Parting the Waters (39 page)

This diplomatic mimicry was small consolation to Wilkins, who realized that the preachers around King represented prominent Negro churches in the South, which were the principal source of NAACP revenue. “What sound reason is there for having two organizations with the same goal when one has been doing such an effective job?” asked the Pittsburgh
Courier
a few days after the Montgomery SCLC meeting. Wilkins saw the SCLC moving into a vacuum that was partially King's own creation. The NAACP was entangled in twenty-five separate lawsuits challenging its right to operate in the South, most of them filed by hostile states and municipalities. The pioneer action, which had effectively abolished the NAACP in Alabama, had been aimed at King's Montgomery bus boycott. Wilkins feared that mass actions of the sort proposed by King might put the NAACP out of business in the South altogether. It was mass action by hostile white people that NAACP strategists saw as the greatest threat to their long struggle for school desegregation. They saw the Little Rock crisis as a timely demonstration of their point.

 

On September 4, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to prevent nine Negro students from enrolling in previously all-white Central High School. School administrators, who had been preparing for this day since the
Brown
decision three years earlier, were patrolling the school corridors urging unruly students to refrain from “incidents” and to think of themselves, the school, and the nation at all times. Some faculty members grumbled about having to cook their own meals and sweep their own classrooms, after Faubus' troops barred Negro service workers as well as the nine new students, but most teachers behaved with scrupulous rectitude. So did most of the white students. Nearly all of them opposed integration, but those who shouted out the window about “getting the niggers” generally came from the same minority of troublemakers who refused to tuck in their shirts.

The day's events opened the spectacular public phase of what became known as the Little Rock crisis. An ever larger mob of angry white adults gathered outside Central High each morning to make sure the troops turned the Negro students away, and a corresponding corps of reporters arrived to write about the troops, the mob, the students, the governor, and, eventually, President Eisenhower. The prolonged duration and the military drama of the siege made Little Rock the first on-site news extravaganza of the modern television era. Faubus became the center of national attention as he sparred with federal courts over their authority to make him rescind his orders to the troops. Legal experts agreed that Faubus, by using the armed forces of a state to oppose the authority of the federal government, had brought on the most severe test of the Constitution since the Civil War. King and Wilkins were among those sending telegrams calling for the President to take a firm stand.

Ten days into the crisis, Faubus flew to Newport, Rhode Island, for a private conference with Eisenhower. To the President and his aides, Faubus seemed to have a split personality. One moment he was an anguished politician searching for a way to end a confrontation that had gotten out of hand, and the next moment he was a publicity genius ranting about federal plots to have him dragged off in chains. White House aides puzzled over the governor's personal psychodrama, which seemed to weave in and out of the public arena. Faubus' own father, who was attacking him for racism in pseudonymous newspaper letters, was said to believe that the governor's true motive was to embarrass the white patricians who had fled to the Little Rock suburbs, leaving him with the race problem. Whatever his motives, Faubus annoyed Eisenhower by agreeing to a draft statement but then changing the words before he released it back home. Eisenhower stated repeatedly that the law must be obeyed but that he could think of few things worse than using federal force to overpower Faubus' troops. Faubus seized upon the statements to claim that the President was working secretly with the segregationists.

After another week of mounting crisis, the federal court finally cornered Faubus with an ironclad contempt citation, and the governor, negotiating furiously with congressmen, lawyers, White House aides, and other intermediaries, appeared willing to shift the mission of his Guardsmen: instead of protecting the white school from the nine Negro children, they would protect the nine Negro children from a white mob that had reached the size of a battalion. “Now begins the crucifixion!” the governor declared in a dirge of surrender that made headlines, but on Monday, September 23, he crossed up the White House again by simply withdrawing the National Guard from the scene, leaving the school to the mob. By midmorning, angry whites had beaten at least two Negro reporters, broken many of the school's windows and doors, and come so close to capturing the Negro students that the Little Rock police evacuated them in desperation. Central High was segregated again before lunch, and students joined the mob in cheers of victory.

Eisenhower's patience snapped when Faubus allowed the mob to run free again the next morning. No longer denying the crisis, he convinced himself that Little Rock was not an issue of racial integration but of insurrection, like Shays's Rebellion. “Well, if we have to do this, and I don't see any alternative,” he told Attorney General Brownell, “then let's apply the best military principles to it and see that the force we send there is strong enough that it will not be challenged, and will not result in any clash.” Brownell never forgot the surge of adrenaline he felt at the President's words. Eisenhower phoned General Maxwell Taylor at the Pentagon and told him to scrap plans to use U.S. marshals. He wanted riot-trained units of the 101st Airborne Division, and ordered Taylor to show how fast he could deploy them at Central High School. Taylor put a thousand soldiers into Little Rock before nightfall.

School integration in Little Rock resumed the next morning, when the presence of the U.S. Army settled the military question without casualty or engagement. What little resistance there was occurred inside the school, student style, in a campaign of Negro-baiting that produced a year-long ordeal for school administrators as well as the new students. Outside the school, the heat of the postmortem rhetoric varied inversely with the speaker's capacity for action. As Governor Faubus was reduced to utter ineffectuality, his pronouncements reached at once for the heights of fantasy and the depths of racial fear. In a wild radio speech, he accused white soldiers from the “occupation forces” of following the female Negro students into the girls' bathrooms at Central High. Faubus had failed by his own standards and brought international ridicule down upon his state, but Arkansas politicians conceded that his performance made him unbeatable in the next election.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched into space the world's first man-made satellite, named Sputnik. News of the achievement produced a tremor of fear and wounded pride in American politics. Overnight, nearly everything about America was deemed second-rate—its scientists, its morals, its math teachers, even its road system. Edward Teller, the hydrogen bomb scientist, told Eisenhower that Sputnik was a worse defeat for the United States than Pearl Harbor. A blue-ribbon commission reported shrilly that the West was indefensible without a drastic increase in weapons spending and a crash program to build underground “fallout shelters” for every American citizen. “Control of space,” declared Lyndon Johnson, “means control of the world.” When the first American attempt to match the Soviet feat exploded two seconds after takeoff, in full view of the television cameras, the national humiliation was complete. Reporters asked Eisenhower questions on practically no other subject. Faubus disappeared from the news as suddenly as he had appeared, and the entire race issue receded proportionally.

 

As King struggled against the tide, competition from the NAACP was hardly the sole obstacle he encountered among his own allies. Tactically, he knew that he must carry the cause beyond bus segregation, but how could Negroes boycott facilities—libraries, schools, parks, restaurants, and others—from which they were already excluded? The bus system had provided political leverage to the great mass of Montgomery's Negroes, and the boycott had allowed them to exercise it effectively through an action—staying off the buses—that did not require face-to-face, illegal confrontations with white authority. No other segregated institution offered such advantages.

Lacking ready answers, King applied himself with a vengeance to his most obvious talent, speaking at the rate of four events per week, or two hundred a year. After interviewing King, one magazine estimated his annual travel at 780,000 miles—a staggering total, which, even if only a quarter true, put him on propeller-driven commercial airplanes steadily enough to circle the globe eight times a year. He acquired a reputation as the complete evangelist, who could preach integration to the humble as well as the elite, to the erudite and the ignorant, to the practical and the idealistic. As he did so, however, he contracted the evangelist's curse. No matter how many cheers he received or how many tear-streaked faces assured him that lives were transformed, tomorrow's newspaper still read pretty much like today's. Segregation remained in place. People listened wholeheartedly but did nothing, and King himself was surer of what they should think than what they should do. Under these conditions, oratory grew upon him like a narcotic. He needed more and more of it because he enjoyed the experience, yet was progressively dissatisfied with the results.

One idea for improvement was to amplify his message through the public media. “All we need is the sponsor to give us a half hour weekly,” Levison wrote King, half seriously. “We already have the star.” Television was beyond the reach of Negroes, and the best Levison could do was to help King obtain a contract from Harper & Brothers to write a book about Montgomery. This venture held out the prestige of authorship and the promise of a mass audience, but cultural and commercial pressures inhibited the project. King's publishers wanted him to sound intellectual but not too dry, inspirational but not too “Negro.” One editor wanted to make sure that in listing the grievances of Negroes he never said anything that might be construed as favorable to communism. All the editors cautioned King against projecting familiarity or identification with the readers. He was to be billed explicitly as “a leader of his people,” addressing himself to whites. These complexities of voice and tone proved difficult even for King. He fell badly behind in meeting the deadline set by the publishers, to whom King was an unproven writer with a perishable story to tell.

The pressure built steadily until a New York editor flew to Montgomery and ordered King to stop preaching. “To prepare and preach sermons is to use up creative energy that your soul and body wants to use on this book,” he wrote in a follow-up letter. King ignored the order, but he finally accepted an ultimatum that he pay $2,000 of his $3,500 royalty advance to a Harper's staff employee, Hermine Popper, in return for her guidance as a writer and editor. Within days, Popper was functioning at the hub of an editorial network that kept updated revisions flying back and forth between her, King, Levison, Rustin, Harris Wofford, and MIA historian L. D. Reddick. King confided to Levison that the book project “has been the most difficult job that I have encountered.”

In the first year of their acquaintance, King came to rely upon Levison as a counsellor, business manager, guide to big-time New York politics, and above all as a friend who made no demands. All King's other advisers pressed personal yearnings, ambitions, or pet theories upon him, even when they tried not to, but Levison seemed to shun frivolity and stargazing, contributing his time freely so long as he was working efficiently. He and King seldom discussed the grand questions, as agreement on such things was largely unspoken between them. Levison did advise King in great detail about his personal investment strategy, observing that “bonds do better when common stocks weaken,” and even pitched himself into King's tax records. To King, Levison was living proof that a crusader need not be a chump, a victim, or a failure, and in that respect it was gratifying that Levison got along so well with King's parents. When Levison first visited King in Atlanta, Daddy King brought him home to dinner. Mother King served him her son's favorite lemon pie. Such a festive interracial occasion was a noteworthy event in Atlanta, where even Daddy King's white friends in the mayor's office did not come home with him to share a meal. The Kings received Levison more warmly than they received Negro advisers such as Rustin, whom they regarded as possibly dangerous to their son. And Daddy King had a known weakness for rich men.

Not long after meeting “a most extraordinary young minister” in Baltimore, Levison had stunned his wife by telling her that Martin King was his only true friend in the world. Levison liked nothing better than to talk politics with King. It was usually after midnight when King called, and they talked for hours, always blunt but friendly. King did not pretend to admire Levison's taste in clothes, and Levison did not pretend to like the boiled cabbage served him when he went South. Their relationship seemed to be grounded in a neutral zone of corny ideals, beyond race. King refused to accept Levison's profession of agnosticism. “You don't know it, Stan,” he teased, “but you believe in God.”

 

King pursued two alternative methods of spreading the movement by mass communications. It might be possible, he thought, to attack segregation in a specified city or town by means of a planned series of mass meetings, rallying night after night around the ideals he had put forward in Montgomery. His model, oddly enough, was the “crusade” developed by evangelist Billy Graham, whose skilled organizers prepared each target area for months—compiling mailing lists, enlisting church sponsors and volunteer groups, arranging publicity campaigns and special bus routes—before Graham arrived for two weeks of nightly mass meetings. The revival-style format held great promise for King, who, like Graham, was still above all else a proselytizer.