Parting the Waters (49 page)

Although the tax indictment was not a front-page story in the nation's leading newspapers, word of it spread rapidly through communities friendly to civil rights. Roy Wilkins declared publicly that the NAACP would do everything in its power to defend him. Negro newspapers denounced the indictment as political. King, though buoyed enormously by the outpouring of support, recognized its limits. Even those who extolled his character could not unequivocally assert his innocence of the charges. There was a tiny seam of doubt—even if King
had
slipped up a little on his taxes, they temporized, he was being persecuted as a leader of his race. This was the crevice that King would fall through if convicted and sent away to prison. Desperately, he sought to create an alternative tribunal that might stand against the full judgment of the Alabama courts. He tried to recruit a blue-ribbon commission of prestigious white leaders—the deans of the Harvard law and divinity schools, the head of the National Council of Churches, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention—to examine his tax records, but the efforts failed.

On the same day that Atlanta's most distinguished Negro preachers met to formulate a statement deploring King's indictment—an event that received banner headlines in the Negro press—a parallel group of the city's leaders met more quietly with the express purpose of heading off the threat of student sit-ins in Atlanta. The Rev. Dr. Samuel Williams—King's Morehouse philosophy professor, who doubled as a Baptist preacher and was also a charter officer of the SCLC—joined all six presidents of the colleges in the Atlanta University complex at the latter meeting. Benjamin Mays of Morehouse warned the students that any “flare-ups” in Atlanta would be blamed on King, and the students eventually agreed to draw up a statement of their grievances, patterned after the Declaration of Independence. This was the proper way to do things in Atlanta, which was different from the other cities. The compromise remained vague as to whether the manifesto would be a prologue to or a substitute for a sit-in. Julian Bond of Morehouse—son of an Atlanta University dean and former president of two Negro colleges, whose own childhood had been favored not only with his scholarly initiation by W. E. B. Du Bois himself but also by an audience with Albert Einstein—undertook to draft most of the manifesto, for submission to the college presidents.

 

In Nashville, the students in Lawson's workshop had completed their second week of daily sit-ins on Friday, February 26, when the chief of police let it be known that their grace period was over. He warned that the downtown merchants had requested trespassing or disorderly conduct arrests if the demonstrations continued. This was the challenge for which the students had braced themselves. John Lewis stayed up all night composing a list of nonviolent “do's and don'ts” to guide the students through the trauma of being arrested. The secretary to the semi nary's president typed them on a mimeograph stencil, ending with Lewis' earnest admonition: “Remember the teachings of Jesus, Gandhi, Thoreau, and Martin Luther King, Jr.”

Each student carried one of the mimeographed sheets the next day as the column marched silently back downtown to the designated stores. Hostile white teenagers shouted “Chicken” and “Nigger.” The police allowed some of the whites to attack Lawson's unresisting troops with rocks, fists, and lighted cigarettes before moving in to arrest seventy-seven Negroes and five white sympathizers—to the applause of several hundred white onlookers. When a policeman said “You're under arrest” to John Lewis, a lifetime of absorbed taboos against any kind of trouble with the law quickened into terror. He tried to blot out everything but his rules as the police frisked, cuffed, and marched him to the paddy wagon. Then, riding to jail with the others, his dread gave way to an exhilaration unlike any he had ever known. They had held steady through the worst, he believed, and by the highest standards they knew there was no doubt that they had been in the right. Their fervor rose to such heights that Lewis and some of the other workshop veterans made a pact that weekend to escalate their Gandhian witness.

At their trials on Monday, the twenty-ninth, their chosen speaker stood up in court to interrupt the monotonous drone of guilty verdicts and fines. Diane Nash—a Chicago native as dedicated as Lewis and much more articulate—informed the judge that a group of the defendants had decided to choose jail instead of a fine. “We feel that if we pay these fines we would be contributing to and supporting the injustice and immoral practices that have been performed in the arrest and conviction of the defendants,” she announced nervously. Nash, Lewis, and fourteen others were soon led off to jail, making good on the Gandhian gesture King himself had tried unsuccessfully in Montgomery a year and a half earlier. The emotional force of their example was so strong that more than sixty of their fellow defendants changed their minds, pocketed their fine money, and joined them in jail. Outside the courtroom, many Negroes were shocked at the news that their city, forced to choose, had imprisoned some of the finest students in the area instead of the white hoodlums who had attacked them. Some also felt shame at remaining aloof from the protests while such treatment was being meted out to the nonviolent students. Among those most deeply affected was James Bevel, who came down from his bathroom soliloquies to lead the next wave of demonstrators by the same route to jail, where he was greeted by an overjoyed John Lewis.

The spectacle of the sit-ins had worked the critical degree of conversion in Bevel, and similar changes spread so rapidly through an aroused Negro population that Mayor Ben West made a conciliatory move. In exchange for a halt in the demonstrations, he offered to release the jailed students and appoint a biracial committee to make recommendations about segregation at downtown stores. Nash, Lewis, Bevel, and the other students emerged from jail as heroes who had forced a Southern city to grant one of the long-denied requests of the established civil rights groups. Hard upon the news of this victory, however, came the news that the trustees of Vanderbilt University had summarily expelled James Lawson from the Divinity School without a hearing or the approval of the faculty. The expulsion was reported on the front page of
The New York Times
, beginning national coverage of the onrushing clash between the university and the Vanderbilt faculty. About four hundred Vanderbilt teachers came to resign in protest, ultimately forcing Lawson's reinstatement. Meanwhile, the intrepid Diane Nash led a band of protesters to the lunch counter at the Greyhound bus terminal, which was not covered by the truce with the mayor. There, to the surprise of the entire city, the management served the students without incident. Segregation was broken at Greyhound even as the Vanderbilt trustees were counterattacking against Lawson. The pattern of the early sit-ins was established: constant surprises, all-night meetings, serial victories, and setbacks, with the elders of both races often on the defensive against their young.

On February 25, after a planning session at Abernathy's home in Montgomery, thirty-five Alabama State students walked into the basement cafeteria at the state capitol, asked for food service, were refused, and walked out again. This rather tame incident nevertheless aroused a ferocious reaction that suggested a difference between Montgomery and Nashville, which by Alabama standards was a metropolis nearing border-state flexibility. Almost immediately after the students left the state capitol, Governor Patterson summoned Alabama State president H. Councill Trenholm, the dignified pillar of the Negro community whom Vernon Johns had shamed many years earlier for paying “his semi-annual visit” to church. The governor bluntly ordered Trenholm to identify and expel all the Negro students who had requested service at the white cafeteria. Patterson did not fret about touching off nationwide sensitivities over academic freedom, as in the Lawson case at Vanderbilt. In fact, he underscored his tough line by calling in reporters to make himself clear. “The citizens of this state do not intend to spend their tax money to educate law violators and race agitators,” he recalled telling Trenholm, “and if you do not put a stop to it, you might well find yourself out of public funds.” Trenholm, who with his father had run Alabama State for more than fifty years, gave reporters but a single line of response: “I have no alternative but to comply.” The next day, angry student leaders protested the governor's public humiliation of their president, saying that they had done no more than to ask to buy food at a public building. Fred Shuttlesworth came in from Birmingham to announce that Patterson's threat was “totalitarian in spirit.”

Nearly four thousand Negroes, including most of the Alabama State student body, rallied that Friday night at the Hutchinson Street Baptist Church. It was the largest crowd since the bus boycott. Student leader Bernard Lee found himself standing on the platform with Shuttlesworth, Abernathy, and Martin Luther King—who had just arrived in town from Atlanta to surrender on his perjury indictment. The crowd applauded for Lee almost as loudly as for the three most famous Negroes in Alabama. Basking in adulation, Lee felt lightheaded from the effects of his sudden elevation. Until that week, he had been just another college student—a married father of three, veteran of Air Force duty at a Strategic Air Command base in Montana, where he cared for, as he was fond of saying, nuclear weapons so awesome that they would make World War II seem like “a little picnic.” His nickname was “Jelly,” in tribute to his love of food. This quality, plus his relatively advanced age, had propelled him into leadership of the campus cafeteria protests for the past two years, and that experience had pushed him in turn to the forefront of the capitol protest two days earlier. Now he was the one who had signed the press release answering Governor Patterson, and his name was praised unanimously by his fellow students. Their deafening approval of his remarks at the rally swept Lee up into the theater of the new movement. “Boy, they really love you here, don't they?” laughed King.

That night Lee received an equally memorable initiation into the habits of preacher politics when the three ministers invited him to share their private feast at Abernathy's house. He glowed in the presence of offstage conversation that bounced from Scripture and pulpit banter to high-level nonviolent tactics, and he marveled at the vast quantities of fried chicken the three preachers managed to consume between words. Lee was transformed. It occurred to him for the first time that he might become a preacher. Nearly four years' work toward an accounting degree began to fade inexorably from his mind, along with his former plans and his attachments to wife and family. He began to move toward his future role as King's valet and shadow—toward an identification so complete that Lee came to boast that his moods and whims, even his health cycles, moved in perfect concert with King's.

Emotions in Montgomery ran high that Saturday, the day of the first mass arrests in Nashville. Rumors of student sit-ins at Montgomery's downtown lunch counters attracted roving bands of angry white people armed with small baseball bats. There were no sit-ins, but exchanges between the white vigilantes and ordinary Negro shoppers occasionally flashed into violence. While one white man scuffled with a Negro woman on the sidewalk, his companion bludgeoned her from the blind side. There was little doubt about the nature of the encounter or the names of the people involved, because Sunday's
Advertiser
carried a photograph with a caption naming the attacker. The white photographer and reporter at the scene both said that the police had stood by passively, and that the crack of the baseball bat on the woman's head could be heard from half a block away. Governor Patterson announced that he would leave the investigation to local officials. Police Commissioner L. B. Sullivan—who had replaced Clyde Sellers since the bus boycott—blamed the Negro students for causing the original disturbance and the
Advertiser
for publishing the photograph. Editor Grover Hall, while dividing the larger blame between “rash, misled young Negroes” and “white thugs,” defended his newspaper against the police commissioner. “Sullivan's problem is not a photographer with a camera,” he wrote. “Sullivan's problem is a white man with a baseball bat.”

On the Monday following the attacks, King surrendered at the Montgomery County Courthouse on the income tax charges. Booked, fingerprinted, and released on $4,000 bond, he walked six blocks through the downtown shopping area, past the spot where the woman had been struck on Saturday. His purpose, he told the small number of Negroes following him, was to demonstrate at once his rededication to nonviolence and his conviction that Negroes could not allow themselves to be intimidated. King then returned to the heated strategy sessions at Abernathy's house. The students wanted to have sit-ins in order to live up to the performance of their peers elsewhere in the South, but most of the adult Negroes in town feared for the very survival of Alabama State. President Trenholm was nearly hemorrhaging from the pressure of trying to maintain both the support of the state and the respect of his students. In the end, the students compromised by agreeing to hold a prayer service on the steps of the capitol.

More than half the student body walked downtown the next day. Bernard Lee made a short speech. A student soprano's rendition of “The Lord's Prayer” so moved her voice teacher, King's old friend Robert Williams, that he vowed to himself not to flunk her that term in music theory. The students all sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and marched back to campus. Alabama's State Board of Education expelled Bernard Lee and eight other “ringleaders” the next day, ignoring President Trenholm's plaintive request that they merely be placed on probation. From the march and the expulsions, the challenges escalated at a quickened pace.