Parting the Waters (52 page)

Eskridge, who had already heard some of the lawyers laughing among themselves at King's claims of innocence, was left alone with his new client in King's Ebenezer study. He asked how King had prepared his tax returns, and King replied rather sheepishly that he had relied almost exclusively on his diaries. Under prodding, he explained that he always wrote his daily receipts and expenditures into the pocket diary that contained his schedule. Blayton had expressed no interest in the diaries, saying they were not financial records. Hearing this, Eskridge perked up instantly. Diaries could be admissible as tax evidence, he said, although defendants rarely submitted diaries, which were usually more rather than less damaging to them. This was all news to King. When Eskridge asked where his old diaries were, King said he had no idea but that Coretta would probably know. He called home, and when Coretta said she thought the diaries were buried away in an old trunk, he relayed Eskridge's request that she find and deliver them to the church right away.

Soon Eskridge was leafing through the little books. Sure enough, there were notes in King's handwriting on every page, recording travel expenses, contributions, and speaking fees in meticulous detail. For every check received, King had written down what portions he planned to give to the SCLC or the MIA or Dexter, and what portion, if any, he planned to keep. When Eskridge expressed amazement that a person could have such messy and confused bank records and yet keep such a precise diary, King replied that the diary was a habit that had been drilled into him from childhood by Daddy King, who taught that keeping a penny-conscious budget was the first rule of frugality. King readily consented to let Eskridge study the diaries, and as the five principal lawyers gathered for a marathon session with King, the young tax lawyer headed back to the hotel to face an endless day with the diaries, his adding machine, and his work sheets.

King's grueling consultations were interrupted by a series of telephone bulletins from Nashville and Montgomery. The first news was that dynamite had exploded with enough force to demolish the home of Nashville attorney Alexander Looby, damage the two adjoining houses, and blow out 147 windows at the nearby Meharry Medical College. Looby and his wife, asleep in the rear of the house, survived without serious injury. The Nashville police chief was calling the attack the work of killers. “You don't throw that much dynamite to scare somebody,” he said. The viciousness of the blast unified Nashville in a flash of trauma so strong that more than three thousand people, including many whites, marched about ten miles through town that very morning.

Mayor Ben West met the enormous crowd of marchers at city hall. He pledged to enforce the law impartially and to do everything possible to catch the bombers, and he defended his leadership in the sit-in crisis by saying that he lacked the power to tell the store owners what to do. “We are all Christians together,” he said in the end. “Let us pray together.” At this, a student shouted out, “How about eating together?” After the prayer, Diane Nash pushed her way to the microphone to ask the mayor whether he would appeal to all citizens to stop racial discrimination. “I appeal to all citizens to end discrimination, to have no bigotry, no bias, no hatred,” West replied.

“Do you mean that to include lunch counters?” asked Nash, pressing the issue. She was standing face to face with the mayor. Her bravado hushed the crowd into silence.

“Little lady,” West replied, trying to be genial, “I stopped segregation seven years ago at the airport when I first took office, and there has been no trouble there since.”

Nash bored in relentlessly. “Then, Mayor, do you recommend that the lunch counters be desegregated?”

West, a moderate white politician skewered in public before an emotional crowd, answered the crucial question with a single word, “Yes.” This drew cheers. The mayor tried desperately to equivocate by reminding everyone that the decision rested with the store owners, but Nash paid no attention. She had her answer.

That same afternoon, crossing the Nashville bulletins, news reached King that Montgomery police commissioner L. B. Sullivan had filed a $500,000 libel suit against
The New York Times
and the four SCLC preachers from Alabama whose names had appeared in Rustin's ad. Governor Patterson, Mayor James, and former commissioner Clyde Sellers were said to be right behind Sullivan with similar suits. These were bizarre cases. None of the plaintiffs had been mentioned by name in the
Times
ad, and each alleged only trivial errors in the narrative facts described in the text. Nevertheless, they took umbrage at the ad, saying that it defamed them by implication. They based their libel claim primarily on Rustin's general characterization of the Southern law enforcement officials as “violators of the Constitution” in their actions to suppress the sit-ins.

From its beginning, the
Sullivan
case confronted the American court system with a delicate political dilemma, and the unbearable sensitivities of race pushed judges into almost surreal extremes of irony. Eventually, the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court avoided the racial content of the facts by inventing a new standard of law. To do so, they redefined the legal concept of defamation in a case that mentioned no names, and based the standard of allowable news reporting on a paid advertisement that was touched by no reporter and never passed through a newsroom. All this would grow out of a fund-raiser for King's tax trial, but he faced crueler, more immediate ironies. He was meeting with lawyers who did not quite believe him, and who were not even sure whether they would be paid, when word came that the same Alabama officials who were behind his prosecution on the tax case were filing for punitive damages against those cooperating to pay for King's defense. The instant effect of the libel case was to make it even harder for King to raise money. The white authorities of Alabama were serving notice that newspapers willing to publish King's paid messages had to fear that Alabama might haul them into court. For the lawyers, the discouraging news meant that they faced a second troublesome, multiyear case before they had formulated a defense to the first one, and that they stood less chance of collecting fees in either.

By the flinty machismo of those who gamble with lives for a living, King and his counsel managed to eat a good supper and to get off a funny story or two about the calamities of the day. Early the next morning, a tired but clearly awed Chauncey Eskridge cornered some of the lawyers at the Waluhaje Hotel. “Fellas, I got news for you,” he declared, holding up his work sheets. “Dr. King didn't take any of that money.”

This announcement took the breath of William Ming in particular, who could not believe that any criminal defendant might be less guilty than he had already admitted to the newspapers. Eskridge explained that he had compiled all the figures from King's 1956 diary, and that the income figures netted out to a paltry $368 more than the outside income reported on King's tax return. Even that discrepancy might be explained by minor errors, he said. Eskridge told his colleagues that while it would take much work to verify that King actually did with the monies what the diary said he intended, he, for one, was utterly convinced that King was telling the truth. In fact, he was convinced that King was more honest than anyone he ever hoped to meet.

Leaving the stunned lawyers at the Waluhaje to reassess their strategy, the freshly converted Eskridge hastened to Ebenezer with the exciting result. King maintained his reserve until he was sure he understood the full impact of the report, then suddenly rushed across his study to hug Eskridge like a long-lost cousin. The Chicago tax lawyer dated his interest in politics from that moment. His devotion to King began to grow, splitting him apart from his family and consuming his life with the movement. He would be standing beneath the Memphis balcony at the instant King was shot down.

Much renewed, King excused himself at midday to catch a flight to Nashville, where he was to address an enormous evening rally in the gymnasium at Fisk University. A substantial minority of the crowd was white. Bomb threats intervened before he could speak, causing the police to evacuate the gym for a search. This consumed hours and would have ruined any normal gathering, but in the wake of the Looby bombing, emotions were running too high. Loudspeakers were set up for those left standing outside, and great roars went up when King saluted Lawson's troops as “the best organized and the most disciplined in the Southland.” The spirit of their campaign, he declared, was stronger than the ill will in all the bombers and segregation laws arrayed against them. Segregation was surely finished, he said, though he could not say exactly when it would expire. (As it turned out, the Nashville movement broke segregation at six of the major downtown lunch counters only twenty days later.) “No lie can live forever,” he said. “Let us not despair. The universe is with us. Work together, children. Don't get weary.”

Fortunately for King, he was conditioned not to trust high moments, just as he fought against succumbing to low ones. Scarcely had he returned home from the optimism of Nashville than internecine warfare broke out elsewhere. The first shot landed in the form of a blistering letter from Roy Wilkins. “We were puzzled and greatly distressed at the criticism of the NAACP voiced by the Rev. James Lawson at the Raleigh meeting,” Wilkins began. Giving notice that “we feel aggrieved over this unwarranted attack,” Wilkins threatened King with responsibility for causing a historic rupture. “I know that you join me in the determination not to have a break between our groups,” he warned. “We seek the same goals and have the same enemies. Those enemies would be happier than they have been for forty years if a split should develop.” In closing, Wilkins demanded that King make amends, and said there were “other disturbing elements in the picture” that could be discussed only in private conference. The “other elements,” as King probably guessed, were his plans to hire Lawson and Moore.

Lawson received the blow secondhand. Just as he was beginning to wonder why he had not heard anything further from King about joining the SCLC, he received a mysterious phone call from the venerable A. J. Muste of the FOR. Muste asked Lawson to meet him at Boston's Logan Airport to receive a message that could not be delivered by telephone. At the airport rendezvous, Muste said that he had been in frequent contact with Martin Luther King lately regarding events in Africa,
*
and that King had implored him to deliver a most disagreeable message: Roy Wilkins had vetoed Lawson's employment at the SCLC. King said Wilkins had stated flatly that the NAACP would “have no dealings with SCLC, ever,” if King allowed Lawson or Moore to join the SCLC staff.

Lawson had trouble believing the news. Furious, deflated, and sad, he asked Muste why he thought King would let Wilkins dictate SCLC hiring policy out of something so petty and misguided as Wilkins' anger about a speech to a student meeting. If Wilkins was so stung by charges that his organization was bourgeois and timid, Lawson fumed, he should make it better. Instead, he was forcing King to make the SCLC more like the NAACP. Muste replied that he could only guess from the way he talked that King did not believe Wilkins was bluffing. Perhaps it was because he had so many prominent NAACP people on his own board, Muste speculated, or perhaps it was because he believed he could not sacrifice NAACP goodwill when he was defending two expensive legal cases that would probably go to the Supreme Court.

“I think Martin underestimates his strength,” Lawson said wearily. In the end, he and Muste decided that his best course was to let it pass. Lawson thanked Muste, saying he knew it was a tortured gesture of kindness on King's part to send someone Lawson respected so much, and he resolved never to speak to King about the episode. But the upshot of the stinging rebuke was to make Lawson more of a loner. Douglas Moore, for his part, heard the news directly from King, who said miserably again and again that he had no choice. Bitterly disappointed, Moore began to disengage from the miracle liftoff of the sit-in movement. By the next year, he had secured a position as a missionary in the Belgian Congo.

 

King had no time to nurse his regrets. While struggling with legal bills and trial preparations, he made it his first priority to end the chronic confusion over the staff leadership of the SCLC. He stepped up recruitment pressure on Wyatt Tee Walker, whose brash demands quickly confronted King with the first crucial personnel decision of his public career. In substance and in character, Walker offered the prospect of a sharp break with the SCLC's lethargic past. He was prepared to take the fateful leap out of the ministry. If selected, he promised to work a revolution of discipline. Secretaries would not be allowed to have coffee at their desks. He would demand to hear their typewriters humming by nine o'clock in the morning. If the SCLC needed more secretaries, he would find the money. Walker would not mind being known as the one who threatened and insulted people to advance the SCLC's interests. “In fact,” he told King, “I'm just mean enough to like it.”

He spoke of himself as King's agent, master administrator, and private “son-of-a-bitch.” A leader like King, who was accommodating by nature, desperately needed such a person, observed Walker, who offered to assume responsibility for disasters, to promote King's image, and to go so far as to stay out of photographs with King. He would see to it that King reaped the glory. In return, he demanded complete authority within the organization. King must grant him the uncontested right to hire and fire people as he saw fit. King's lieutenants, particularly Bayard Rustin in New York, must cease issuing public statements in King's name unless first cleared with Walker. Ella Baker could stay on in the Atlanta headquarters if she wished, so long as she understood that she would be working for Walker. In addition to this authority, Walker wanted the SCLC to hire two of his friends from Virginia—you cannot run an organization, he said, without having your own people on the staff—and to pay him a salary of $8,000, which was twice what he was making as pastor at Gillfield. It did not bother him in the slightest that this sum exceeded what King himself earned from Ebenezer. King's income limitation was self-imposed, Walker explained, and he did not share King's qualms about money.