Parting the Waters (48 page)

 

The King family returned to Montgomery at the end of January 1960 for King's last official service at Dexter. They received from the congregation an engraved silver tea service and countless tender expressions of farewell. On the following night, Abernathy hosted a much more extravagant “Testimonial of Love and Loyalty,” at which the extreme sentiments of humility and royalty bathed each other in a warm harmony that was attainable almost nowhere else. The packed crowd rocked with “Amens” when told that Negroes in Montgomery remained psychologically and politically downtrodden—that too many of them still filed to the back of the bus in disregard of their boycott victory, that there were still no Negro bus drivers and not a single Negro policeman “to escort our children across the streets at the school as the white children are escorted.” Very few in the audience were allowed to vote, and even King himself could not get the “White” and “Colored” signs removed from the entrances to public places. These laments only highlighted the contrasting adulation of King, who, like Jesus, was praised as a savior on a donkey. No fewer than nine church choirs performed before the service began with a processional hymn called “The Integration Song,” in which the traditional Baptist refrain “When we all get to heaven” was changed to “When we all know justice.”

During the service itself, five additional choirs saluted King. Representatives of Montgomery's major Negro guilds and associations—the barbers, merchants, beauticians, doctors, preachers, and others—came forward in succession to pay tribute to King before he formally transferred the MIA's official gavel to Abernathy. At the end, bearers came forward to present King with a last expression of homage: a wooden box filled with cash, as broad and deep as King's shoulders, reaching from his midsection to his chin. King accepted all this like a monarch, but then, in the sort of gesture that made people shake their heads in wonder, he directed that the money be divided between the MIA and the SCLC. “And I mean every penny of it,” he quipped, in a backhanded tribute to the clergy's reputation for accounting tricks. “I cannot claim to be worthy of such a tribute,” he added seriously. When he finished, they all sang “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” and received the benediction.

King severed his last connections to Montgomery. In many respects, the first phase of his career had brought years of frustration. Even his trips abroad, like his White House audience, brought vexations, and the prodigious energies he had thrown into a thousand speeches had exposed as an illusion the hope that his larger purpose could be accomplished by political evangelism. These things were more troublesome to King than most people around him could have guessed, and yet they had benefited him more than he could know. The stale glories chipped away at the headiness and false wisdom attendant to early fame. They strengthened his already remarkable steadiness. The oratorical illusion had propelled him so rapidly around the country that he made in only a few years a lifetime supply of acquaintances, some of historic importance. The speeches also helped King learn to read audiences of every composition and above all to acknowledge the limits of his own special gift, oratory.

Fate could have designed no better culmination of these lessons than events occurring simultaneously with the Testimonial of Love and Loyalty. That same night of Monday, February 1, students at the Negro colleges around Greensboro, North Carolina, were electrified by reports of what four freshman boys had done that day. Even the words that had started it all were the stuff of new myth. At a bull session, one of them had said, “We might as well go now.” Another had replied, “You really mean it?” The first had said, “Sure, I mean it,” and the four of them had gone to the downtown Woolworth's store and slipped into seats at the sacrosanct whites-only lunch counter. The Negro waitress had said, “Fellows like you make our race look bad,” and refused to serve them, but the four freshmen had not only sat there unperturbed all afternoon but also promised to return at ten o'clock the next morning to continue what they called a “sit-down protest.” That night, the four instantly famous students on the campus of North Carolina A&T were meeting with elected student leaders, and rumors spread that others were volunteering to join them in the morning. With telephones buzzing between campuses, word flashed that even some white students from Greensboro College wanted to sit in with them. The student leaders were arranging it so that students could sit down in shifts so as not to miss classes. Nineteen students sat with the four freshmen at Woolworth's on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the number swelled to eighty-five as the “sit-in” became a contagion.

No one had time to wonder why the Greensboro sit-in was so different. In the previous three years, similar demonstrations had occurred in at least sixteen other cities. Few of them made the news, all faded quickly from public notice, and none had the slightest catalytic effect anywhere else. By contrast, Greensboro helped define the new decade. Almost certainly, the lack of planning helped create the initial euphoria. Because the four students at Woolworth's had no plan, they began with no self-imposed limitations. They defined no tactical goals. They did not train or drill in preparation. They did not dwell on the many forces that might be used against them. Above all, they did not anticipate that Woolworth's white managers would—instead of threatening to have them arrested—flounder in confusion and embarrassment. The surprise discovery of defensiveness within the segregated white world turned their fear into elation.

The spontaneity and open-endedness of the first Greensboro sit-in flashed through the network of activists who had been groping toward the same goal. On the first night, the first four protesters themselves contacted Floyd McKissick, who, as a maverick lawyer and NAACP Youth Council leader, had joined Rev. Douglas Moore in the Durham ice cream parlor case and other small sit-ins. McKissick and Moore rushed to nearby Greensboro. Simultaneously, the news traveled along parallel lines of communication with such speed that a vice president of the mostly white National Student Association was in Greensboro on February 2, the second day, before any word of the sit-in had appeared in the public media.

On the third day, when the number of protesters passed eighty, Douglas Moore called James Lawson in Nashville with a volley of bulletins. The protest would continue to grow, he reported, as enthusiastic student volunteers were only too eager to absorb the organizing discipline of the adults who had arrived to work in the background. The sit-in “command center” at North Carolina A&T was operating with crisp, military efficiency—briefing new protesters on nonviolence, quashing rumors, dispatching fresh troops as needed. Most important, Moore reported, sympathetic sit-ins were about to begin in Durham, Raleigh, and other North Carolina cities. Moore, who knew already that Lawson had been preparing for new Nashville protests, urged him to speed up the schedule so that the movement could spread into other states. Lawson promised to try. Moore then made other calls, including one to the FOR's Glenn Smiley. McKissick called Gordon Carey, the CORE official who had worked on Wyatt Walker's Richmond march and the Miami sit-ins the previous year. Carey flew from New York to Durham at the end of the first week. By Saturday, the Greensboro sit-in counted some four hundred students, and Kress, the other big downtown dime store, had been added to the target list. A bomb scare that day interrupted the demonstrations. Later, Klansmen and youth-gang members crowded inside the stores to menace the protesters. Store managers who had been desperately polite all week now threatened to call in legal force.

Before serious reprisal fell upon Greensboro, fresh sit-ins broke out the following Monday in the surrounding North Carolina cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Winston-Salem. Three days later in nearby High Point, students assembled at a church before marching downtown to the segregated lunch counters, and as it happened, Fred Shuttlesworth had come in from Birmingham to preach the midweek service for the minister of that church. Shuttlesworth became the first eyewitness from the tough Deep South states below North Carolina. He saw the well-dressed students step off in good order, like soldiers in the joyous early stages of a popular war, and he heard that it was the same in the other North Carolina towns—only bigger. Shuttlesworth promptly called Ella Baker at the SCLC office in Atlanta. He was not the first to report to her about the sit-ins, but he was the first voice of authority from the inner circle of SCLC preachers. This is it, he told Baker. “You must tell Martin that we must get with this,” said Shuttlesworth, adding that the sit-ins might “shake up the world.”

The movement first leaped across state lines on the day after the High Point sit-in. An SCLC preacher in Rock Hill, South Carolina, reported by phone to McKissick that his charges were “ready to go.” They went from his church to the lunch counters on Friday, the same day police arrested forty-one students sitting in at the Cameron Village Woolworth store in Raleigh. In handcuffs, the Raleigh students swept across the threshold of the jail with eyes closed and hearts pounding, and, like the bus boycotters four years earlier, they soon re-emerged on bail to discover that their identities had not been crushed. They were unharmed and did not feel like trash. A flood of relief swelled their enthusiasm.

In Nashville that Friday night, Lawson presided over what turned out to be the first mass meeting of the sit-in movement. About five hundred new volunteers crowded into the First Baptist Church along with the seventy-five veterans of the nonviolence workshop. Lawson and the other adults argued for delay, on the grounds that only a small fraction of the students had received any training. This was not a game, they said. Sooner or later the city would put demonstrators in jail, and their organization—the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference, a local affiliate of King's SCLC—had less than $100 in reserve. They needed time to raise a bail fund. These and other words of caution gave way to a tide of student sentiment, however, and Lawson found himself giving a crash course on nonviolence late into the night. He told the crowd how to behave in the face of a hundred possible emergencies, how to avoid violating the loitering laws, how to move to and from the lunch counters in orderly shifts, how to fill the seats of students who needed to go to the bathroom, even how to dress: stockings and heels for the women, coats and ties for the fellows. When in doubt, he stressed, the newcomers should take their cue from the behavior of the workshop members who had demonstrated before.

They broke up that night amid nervous prayers and whispers of “Good luck,” and Lawson's logistical plan worked smoothly the next morning. Church cars traveled a circuit between the First Baptist Church and designated pickup spots near Nashville's four Negro colleges—Fisk University, Tennessee State, Meharry Medical, and the Baptist seminary. When all were assembled at the First Baptist staging area, Lawson moved them out five hundred strong. White Nashville, which had changed hands nearly a dozen times during the Civil War, awoke slowly to a kind of invasion force it never had encountered before, as rows of neatly dressed Negro college students filed into the downtown stores to wait for food service.

The Nashville students—destined to establish themselves as the largest, most disciplined, and most persistent of the nonviolent action groups in the South—extended the sit-in movement into its third state. Their success helped form the model of the student group—recruited from the campuses, quartered in the churches, and advised by preachers. Elated with the early results, Lawson called King, Ella Baker, and Douglas Moore, among others, to exchange reports. Each of them in turn called acquaintances who might help open other fronts. By the end of February, sit-in campaigns were under way in thirty-one Southern cities across eight states. News attention remained scanty for the most part in both white and Negro media, largely because people were conditioned to think of student antics as transient events. Moore predicted that the sit-ins soon would put an end to such complacency. “If Woolworth and the other stores think this is just another panty raid,” he told reporters, “they haven't had their sociologists in the field recently.”

 

The earliest wave of student protests spanned the two weeks preceding King's first two sermons as the new co-pastor at Ebenezer. More ominously for King, they coincided with the arrival of ugly rumors that Alabama officials were not satisfied with the back taxes they had extracted from him on January 18. Talk filtered out of the courthouse to the effect that lawyers for the state were putting King's name before a grand jury on charges that could send him to prison for a decade or more. The growing intensity of the rumors alarmed King enough to seek legal and financial help in advance. He sent urgent telegrams to Harry Belafonte and actor Sidney Poitier, and he asked Roy Wilkins to help him find the best criminal defense lawyers in the country. Wilkins recommended two of his NAACP board members. King wrote a guarded letter to one of them, Judge Hubert T. Delaney in New York, asking him to receive his “special assistant,” Bayard Rustin, for a briefing about a confidential matter. As the third week of sit-ins began, King himself conferred with potential defenders in New York.

On the way home, he stopped off in North Carolina to see Douglas Moore. Abernathy, up from Montgomery, joined him for a visit to the F. W. Woolworth lunch counter in downtown Durham, which company officials had closed in the vain hope that delay would make the students forget about the protest. That night King spoke at a rally in support of the continuing sit-ins in the clustered cities of central North Carolina. “Men are tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” he said, repeating the trigger line of his first speech during the bus boycott. “The underlying philosophies of segregation are diametrically opposed to democracy and Christianity, and all the dialectics of all the logicians in the world cannot make them lie down together.”

These were familiar King themes. A significant departure lay in his unequivocal early endorsement of the protest, which he said was “destined to be one of the glowing epics of our time.” Alone among the established leaders of either race, he praised the students as a mature force in adult politics: “What is fresh, what is new in your fight is the fact that it was initiated, led, and sustained by students. What is new is that American students have come of age. You now take your honored places in the world-wide struggle for freedom.” The respectful tone of his remarks was highly unusual in an era when student achievements of any kind were customarily relegated to a junior, preparatory role in the public mind—and the novel, extralegal sit-in method was mainly attracting puzzled frowns and widespread suspicion. Even the major Negro newspapers were reporting the sit-ins cautiously. They registered as a newfangled teenage rumble with a partially redeeming purpose. They were not controlled or approved by the adult civil rights organizations, and for that reason alone the NAACP Legal Defense Fund refrained from defending the first students arrested.

King embraced the students for taking the step he had been toying with for the past three years—of
seeking out
a nonviolent confrontation with the segregation laws. He had traveled halfway around the world to wrestle with obscure Gandhian conundrums, and declared countless times that he was prepared to die for his beliefs, but he had never been quite willing to follow his thoughts outside the relative safety of oratory. With a simple, schoolboyish deed, the students cut through all the complex knots he had been trying to untie at the erudite Institutes on Nonviolence. His generosity of spirit made it easy for him to give the students credit for their inspiration, and his own lingering fears no doubt added to his admiration of their courage. Even now, King himself was not ready to join them at a lunch counter or otherwise force a test of the segregation laws with his person. He made no pledge to do so at Durham, but the pull of it fueled his exhortations to the assembled students. “Let us not fear going to jail,” he declared. “If the officials threaten to arrest us for standing up for our rights, we must answer by saying that we are willing and prepared to fill up the jails of the South…. And so I would urge you to continue your struggle.” “Fill up the jails” was a new battle cry for King, an incendiary one by the standards of both races.

No sooner had King warmly embraced the student protest movement than his forebodings of danger came to life in another quarter. Two Georgia sheriff's deputies appeared at the Ebenezer church office on the day after the Durham speech, armed with a warrant for King's arrest on Alabama perjury charges. King surrendered to them and was led off as a prisoner to the county courthouse, leaving behind a wave of shock and rumor that quickly radiated from Auburn Avenue to the West Side. Daddy King rushed to the courthouse. He led a gathering crowd of lawyers and other prominent Negroes trying to fathom the nature of King's alleged crimes. The news that they were felonies was received, doubted, confirmed, and finally accepted as a stinging blow. The further news that they grew out of King's Alabama tax problems puzzled and then outraged the lawyers, some of whom knew that King had already paid the disputed back taxes for the years in question. It was almost unheard of for a taxpayer who accepted and paid the state's assessment to be prosecuted as a criminal, and even then the normal procedure was for the state to bring charges of tax evasion—a misdemeanor. King was the first citizen in the history of Alabama to be prosecuted for felony tax evasion, the technical charge being that he had perjured himself in signing his tax returns for 1956 and 1958. Governor John Patterson, who as attorney general had led the fight against the bus boycott and the state NAACP, did nothing to contradict speculation that Alabama was stretching state power to its limits in order to make a political example of King. While signing the papers requesting King's extradition from Georgia, Patterson made a merrily sarcastic public statement. “If you dance,” he quipped, “you must pay the fiddler.”

The confluence of the sit-ins and the perjury indictment slapped King with a cruel irony. Just as he was deciding that he should aim his political influence at filling the jails with idealistic young protesters, Alabama struck at the most sensitive spot of such resolve. If convicted on tax charges, even in the white courts, he would take to prison the tarnished public image of a lying, greedy, sham preacher. This was everything King had resolved most devoutly not to be himself and to change in his church if he could. His entire life's struggle as a preacher had begun in rebellion against what he saw as the cynical pabulum and exploitative uses of fundamentalist doctrines. For Governor Patterson to make a mockery of all that threatened not only to extinguish his own identity but to impugn the foundation of his beliefs. Never before or after was King so distraught about his future. Returning home from his arraignment on the day of the arrest, he canceled speaking engagements in Chicago and California. He felt he could not face an audience, hold his head up, or be sure of his courage. Then he decided that if he did not keep going, he would have lost already. In a fit of energy, King rebooked his speeches and caught a later flight to Chicago that same afternoon.