Parting the Waters (54 page)

Early bickering among the Democrats seemed to work to the advantage of Vice President Nixon, who was all but assured of his party's nomination. He faced no Republican opponent except possibly New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who wanted to run but could not bring himself to say so. Possessed of broader experience than any of the Democrats, and with the mantle of Eisenhower at least formally on his shoulders, Nixon was shrewd enough to warn against the sort of complacency that had led to Dewey's upset by Truman in 1948. Theirs was still a minority party, he kept reminding his supporters, and he was not Eisenhower. “Anyone who does not recognize that we are in for the fight of our lives must be smoking opium,” he told Nebraska Republicans.

Kennedy eliminated Humphrey from the race by winning early primaries in Wisconsin (next door to Humphrey's home state) and in the Protestant stronghold of West Virginia. The unannounced candidates grumbled that Kennedy's wit and glamour were seducing the party toward defeat, and the leading Democrats looked on the new front-runner with distaste. Only two senators endorsed him for the nomination. Eleanor Roosevelt continued to campaign for Stevenson, making scathing remarks about Kennedy as a puppet of his millionaire father and a coward in the battle against McCarthyism.
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Adam Clayton Powell continued to support Johnson, the Southern wheeler-dealer. Former president Harry Truman said he was for Senator Stuart Symington or for Johnson—anybody but Kennedy—and he felt so strongly as to scold Kennedy on television just before the convention. “Senator, are you certain that you are quite ready for the country, or that the country is ready for you?” he asked.

Race played a large role in the campaign, less because of the civil rights movement than because the polls were showing the Negro vote to be divided and volatile. The candidates competed intensely for Negro votes, but they tried to do so in ways that would generate as little controversy as possible among whites. Subtle-minded readers of
Jet
magazine knew Lyndon Johnson was serious about running for President when they saw the “exclusive” posed photograph of LBJ with a Negro leader in the March 3 issue. The hypersensitive Johnson never had allowed such a photograph to be published, for fear of losing votes in Texas. Two months later, Johnson wore brand-new contact lenses on a “non-candidate” campaign tour of three primary states, and all the while he was welcoming Negroes into his Taj Mahal along with everyone else he could corral.

Johnson had many endorsements but few convention delegates. Kennedy had the reverse problem, which proved to be the better one, but the candidate himself worried that his strategy might not win him certain blocs of voters, including Negroes. His insecurities peaked when he allowed a campaign aide to talk him into attending an NAACP dinner, only to have Jackie Robinson refuse to have his picture taken with Kennedy on the grounds that he was a Republican. Stung and embarrassed, Kennedy left, saying he thought Robinson was for Humphrey. This was true, he learned, but Robinson considered himself a Republican for Humphrey, and if Humphrey did not win the nomination, the former Dodgers star might support Nixon. Hard on this intelligence came the rumor that even Roy Wilkins felt misgivings about Kennedy, and sympathized privately with Lyndon Johnson. “We're in trouble with the Negroes,” said campaign manager Robert Kennedy. He assigned Harris Wofford, the white Gandhian lawyer whom King had known since the boycott, to work full time on the Negro vote.

Senator Kennedy himself was so alarmed by his lack of feel for race politics that he decided to investigate personally. One night late in May, he carved a hole in his campaign schedule, jettisoned his retinue of advisers, planners, and noisemakers, and instructed his driver to wait for him outside Harry Belafonte's apartment building on New York's West End Avenue. After introducing himself to Belafonte and thanking him for agreeing to the hastily arranged visit, Kennedy came straight to the point. He said he knew Belafonte was for Stevenson. That was all right, he could understand it. But Kennedy was looking ahead to the fall campaign against Nixon. He was worried about Jackie Robinson, and he had two favors to ask. Could Belafonte explain to him how someone like Jackie Robinson could ever endorse Nixon for President, and would Belafonte consider organizing Negro stars for Kennedy, to offset the political damage of Robinson's likely defection?

Belafonte, who remained convinced that Stevenson would win the Democratic nomination, made small talk as he absorbed the many surprises of his first few seconds with Kennedy—the candidate's assumption so early in the contest that he would win the nomination, his sharp intuition that Jackie Robinson was a political problem that he must address forcefully, his capacity to ask penetrating questions and request brash favors under cover of his charm. Belafonte replied that he could understand why Robinson and other prominent Negroes did not prefer Kennedy among the Democratic candidates. Kennedy was an unknown to them, without friendships or even acquaintances, and he had no record of sympathy with the cause of civil rights. Belafonte confessed, however, that he had no better idea than Kennedy why Jackie Robinson might endorse Nixon. He considered Nixon anathema for his role as a leader of the McCarthy witch-hunts, during which Du Bois had been arrested, Paul Robeson driven from the country, and Belafonte himself partially blacklisted. On civil liberties grounds alone, said Belafonte, he would do everything he could to help Kennedy defeat Nixon, if Kennedy won the nomination. In the course of the long strategy session that followed, Belafonte recommended above all that Kennedy establish a close relationship with Martin Luther King.

“Why do you see him as so important?” Kennedy asked. “What can he do?”

Belafonte paused. It was clear to him that Kennedy was not being snide or argumentative. The senator saw King as an unfamiliar preacher who had once led a bus boycott in Alabama and was now facing trial on income tax charges. What was King in comparison with the nearly universal appeal of Belafonte or Jackie Robinson, who could sway Negro voters without alienating white ones? Belafonte tried to explain to Kennedy his belief that the Negro vote no longer could be contested on the basis of popularity, because civil rights was building to the status of a sacred cause. He said he was not a religious man himself but had seen and felt King's impact. Its strength was not reflected in either the white or Negro press. “Forget me,” he advised Kennedy. “Forget Jackie Robinson and everybody else we've been talking about. If you can join the cause of King, and be counselled by him, then you'll have an alliance that will make the difference.”

Kennedy, always nodding, asking more questions, thanking Belafonte for the information, made no commitments and disclosed no plans. At the end of nearly three hours' discussion, he made his way back down-stairs to his car. Belafonte called King almost immediately with a report on Kennedy, whom he described as unschooled and unemotional but very quick. He recommended that King make every effort to get to know Kennedy. King was receiving the same advice from Harris Wofford, who was promoting Kennedy to King and King to Kennedy. Like Belafonte, Wofford was a Stevenson man. Even after joining Kennedy's staff, in fact, he kept up his contact with the reluctant candidate from Illinois. He wrote a letter commending King to Stevenson, a copy of which he sent King “in strictest confidence,” hoping to make sure that no one in the Kennedy camp would discover that he was still consorting with the enemy.

 

On May 22, King took his seat at the defendant's table in Judge James J. Carter's Montgomery courtroom, charged with perjury. There were legal motions and futile skirmishes over segregation in the spectator area as well as the jury box, but the prosecutors managed to introduce by the third day a mountainous pile of 999 exhibits—mostly copies of deposit slips and checks payable to King. The state's case built smoothly until King's strutting Chicago barrister, William Ming, cross-examined the chief prosecution witness, Lloyd D. Hale, the state revenue auditor who had appeared at the Dexter parsonage back in January to demand payment of back taxes. Ming tried to make the prosecution's blizzard of numbers backfire by asking Hale how the state had arrived at its own estimate of King's income. Hale admitted that he had made his calculations pretty much spontaneously, on the same day he had visited King. Furthermore, Hale testified, the state of Alabama was
still
not sure how much money King had earned in 1956, the year in question. These answers were highly favorable to the defense. Ming studied Hale, a clearly troubled man who seemed to make an effort to be objective in his characterization of King, and decided to pose an extremely dangerous question. Did Hale remember telling King that day at the parsonage that there was no evidence of fraud in the tax return, he asked. Hale said he did. This testimony drew gasps from spectators, who were shocked to hear a white Alabama civil servant give comfort to a Negro in Alabama's most visible, and blatantly political, trial.

The prosecutors seemed agitated as they rested their case; the defense remained subdued. The facts lay somewhere in a maze of numbers, and King had never won a case in an Alabama court. The defense lawyers put R. D. Nesbitt on the stand to tell the jury how fiercely King had resisted the salary increases the Dexter trustees tried to force upon him, and Morehouse's President Mays led a string of distinguished character witnesses. Still, defense hopes for a mistrial were so dim that King's lawyers, after furious internal argument, took the ultimate risk of putting King himself on the stand. As expected, the prosecutors in cross examination ridiculed King's descriptions of the daily financial notations in his little diaries and battered him with questions designed to maximize the jury's political hostility. This high price the defense lawyers were willing to pay so that King could corroborate Hale's testimony about their conversation in the parsonage on the day of the tax ambush. After King stepped down, the defense lawyers called as their final witness the accountant and Ebenezer trustee J. B. Blayton, who told incomprehensible tales of accounting inventions such as the geographic-median-airfare method he had used to estimate King's legitimate travel deductions for 1956. Somehow, from all the numbers he threw into the air, Blayton pulled the precise figure of $235.16 as the paltry amount of King's undeclared income. Even that, Blayton testified, could be explained by an alternative expense formula. Throughout Blayton's testimony, Chauncey Eskridge muttered to himself that Blayton was merely grafting bowdlerized accounting jargon to the results of Eskridge's own calculations. Eskridge knew, however, that Blayton's expostulations might be helpful, because the defense had an equal right to lay claim to the benefits of confusion.

The courtroom bristled with acrimony on Saturday, May 28, the morning of closing arguments. Extra reporters jammed in for the climax of the trial, including one Negro reporter who touched off the day's first controversy by taking a seat in the white spectator section. Bailiffs ordered him to move. The jury deliberated for some three hours and forty-five minutes, nearly every moment of which was the occasion for new speculative interpretations by someone in the anxious crowd. When the words “Not guilty” were pronounced, Daddy King and Mother King burst into tears along with Coretta, and Delaney's emotion overcame him as he rose to praise the judge for his conduct of the trial. Judge Carter banged his gavel against the rising tide of hallelujahs, sobs, and moans of relief, and then he ordered the bailiffs to evacuate the courtroom row by row and march the predominantly Negro crowd out of the courthouse in single file in order to forestall demonstrations of joy. Outside, special units of highway patrolmen prevented any clusters or huddles, with the result that the Negroes, too happy or too shocked to do otherwise, marched single file all the way to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. King, who had received the verdict passively, having prepared himself to be marched off to jail, rearranged himself enough to speak a single sentence to the reporters who surrounded him outside the courthouse: “This represents great hope, and it shows that there are hundreds of thousands of white people of good will in the South, even though they may disagree with our views on integration.” Judge Delaney could only say that the acquittal was “the most surprising thing in my 34 years as a lawyer.”

King joined the long procession back to Dexter for a spontaneous church service, during which he and Abernathy asked the young people to lead them in singing a song called “We Shall Overcome.” It was a Negro hymn dating to the pre-gospel era of the early twentieth century that had been transported by South Carolina tobacco workers to Highlander Folk School, where it had been adapted for protest.
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Since Septima Clark's Highlander workshop in April, the song had been spreading rapidly among the students of the sit-ins. Simple strains and dogged sincerity made the hymn suitable for crisis, mourning, and celebration alike, as many adults discovered when they heard the song for the first time that day.

On leaving Dexter, Coretta and Abernathy split off to keep church speaking engagements, while King rode home to Atlanta with his mother and father. To the homecoming crowd that filled Ebenezer the next morning, King preached a revealing sermon entitled “Autobiography of Suffering.” He had not spoken out previously about all his persecutions, he said, for fear that people might think he was playing for sympathy. Now he reviewed them in detail—from the bombings of the bus boycott and the near-fatal stabbing in Harlem to all the outrages of the trial just ended. The sermon was a cry of complaints let loose, but the litany was so sweet and self-focused that King seemed to be engaged, if not enlivened, by the record of his own ordeals. This was not a new theme with him. It reached toward the innocent pathos of a messiah, but King did not give in completely to somber melodrama, and he certainly did not entertain the belief that the acquittal was the result of his own mystical powers. He joked about how the state of Alabama had fought to provide him with free housing for a few years, and he described the verdict as a quirk. Perhaps the twelve jurors had discovered a point of identity with King as a common victim of the loathsome tax audit that was stronger even than the separation of the races. Or perhaps this jury, unlike previous ones, had seen some truth too glaring to overlook. In any case, segregation remained. King gave thanks for the welcome verdict without pretending to explain it. “Something happened to the jury,” he told his congregation.