold out my hand, they refuse to shake hands,” said Hamilton. “If I speak, they refuse to speak.” He said at least a third of the police force would quit rather than serve with a Negro. Rev. Dr. Landon Miller, president of the Birmingham Council of Ministers, told Kennedy that the moderates already were “branded.” “When we left the airport yesterday, there were signs over our heads saying these liberals do not represent us,” he said.

President Kennedy expressed sympathy, saying people were calling him names too, but that this was the price of public life in difficult times and that things would get worse if they did not do something. Every few minutes he ventured forth on his refrain: “Now isn't it possible to do something?…Is there anything that can be done?…I'm just trying to think of two or three things that could be done…Is there anything that you can do now?” He finally prodded Frank Newton, vice president of the telephone company, into what Newton called “a straightforward answer, but a respectful answer,” that such steps would only encourage “those people,” and that in fact “a lot of people…think
you've
been giving those people encouragement.”

“I understand that,” replied the President, his voice rising defensively. He told them he had not encouraged any agitation in Birmingham, but on the other hand he did not think all the agitation was unwarranted. “Let me make it clear that I regard getting a police force as legitimate,” he said. “And I regard people working as clerks in the stores as legitimate. And I don't think that you can take any other position from a national point of view. And my opinion is that if you can integrate the armed forces, where you have to live together, eat together, use the same john, and all the rest, you can in these cases work together…. We're talking about some things which are rather limited.” When Newton rejoined that in his opinion the Kennedy public accommodations bill was not so limited, President Kennedy fairly exploded. “Oh, public accommodations is nothing!” he said, launching a passionate monologue on the theme that public accommodations was minimal justice compared with the wrenching problem of the public schools. “Nobody here is naïve about it,” he said, “or doesn't understand it, or doesn't see what's happening in Washington, where you've got fifty-four percent Negro and eighty-five percent in the schools, the whites just
running
out of Washington. Nobody wants that. Public accommodations is nothing! My God, it's whether you can go into a store or a hotel. They don't go into the Statler…and they won't be coming into the hotel in Birmingham.” He wound up his exhortation by telling them he hated to argue with the state of Alabama, “but isn't there something that you can now do, given the problem as it is?…You ought to be able to turn that situation around.”

“We think we
have
turned it around,” Newton replied with cheerful obstinance. After that, President Kennedy hazarded no more emotional pleas. He did warn them not to pin their hopes on getting King out of Birmingham, saying that SNCC and far more radical groups would come behind him. “King has got a…terrific investment in nonviolence,” said the President, “and SNCC has got an investment in violence, and that's the struggle.” But Kennedy himself made no threats, offered no deals, sold no bargains. He resumed the plaintive theme of a rather helpless president in a representative democracy, saying no fewer than twenty-five times that he wished they could take just one step, “even a public relations action…anything that gives a hook that suggests that the prospects are better.” Out of sheer exhaustion, President Kennedy collapsed toward the only positive step available: support for the Blaik-Royall advisory mission. Grasping the gesture, the Birmingham leaders said they were ready to do just that and already felt better for the exchange of views.

 

King, while not privy to the internal dynamics of the White House meeting, saw the public result on the front page of the
Times
: “Kennedy Says Birmingham Can Solve Its Own Problems.” Such news fed the anxieties gnawing at him that week in Richmond, where the SCLC assembled for its seventh annual convention. The giant four-day affair drew five hundred delegates for what was meant to be a celebration of the movement's breakthrough. Rosa Parks gave a short speech, as did Francis Griffin, the preacher who twelve years earlier had first supported Barbara Johns's student strike in Farmville. The Birmingham movement choir gave nightly concerts of freedom songs. A panel discussion on “The Power of Nonviolence” featured organizers now acquiring an aura of legend—Bayard Rustin, James Bevel, James Lawson, and C. T. Vivian. The convention heard reports from Gadsden, Danville, and ten other cities in the grip of showdowns inspired by Birmingham. Celebrity speakers included Dick Gregory, Roy Wilkins, Adam Clayton Powell, and two U.S. senators.

They all crowded into Richmond's Hotel John Marshall, a proud old facility that bent to its first integrated convention with strained civility. For the delegates, a different strain of dissension rippled in all directions on the supercharged emotions of the church bombing, making it difficult to maintain even the façade of movement idealism. For King, at the center of a tempest, the underside of success collided with the topside of failure. Wyatt Walker demanded nearly a threefold salary increase based on the SCLC's stupendous growth, while diverse critics charged that King's paralysis had put the SCLC out of business. King's “I Have a Dream” fame caused Ralph Abernathy's long-simmering jealousy to spill over into indignant complaints that his hotel room was not appointed as finely as King's, and finally into an inebriated elevator scuffle with a white man who did not share his low opinion of the room service. Septima Clark followed Abernathy to his room to tell him bluntly that he was a spoiled man, full of unseemly spite, and while she was at it, she also reproached him for his habit of being deliberately late to church services in order to flaunt his mastery over the common people of the congregation. In particular, she reminded him of the time when she spoke in his church and he insisted on showing her his garden while sending word that the congregation should keep singing hymns until he got there. Abernathy retorted lamely that Clark did not know everything, but very likely he would have tolerated no such scolding from anyone other than the SCLC's mother conscience. (Clark refused the pay raise offered her at the convention, writing King that she “couldn't accept it and feel perfectly free inside.”) Meanwhile, out on the convention floor, the rakish Adam Clayton Powell renewed his attack on Wilkins and the NAACP as “white-controlled,” and he spiked hopes for passage of the civil rights bill, saying that the white man already had given Negroes more than he wanted to.