Parting the Waters (43 page)

“Yes, it is,” King replied easily, as though greeting a fan.

The woman's hand came from under her raincoat and flashed in an arc. King reflexively yanked his arm up just enough for the razor-sharp blade to cut his left hand as it plunged deep into his chest. A quick-witted woman next to King knocked the attacker's fist from the handle before she could pull it out for a second stab. The attacker stepped back, making no effort to flee, and shouted, “I've been after him for six years! I'm glad I done it!”

Her shriek cracked the instant of silence. Pandemonium erupted with shouts of “Grab her!” and “What happened?” rising above the grunts of those trying to subdue the woman, who was spitting out shrill obscenities about King and the NAACP. Nettie Carter Jackson, Grand Daughter Ruler of the Elks and one of the sponsors of the promotion, spoke sharply to those whose attention was riveted on King. “Don't touch that knife!” she ordered. Its hilt protruded from King's chest at a point a few inches below and to the left of the knot in his tie. King sat down in the chair behind him. “That's all right,” he said in a stony calm. “That's all right. Everything is going to be all right.” Nettie Jackson told him to hush, he should not talk. Then, as security guards hustled the attacker outside to the police and the screams and shouts died down, Jackson daubed the blood from the minor wound on King's left hand. A score of bystanders who had nothing else to do with their residual panic concentrated furiously on her every movement.

Forty-five minutes later, police detectives escorted the attacker—now identified as Izola Ware Curry, a forty-two-year-old native of a tiny Georgia town called Adrian—into the emergency room of Harlem Hospital, where King lay waiting on a gurney with the blade still in his chest. Fearing that he might die of the stab wound, the detectives wanted to get his identification of the woman on record. They negotiated successfully with the nervous doctors and then maneuvered the woman cautiously within King's view. Before he could speak, Curry cried out, “That's him! I'll report him to my lawyers!” She stood rigidly erect and haughty, proud as a queen. Such behavior worsened the detectives' other fear—that they might lose their criminal case to the asylum. Curry had been raving incoherently about persecution and torture and her anger at King for having undermined her Roman Catholic faith. If she was a loony, the detectives knew, she was a dangerous one. A police matron had discovered a fully loaded Italian automatic inside her blouse. King, still calm and lucid though growing weaker, identified Curry before she was hustled off again.

King was still awaiting treatment an hour later when New York governor Averell Harriman, then in the heat of a losing reelection contest against Nelson Rockefeller, arrived at Harlem Hospital. As Harriman patted the victim softly on the hand, King gamely assured him that everything would be all right. The delay, Harriman learned from the doctors, was caused by the critical position of the blade, which X rays showed to be lodged between the heart and a lung. A team of surgeons was being assembled to remove it. The governor waited in the corridors more than four hours, until doctors advised him that the delicate surgery had been successful. They had to remove two ribs and portions of King's breastbone before they could safely extract the instrument. It had grazed the aorta, they said. One of the surgeons later told King that even a sneeze could have punctured the aorta and killed him.

Prosecutors arranged an unusual Sunday arraignment for Izola Curry. She stood defiantly through Magistrate Vincent Rao's recitation of the pertinent facts until he stated that she was alleged to have stabbed King with a knife. “No,” she interrupted sharply. “It was a letter opener.” Detectives sustained her correction. She had used an instrument quite different from the kitchen knife common to urban stabbings: a slender Japanese penknife with a gently curved blade and a handle of inlaid ivory. Like her Italian automatic, it was a stylish weapon. As a would-be assassin, Curry had expensive foreign tastes jarringly at odds with her low station as an itinerant Negro maid who had drifted alone for many years since leaving a broken home and a failed marriage. Shortly after the magistrate resumed his presentation, Curry interrupted again to announce that she was accusing King of “being mixed up with the communists,” adding that she had “reported the case to the FBI and it's being looked into.” These statements landed her at Bellevue Hospital, where she was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Upon order of indefinite commitment to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Curry disappeared permanently, leaving behind only a single deed of mysterious, unfathomable horror.

 

Recovering at home, King settled into a period of relative stillness unique to his entire adult life. He delivered no speeches or sermons outside the Dexter pulpit for many weeks. Nor did he travel. From Virginia, where white leaders locked twelve thousand white and Negro children out of public schools that fall under the state's new “massive resistance” laws, an old seminary acquaintance named Wyatt Tee Walker appealed to King to lend his presence in a protest march. “What we really need now, Mike, is your support,” he wrote. King begged off Walker's march, citing his health. He also canceled his appearance at Randolph's Youth March for Integrated Schools, in which Harry Belafonte and a jaunty Bayard Rustin led a thousand students from New York to Washington, in a novel protest that drew praise from the normally reserved Stanley Levison. “If the young people are aroused from their lethargy through this fight,” he wrote King, “it will affect broad circles throughout the country as well as vertically through the different economic stratifications. In this sense there is a great similarity to the student movement which emerged in the thirties in support of the great liberal issue of that day—the right to trade union organization…. Since I see this emerging around civil rights in that area, I am greatly encouraged.”

The Edward Davis trial lasted all day on November 21 and well into the night. Complications of race, sex, and religion left every word of testimony subject to contrary interpretation, as many Negro spectators believed that the white prosecutors were really helping the defendant, Davis, and that the defense was really prosecuting the victim, Abernathy. Vivian Davis broke down on the stand as she testified about both “natural and unnatural” sexual acts with Abernathy at the home of a relative, and, pressed for an explanation, she described as unnatural what others called oral sex. Her husband testified that she had admitted the affair to him, and that he had warned Abernathy the previous May to stay away from her.

In rebuttal, Abernathy offered a radically different account of his conversation with the defendant. Davis actually had come to him offering to kill white opponents of the MIA for money, Abernathy testified, and he had refused to entertain the idea. This testimony served to discredit Davis without going so far as to embrace the theory—widely believed by Negroes but unpalatable to the prosecutors and the all-white jury—that whites hostile to the MIA had hired Davis to ruin Abernathy by means of a spectacularly slanderous hoax. Some Negroes in the courtroom laughed when Davis hotly denied Abernathy's story, but defense lawyers chipped away at its plausibility. Neither Davis' character nor his wild daylight attack on the preacher seemed to fit Abernathy's portrait of a spurned killer-for-hire, they suggested. And, in the absence of evidence that Davis had been paid anything at all, it seemed unlikely that money had induced him to take actions guaranteed to land him in jail, to destroy his wife's reputation, and to mark him as a political traitor among his own people. The defense case rested on the theory that Davis' motive was blind, irrational jealousy, which fit the crime.

The jury required only thirteen minutes to agree, acquitting Davis on all charges. Its verdict surprised no one and proved nothing, as even a white defendant well might have escaped conviction on equivalent facts. Outside the courtroom, the social effects of the case offered a truer test of its impact. Davis soon divorced his wife, and she moved away from Montgomery to seek a new start. Abernathy, who had not wanted to bring charges against Davis at all, delivered a prepared statement to local newspapers branding the case as “another futile attempt on the part of the evil forces in our community to conquer by dividing.” He thanked “friends throughout the nation for the profound and unshakeable confidence which they have expressed in me and their abiding loyalty throughout this trying ordeal.”

With King and other friends, Abernathy went to the Dexter basement that night to allow the pressure to drain. He was on edge and distraught, Vivian Davis' testimony having obliterated his normal jocular mood. His friends sought to encourage him with observations that he had fared well, that nobody in his church or the community believed the Davises' word over his. They predicted correctly that it would all soon be forgotten. Many factors, including the prestige of the pulpit and a gale-force crosswind of politics, helped protect Abernathy among Montgomery's Negroes. In the great gulf between the races, there was no ground firm enough to support anything resembling an objective opinion. The Abernathy scandal illustrated the power of avoidance more strongly than anything in King's experience, including the Walter McCall paternity dispute at Crozer. King was soon teasing Abernathy about the nasty things Vivian Davis had said about him.

In Atlanta, personal strains of a different sort prolonged the ineffectiveness of the SCLC's Crusade for Citizenship. John Tilley, the elderly Baltimore preacher finally hired as the SCLC's executive director, was proving to be a disappointment. Tilley drew for King schematic charts of the SCLC's primary functions and “the secondary functions which will make the primary or basic functions possible.” His gifts in this area had impressed the SCLC selection committee, but they registered few voters and exacerbated Ella Baker's resentment of the preacher fraternity. Maddeningly to Baker, King was at once the antithesis of the preacher type and its epitome. In private, he was personable, self-effacing, willing to listen, to serve, and to work hard—all qualities that had induced Baker to extend her volunteer SCLC work for a full year, under adverse conditions. Within the SCLC, however, King was a preacher's preacher, which brought him a degree of adulation that few institutions outside the Negro church could approach. At the third MIA Institute on Nonviolence in early December, the printed program called for a “Testimonial to Dr. King's Leadership” during the main meeting, with formal speeches from six different preachers and a half-hour reserved for “General Expressions from the Floor.” To Ella Baker, frustrated by the SCLC's bare solvency and its paralyzed registration campaign, this sort of activity was not mere froth but a harmful end in itself. She finally asked King directly why he permitted all the circular praise—the meetings of his friends to plan the literature that would be distributed at the conference in his honor. “Well, I don't want to,” King told Baker. “The people want to do this.”

King's choices seemed to fuse. To do nothing was to accept praise. To act, to expose himself to further danger, was to seek praise. Even an act of criminal madness had brought him praise, and Abernathy's private scandal had achieved the same result indirectly. King felt that he did not deserve what he was receiving and that he needed to change somehow. During his semi-withdrawal in the winter of 1958, his wife described him as a “guilt-ridden man” who was fearful of making the slightest mistake and obsessed with his notion of personal redemption through suffering. His friend L. D. Reddick, who was then finishing the first biography of King, wrote that the stabbing was a “natural turning point in his life,” and made so bold as to recommend a “thoughtful reordering” of King's priorities. Reddick called for more discipline and restraint in King, more political organization and more renunciation of worldly concerns. In short, he wanted King to remake himself in the service of his cause.

 

In Washington that January of 1959, one of the more conspicuous changes involved the decor of Senator Lyndon Johnson's office. The Majority Leader, buoyed by the twenty-eight-vote majority the Democrats had gained in the 1958 elections, annexed spacious new quarters and hired a New York decorator to furnish them in a style advertising a man comfortable with power. The result was a shimmering mixture of green and gold, soon nicknamed the Taj Mahal. From there, Johnson moved quickly to place his personal stamp on the new Senate by controlling its most volatile institutional issue—the cloture rule, which governed the chances of civil rights bills. One by one, he summoned the incoming senators to flatter, cajole, or intimidate them. No matter how many liberals had been elected in 1958, Johnson told each one, he would never permit the radical relaxation of the cloture rule that reformers now thought possible. It would ruin the party in the South, he said, and worse, it would play into the hands of Vice President Nixon, who was using liberal Northern Democrats in a scheme to win Negro votes for the Republicans. In an impressive display of personal influence, Johnson induced many supporters of civil rights to help him crush the cloture reform movement in the new Senate.

On February 4, Attorney General William Rogers told a White House meeting of Republican leaders that the Administration must submit a new civil rights bill in spite of the cloture defeat. There were technical flaws in the Voting Rights Act of 1957, he said, and at the very least a new proposal would reduce political resistance to the present law. Most Republican leaders, especially House Minority Leader Charles Halleck, wanted no part of a new civil rights bill. They reminded President Eisenhower of his speculation that the 1957 act would be the last for a decade or two, but Eisenhower said that he was friendly to any new bill addressing proven subterfuge against Negro voting rights. Chief of Staff Persons advised Rogers that no bill could go to Congress anytime soon, because the President had promised privately to give ample notice to Senate Majority Leader Johnson.