Parting the Waters (202 page)

Taylor Branch is the award-winning author of
Pillar of Fire
, a novel and four collaborative books of nonfiction. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

* Ebenezer, meaning “the stone of help,” was derived from the Old Testament, like the names of many Negro churches. “Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the Lord helped us.” (I Samuel 7:12)

* One such child, John Hope Franklin, would become a prominent historian and the author of
From Slavery to Freedom
.

* Reddick used the byline L. D. Reddick, but his full name was Lawrence Dunbar Reddick—after Paul Lawrence Dunbar, a celebrated turn-of-the-century poet.

* The sex ratio among Negro college students would remain stable even through the generation after King's death, when a dramatic influx of females would move the white student ratio toward the historic Negro norm.

* The Fellowship, which would be headed by A. J. Muste during King's public career, had been founded shortly before World War I by Henry Hodgkin, an English Quaker, and Sigmund Schultze, Kaiser Wilhelm's chaplain, who vowed not to participate in any war that might result from the rabid nationalism of their respective countries. Their vow was regarded as a sentimental quirk at the time, but the fruitless carnage of the Great War transformed them into sages. For the generation between the world wars, pacifism was a thoroughly respectable mass movement not only in Europe but also in the United States, where a 1935 poll of undergraduates found that 39 percent would fight in no war at all and another 33 percent would fight only if the United States itself was attacked.

* Niebuhr hinted privately that his target was his own department head at Union Theological Seminary, Harry Ward, whom he described as “a naïve Christian Marxist.” Ward had returned from the Soviet Union to write
In Place of Profit
, which Niebuhr called “a glorification of Russian society as having gotten rid of selfishness.”

* This point, marking the origins of the Montgomery bus boycott, would become hotly contested ground to future generations of civil rights historians. King himself would divide the credit between Nixon and the Women's Political Council, citing Nixon for taking the first steps to fight the Parks case and the women for conceiving of the boycott. Nixon himself would later claim credit for both, stating that he had told his wife—after leaving the Parks home but before hearing from Robinson a few hours later—that there would be a boycott. King's partisans would dismiss Nixon's assertion with more than a hint of condescension, but Nixon's side of the story would be taken up later by various kinds of revisionists. Roy Wilkins stressed Nixon's longtime service to the NAACP, whereas black power activists stressed Nixon's proletarian origins to show that the boycott sprang from the masses. Some white chroniclers seemed to stress Nixon's role because he was a colorful character whose contribution had been overlooked. Years after the pro—E. D. Nixon revisionists, new feminist versions, largely unpublished, would stress the role of the upper-class women of the Women's Political Council.

* In a dynastic compromise of the kind often made in the baronial politics of the National Baptist Convention, Jemison was serving under President J. H. Jackson, who had ousted Jemison's blind father at Miami in 1953. It would take the younger Jemison twenty-nine years to oust Jackson.

* General Lewis B. Hershey, director of the National Selective Service System, repeatedly blocked attempts by the Montgomery draft board to induct MIA attorney Fred Gray into the Army. Local draft board members across Alabama resigned in protest against “political interference” by the Eisenhower Administration, as did George C. Wallace, then a judge handling draft appeals near Montgomery. Shortly before the election, both U.S. senators from Alabama called for a congressional investigation of the Fred Gray draft case.

* In the same issue of
Liberation
, A. Philip Randolph endorsed the activism of nonviolence, and the aged Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor emeritus of New York's Riverside Church, called the boycott a “godsend.” Fosdick quoted one of King's favorite lines, from the abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

* Wofford's Southern grandmother literally collapsed when she heard the news that he would attend a Negro school, and as she was being carried upstairs shouted, “If God made them equal, I hate God! I hate God! I hate God!”

* As often happened among ideologues of that era, Rushmore turned violently against the Communists. He took up a second career as an anti-subversion specialist for the Hearst newspapers.

* The street on which the wealthiest of Montgomery's white citizens lived.

* Powell wanted money as well as political endorsements. He sent King a form letter of characteristic bluntness: “If you desire to [contribute] anonymously, let me know or you can place cash in an envelope marked
PERSONAL-CONFIDENTIAL
.”

* Rogers dated his own interest in civil rights to his wartime service aboard an aircraft carrier, when he watched Negro sailors fire exposed .50-caliber machine guns as the last line of defense against Japanese kamikazes, and then, when the fight was over, those same Negro sailors went below decks to serve meals to Rogers and the other white officers of a segregated Navy. Among other endeavors, he had worked on the Justice Department's supporting brief in the
Brown
case and had pushed through the appointments of fair-minded Republican judges in the South who themselves were to make history in civil rights.

* Dean of the faculties at Howard University in Washington. King had hoped to be guided through India by Nelson, who had spent the last six months of 1958 there on a Fulbright scholarship, but Nelson had been unable to extend his visit long enough.

* Police Commissioner Bull Connor had suppressed Birmingham's one tentative student demonstration. When a dozen Negro college students carried placards with religious slogans into a park in a Negro section of the city one night, police officers seized, fingerprinted, photographed, and thoroughly intimidated them at the police station before releasing them with instructions to “be good.” Connor issued a terse press release stating that he would not permit such activities. Confident that the local students were not a threat, he worried only about Shuttlesworth and possible threats from afar. “Keep your eyes open for this negro, Lawson,” Connor wrote his chief of detectives. “He has been kicked out of Vanderbilt, and I understand he is a Birmingham negro, or an Alabama negro. [Here Connor was in error. Lawson never lived in Alabama.] He may come down here to start some trouble. If he does, you will know what to do with him.”

* Including Wyatt Walker himself, who would always maintain that he succeeded John Tilley instead of Baker.

* A phrase taken from a
Times
editorial of March 19, 1960, which endorsed the sit-in movement as “something new in the South, something understandable.”

* Highlander was first padlocked on September 26, 1959, by order of Judge C. C. Chattin, on charges of selling beer. With the padlocks removed pending appeal, the judge revoked Highlander's corporate charter on February 16, 1960, and when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene, all Highlander property was auctioned under state receivership on December 16, 1961.

† Early in April, King took the drastic step of pledging a $600 contribution to the SCLC from his own pocket—a tithe of his Ebenezer salary—and challenged all the SCLC board members to do likewise.

* Barry would be elected mayor of Washington, D.C., eighteen years later.

* In 1947, Ming had helped W. E. B. Du Bois draft a petition urging the new United Nations to recognize that the human rights claims of American Negroes were similar to those of the colonized peoples around the world.

* Two days after police fired into a crowd of people demonstrating against apartheid in Sharpeville, South Africa, Muste and Bayard Rustin pressured King to attend an upcoming conference in Ghana, which had been called to protest French plans to test atomic bombs in Africa. Muste feared that the worldwide outrage over the “Sharpeville massacre” would push the African anti-colonial movement into violence. “There is probably no one in the world today who can speak more convincingly about nonviolence to Africans than yourself,” Muste wrote King, observing shrewdly that increased visibility in Africa would benefit King indirectly in the struggle against segregation at home by making it “harder for any elements here to attack or stop you and your people.” King decided not to attend the Ghana conference, sending Abernathy in his place. (Abernathy and Muste were the only two Americans at the meeting.) But King did continue to work with Muste and Rustin to support the anti-colonial movement. On May 5, for instance, he welcomed Kenneth Kaunda—a pro-independence leader of Northern Rhodesia and future president of Zambia—to Ebenezer.

* Kennedy had been the only Democratic senator who neither voted for nor announced his support of the historic censure resolution against McCarthy in 1954.

* “We Shall Overcome” is generally traced to “I'll Overcome, Some Day,” which was written in the World War I era by Rev. C. A. Tindley of Philadelphia. Tindley was a prime influence on Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of modern gospel music. The gospel rhythms, along with the quartet styles and other modes of religious music pioneered by Tindley and Dorsey, became so popular that they burst out of the black churches into concert halls and even nightclubs during the Depression. Later, through pop music and the civil rights movement, they registered strongly among millions in the majority white culture who remained ignorant of the origins in black sacred music. One small indication of the astonishing range of early gospel is the fact that Tindley wrote not only the model for the anthem of the civil rights movement but also “Stand By Me,” a title which Ben E. King of the Drifters adapted to puppy romance and made into a hit rock ‘n' roll song.

*This was the famous Esther James case, which would hound Powell for the rest of his life. Over the next decade, more than eighty judges in ten different courts would be called upon to rule on such questions as whether the House of Representatives had the constitutional power to expel Powell for standing in contempt of court orders to pay Mrs. James. As often happened with Powell, his own flamboyance and the race issue publicly overwhelmed the substantive origins of the dispute. His attack on Mrs. James, first delivered in a speech to the House and then repeated on March 6, 1960, on television, was but a small part of an extremely detailed investigation of police corruption in Harlem. New York police officers were taking payoffs to protect the numbers racket and other vices, he said, naming Mrs. James almost incidentally as one of those helping to collect the payments. Ironically, his charges of corruption would be substantiated in spectacular police scandals that developed after his death. But most New York politicians and newspapers dismissed his original campaign as a political slur on the New York police department. From there, the popular fiction grew that Powell's troubles started with a capricious ad hominem attack on Mrs. James.