Parting the Waters (53 page)

To King, the chief drawback to Walker's package was Walker himself. He abounded with brains and zeal, but he embodied little more of the nonviolent spirit than a locomotive. Also, Walker's military idea of authority was certain to clash with the realities of the SCLC. It was essentially a charismatic organization, and the influences on King's decisions extended far beyond the SCLC preachers. Somehow King convinced himself that he could have all Walker's virtues while controlling any adverse effects of his abrasive nature. His only countermove was a subtle one: he asked Walker to meet privately with Stanley Levison and Bayard Rustin before taking the job. Walker objected strenuously, saying that Levison and Rustin were not even on the SCLC board. Why should he meet with them? Just talk with them, King gently replied, and the result was a two-day meeting early in May at New York's Sheraton Atlantic Hotel. At its conclusion, Walker was satisfied that he had established his line of authority. Rustin and Levison were satisfied that they had headed off some of Walker's moves for power, such as his idea to abolish all of King's support organizations in New York and to centralize all fund-raising operations in Atlanta. These were impractical notions, they said, because most of the money was coming from New York. In the end, the three of them compromised. When the agreement was sealed, King sent out a flock of letters to his board members and other key supporters, almost begging them to contribute at least an extra $100 to the SCLC. The payroll was about to double in August. “It would be most embarrassing to bring a man from a substantial church and not be able to pay his salary,” King wrote.

His resignation settled, Walker continued to preach slashing, dazzling sermons throughout Virginia in support of the sit-ins. His anthem was a call for unity. Supporters of the sit-ins needed to unify in courage and in action, he declared. Above all, they needed to unify behind one leader, and that leader was Martin Luther King. He spoke of King's persecutions, his needs, his example, his teachings, and his tactics, hailing him as Moses. (In private, Walker addressed King simply as “Leader.”) The crowds invariably roared in approval. After one rally, in Newport News, a spectator pushed his way forward to shake hands. Thoughtful concern was written all over the face of the young man, who had been trained in philosophy at Harvard. It was all he could do to assert himself among the jostling crowd of Walker's well-wishers. “Rev. Walker,” he said, when his chance came, “why do you keep saying one leader? Don't you think we need
a lot
of leaders?”

This was Bob Moses—then a New York high school teacher on a visit to his Virginia uncle. Moses possessed a character almost wholly at odds with his biblical namesake, the original lawgiver of Israel. He was spiritual but not religious, political but not ambitious. The question he put to Walker accurately foretold the axis that always would divide him most sharply from King. They both believed in the spirit of brotherhood, but King believed in the necessity of gods, as interpreted by leaders of rank. Moses did not. His perspective was so alien to that of the Negro church in general, and of Wyatt Walker in particular, that Walker gave him only a quizzical look and passed on without making a reply. Moses shrugged. Having written down during Walker's speech the name and address of the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King, he went back to New York to present himself to Bayard Rustin as a volunteer.

Meanwhile, King stepped into the Montgomery courthouse on May 16 to face arraignment on his income tax charges. Sheriff's deputies on horseback supplemented a phalanx of state troopers and city policemen stationed outside as a precaution against a recurrence of racial demonstrations. Inside the tense courtroom, King joined his five attorneys of record at the defense table, while the new legal assistant, Chauncey Eskridge of Chicago, sat behind them in the special section reserved for Negroes. King's lawyers protested this courtroom segregation itself in one of many legal objections they placed on the record for appeal. They won a postponement, but a barrage of phone calls from Atlanta ruined their strategy meetings that night. Now that King was not to be in court the next day, he became the prize of a fierce lobbying campaign. Atlanta college students wanted him to help them commemorate the sixth anniversary of the
Brown
decision. They had planned to march from Atlanta University to the state capitol for a rally, but Governor Vandiver had just announced that he would use state troopers to prevent any Negro from setting foot on the capitol lawn. Vandiver's warning caused tremors within Atlanta's Negro leadership. The six presidents of the Atlanta University colleges were asking what good could come of it. The students, who had remained mere observers of the sit-in movement since their one-day demonstration in March, pleaded with King to support them, but their elders argued that it would be sheer folly for King to cross the governor of Georgia over something so trivial as an aborted student march. Vandiver's antipathy for King was a matter of public record.

Students gathered the next morning not knowing whether they would march or King would come. Dr. Brawley of Clark College took the most extreme position of the six presidents: he ordered the doors of the gymnasium locked from the outside in an effort to keep the students from marching. But someone slipped out a window to spring the locks, and the Clark students joined an immense tide of students that prayed, caucused, and sang, then surged into the streets 1,500 strong. They marched from the West Side to the perimeter of the capitol grounds, where they found that the governor indeed had posted state troopers with orders not to let them pass. From there, the main body of students retreated eastward through downtown Atlanta—reversing the historical path of Negro migration from the city—toward Auburn Avenue. Borders had agreed to let them hold their rally at Wheat Street Baptist Church. The students had heard radio bulletins that King was flying in from Montgomery expressly to join them, but conflicting rumors buzzed until the head of the column came into sight of Borders and King together at the top of the Wheat Street steps. Waving and beaming, the two preachers greeted the students like victorious pilgrims. A great shout of triumph went back through the line of march, and when the rally began, King commended the students for their nonviolence and for having the courage to take a stand. King praised Borders, Borders praised King, and everyone praised the students—even the college presidents who had urged them not to march. All six turned up on the dais during the rally, giving thanks that their fears had been proven wrong. The goodwill was so pervasive that no one thought ill of the presidents or begrudged them their places of honor.

During the Atlanta student march, white pedestrians stood silently for the most part, gawking at the endless procession. A bewildered woman matter-of-factly said, “I didn't know there were that many niggers
in
college.” Her comment, which made the newspapers, was fairly representative of the national state of mind. For the vast majority of Americans who were not directly threatened or inspired by the demonstrations, the very existence of large masses of Negro college students came as a revelation. Hitherto, whites had been able to categorize Negroes as both a class and a race of laborers, because the educated ones they knew tended to be famous, idiosyncratic by definition and set apart from ordinary life. Even in the North, white-collar Negroes were an uncommon sight in the downtown business districts. Now, suddenly, their presence in sufficient numbers to clog streets or fill up jails began to register, and more than a few members of the majority culture wondered how they would fit into the greater scheme of things.

 

For those millions who did not happen to witness a live march, the civil rights issue remained a distant cause, arousing variously curiosity, fore-boding, or hope. Sit-in stories from anywhere outside one's hometown played on the inside pages along with the wildcat coal strikes and the news that the government had approved an invention called the birth control pill. In the spring of 1960, the stories that dominated the front pages tended to reverberate homeward from overseas. Even the most prominent race stories came not from Dixie but from Africa. When police in Sharpeville, South Africa, opened fire on a crowd of blacks demonstrating peacefully against the hated identity-card laws of apartheid—killing sixty-nine people, most of whom were shot in the back—dispatches shocked readers all over the world. The Eisenhower Administration denounced the South African government for its repression. Foreign capital began fleeing South Africa in multimillion-dollar chunks. Photographs of Africans burning their identity cards appeared on American front pages above stories featuring riots and predictions of the final rebellion. The tension faded, however, as the South African government simply jailed 13,000 suspicious Africans without trial. Neither the African blacks nor their white liberal supporters had an answer to state power unchecked by law or qualm.

In May, not long after the Sharpeville massacre, secret agents snatched former S.S. colonel Adolph Eichmann out of Argentina for transport to Israel, where his trial for Nazi war crimes against Jews made him world famous as the man in the glass booth, on his way to the gallows, and intellectuals debated how this bland technocrat fit with the global image of evil incarnate that had fastened upon the Nazis in the fifteen years since Hitler's death. Across that same span, the world had struggled to comprehend a successor evil that was, like Eichmann, too real to be comprehensible: the specter of thermonuclear war. In early May, all 160 million Americans participated in a national air-raid alert, the seventh since U.S. officials had acknowledged that the Russians might be capable of raining nuclear warheads down on the Western Hemisphere. As before, schoolchildren crawled under their desks, Wall Street closed, television screens went blank, and American leaders set examples by scurrying into underground bomb shelters. The consumption of electricity in New York dropped 90 percent for half an hour.

On May 5, as devilish Civil Defense officials were putting government executives through a surprise repeat of the national air-raid drill, word reached Eisenhower in his top-secret North Carolina command bunker that Khrushchev was claiming publicly that the Soviets had shot down an American spy plane. Reacting instinctively to protect the secrecy of the U-2, and on the assumption that both the CIA pilot and his plane were destroyed, Eisenhower ordered release of the cover story that a weather plane must have strayed off course. The next day, when the President was back in Washington to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1960 into law, he confirmed the weather plane story to reporters, and the day after that Khrushchev sprang his trap, announcing that the Soviets had captured Francis Gary Powers alive and would prove to the world that he had been flying no weather plane. This should have finished the tale, but Eisenhower, reeling in shock, authorized another cover story. The State Department admitted that it was a spy plane but blamed Powers as a renegade, asserting that he had no orders to fly over the Soviet Union. When this flimsy claim did not last a single day, the White House acknowledged the bare essential truth, but Eisenhower could never bring himself to admit that he had personally approved each U-2 flight. “I would like to resign,” he said despondently in the White House. In public, he never lost confidence. A week later, he flew to Paris for a summit meeting, only to watch a sputtering, sarcastic Khrushchev brand the United States a pirate nation and walk out. Eisenhower flew home again on May 17, as King was greeting Atlanta's marching students at the Wheat Street Church.

The U-2 was so important an event that millions denied its importance, rallied to the flag, and routinely denounced the Russians. What lingered beneath were memories of Ike's humiliation, of the first great lie, the public debut of the CIA in a vaguely sinister context, and the first serious puncture in the American innocence that had swelled up since Eisenhower's war.

In spite of the unnerving headlines from abroad, the country exhibited a mood of tranquil optimism. Distant crises were exciting, after all, and at home the United States left behind the bitterness of the McCarthy years while building its “economic miracle” through an unbroken generation, with no sign of slowdown in sight. Americans had licked polio. Cancer was next. A majority of employees wore white collars, and economists puzzled over the enigma of surplus, wondering what else people could want. “Gone for the first time in history is the worry over whether a society can produce enough goods,”
Time
had announced. Automobiles were everywhere, and those who turned on their car radios were most likely to hear the strings of the Percy Faith orchestra playing the winsome “Theme from
A Summer Place
,” which was the number one song that spring. By the end of the year, adults and kids alike were trying the new dance craze called “the twist,” introduced by an orphan singer from Philadelphia named Chubby Checker. There was a rapprochement between age groups. Adults were cooler, teenagers less wild.

Building all through the year—laid down along the heart of the culture somewhere between the threats of holocaust and the gurgle of pop entertainment—was the presidential campaign. The contest for the Democratic nomination drew a host of candidates, each of whom was perceived to have a fatal flaw. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson enjoyed the support of nearly every leading Democrat in Congress, but he and everyone else knew that no pure Southerner had run successfully for President in more than a hundred years. Adlai Stevenson, the best-known Democrat, was a two-time loser to Eisenhower. Like Johnson, he was loath to expose himself to loss and therefore played Hamlet in public as to whether he would run at all. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota suffered no such restraint, but he was not very well known, and his reputation as a champion of civil rights and labor unions was thought to confine the range of his appeal. Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts began with a limited political network as a result of his run for the vice presidency at the 1956 convention, but he was young and he was Roman Catholic.