Parting the Waters (57 page)

 

King returned home to Atlanta thinking there was not much difference between Kennedy and Nixon on civil rights. Both on principle and on the relative merits of the candidates, King was inclined to be neutral in the fall election. This put him at odds not only with the highly partisan Daddy King but also with the Atlanta
Daily World
, which was run by family friend and Ebenezer trustee C. A. Scott. The
World
scarcely waited for the conclusion of the Republican Convention before declaring in a headline, “Nixon and Lodge Are Best to Fight World Communism.”

On the Morehouse campus, King joined student leaders who had been meeting periodically since their SCLC conference back in April. Their spirits were high, and with good reason, as the sit-ins of the previous spring had been reverberating through the adult world all summer. City officials in Durham, North Carolina, were taking steps to end segregation “quietly” in many downtown stores. Two drugstore chains based in Virginia had agreed to end lunch counter segregation—which news, announced at the NAACP convention, inspired jubilant youth delegates to lift Roy Wilkins to their shoulders like a triumphant football coach. The U.S. Attorney General, William Rogers, had represented Vice President Nixon during the civil rights battles at the Republican Convention and then proceeded directly into negotiations with the owners of chain stores across the South. News stories out of the Justice Department indicated that the owners were willing to integrate their lunch counters if they could do so all at once; their fear was that Southern legislatures would enact more laws
requiring
segregation. Meanwhile, Trailways officials announced that they would desegregate the restaurants in their bus terminals throughout the South. The company would continue to maintain separate lunch counters and restrooms as a public service, said the beleaguered officials, but customers of all races would be free to sit anywhere.

Victories and rumors of victory swelled the hopes of the student leaders. Their movement had not only captured the attention of the highest officials in the land but also pushed segregationists into defensive, ridiculous compromises. At their Atlanta meeting, the students discussed ambitious plans to push into new areas and attack other segregated institutions, such as churches and public parks. Their crying weakness, everyone agreed, was that the organized student movement was of negligible size in proportion to the vast opportunities created by the sit-ins. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's office was merely a corner of King's SCLC office, which itself was no bigger than a three-man barber shop. The sole SNCC staffer was a volunteer student on leave from Union Theological Seminary. Only nine student delegates could be mustered for the Atlanta conference, one of whom represented both the District of Columbia and the entire state of Florida. There were no delegates at all from rural areas or from the tough states of Mississippi and Louisiana, and the SNCC delegates were outnumbered at their conference by observers such as King, reporter Carl Rowan, and the recently fired professor L. D. Reddick. In the face of all these deficiencies, the SNCC delegates borrowed a maneuver from the SCLC: they resolved to recruit more people for yet another conference two months hence, at which time they hoped to establish SNCC as a permanent organization. They boldly invited Senator Kennedy and Vice President Nixon to attend.

Privately, some of the leaders of the Atlanta student movement went to King with a worry that was emblematic of the times. They feared that one of their supporters might be a Communist. In particular, they suspected a New Yorker who was coming to their meetings, joining their picket lines, making friends with their friends. He was older and more sophisticated than most of them, with strange habits and a volunteer spirit that seemed too good to be true. After much internal debate, the Atlanta students had called him in for what amounted to an interrogation. When this settled nothing, they decided to pass their doubts along to King, because the man in question said he had come South to work as a summer volunteer for the SCLC. Promising to look into the matter, King summoned the suspect to his study at Ebenezer.

King and Bob Moses were introduced to each other under these unfortunate circumstances. Alone together in the study, they said little and moved slowly. There were long silences. A mutual distaste for the subject at hand—a loyalty investigation—accented each man's natural reserve. King, distracted by the rush of greater events, retreated into the formality of his preacher's role, and Moses, too self-assured to fall into hero-worship of King and yet too respectful to assert any of his complaints about the way the movement was being run, waited patiently for King to challenge him. King was slow to do so. Though frail, bespectacled, and soft-spoken to the point of whispering, Moses carried about him the strong presence of an Eastern mystic. There was something odd about him, yet he also managed to communicate a soothing, spiritual depth.

Ostensibly, the two of them met as world-famous leader and obscure volunteer, judge and accused, Baptist preacher and suspected Marxist, but beneath the trappings of rank the two men were natural competitors in the realms of politics and religion, destined to become opposing symbols for the holy wars within the civil rights movement. Their personalities struck deep notes that were so close together as to be unbearably dissonant. Never—and certainly not at their first strained meeting—were they to acknowledge the range of similarities between them.

At twenty-five, Moses was only six years younger than King. Born and raised in Harlem, he had been marked as an extremely sensitive child. He was admitted to Stuyvesant High School, a school for gifted students, and even there he distinguished himself by developing a taste on his own for the works of the Chinese philosopher Lao-tze. His grandfather had been an early leader of the National Baptist Convention, a distinguished but overbearing preacher who had moved his family to New York just in time to be struck by a mortal illness and the hard times of the Depression. As a result, the invalid grandfather Moses had been unable to educate or support the last few of his many children. Moses' father, one of those left out, retained a lifelong bitterness over his lack of education or professional accomplishment. Together with his wife, he encouraged his son's bookish proclivities and inculcated in him an ambition to succeed at one of the better white colleges, as opposed to the traditional Negro ones, which they dismissed as too “social.” They were thrilled when he won a scholarship to enter Hamilton College in upstate New York, for the fall term of 1952.

Suddenly, as one of only three Negroes in the student body, Moses had entered a new universe of white middle-class culture. Excluded by race from the all-important fraternity social system, he gravitated toward an integrated Christian study group, whose members, still reeling from the apocalypse of World War II, embraced a Last Judgment fundamentalism as a shield against the vanity-glutted world they saw around them. Moses joined some of them who commuted to New York City to preach in the streets. On many a Saturday night, he stood beneath the lurid bright lights of Times Square and took his turn among the hillbilly preachers and West Indian soothsayers and the other student evangelists—holding up his Bible and urging streams of tourists to repent. His voice was much too soft for the task, however, and a few of his Hamilton professors perceived that his zeal was connected to a more eclectic curiosity about the cosmic questions. Moses became a philosophy major. He read Camus in French, renewed his study of Eastern philosophers, and took an interest in pacifist thought on the issues of war and peace. Admiring professors placed Moses in Quaker workshops held overseas. He spent one Hamilton summer vacation in France living among pacifists whose beliefs had been tested by the Hitler occupation, and he spent the next summer in Japan, dividing his time between a Quaker workshop and the home of a Zen Buddhist monk. His writings about these experiences, plus his mastery of the great metaphysical philosophers, established him as the kind of oddity that was much more respectable to faculty tastes than were street preachers. In 1956, Moses was accepted into the Ph.D. program of Harvard's graduate department of philosophy.

Still deeply insecure about his ability to compete with white students at a Harvard level, Moses arrived in the Boston area two years after King had departed. Much had changed in those two years. Paul Tillich, the world-famous theologian on whom King had written his dissertation at Boston University but whom he had never met, was now a professor of philosophy and religion at Harvard. Moses attended his lectures, but his perception of Tillich was affected deeply by a historic shift in the prevailing world view of professional philosophers. Tillich was more than out of vogue; his focus on the old questions of truth and being made him irrelevant to modern analytic philosophy. Generally speaking, the analytic philosophers had put aside the ancient riddles until they could find a way to make words as precise and scientific as numbers. Their papers bristled with equations and notations of symbolic logic. Mathematical proof came to replace persuasiveness as the test of good philosophical work. Soon Moses joined the small cliques of graduate philosophy students who sat disapprovingly through Tillich's lectures. “It was all poetry,” they said derisively, meaning that Tillich was just playing with words. Moses absorbed enough of the analytic school to understand all this, but part of him yearned to hear the religious and philosophical poetry.

He was well along toward his doctorate when, in February 1958, the news came that his mother had died suddenly. In shock, he went to New York for the funeral. Afterward, his father packed his bags and left for a short trip of escape and recovery. Before Moses could leave for Harvard, the police called with the news that they had picked up Mr. Moses on the street. He had gone mad, apparently. Police officers found him raving, hurting himself, shouting that he was movie star Gary Cooper. They took him to the Bellevue psychiatric unit, where he remained under treatment for many months. He was released not long before police officers brought Izola Ware Curry to the same hospital for evaluation after she stabbed King.

Moses left Harvard and went home to take care of his father. To support the two of them, he took a job as a teacher of mathematics at the Horace Mann High School in New York. He was still there in 1960 when the sit-ins began in the South. At the New York office of the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King, Moses worked as a volunteer for Bayard Rustin. He had met Rustin years earlier to discuss conscientious objection to the military draft, but Rustin did not remember it. Now Moses found himself engaged again on the issues of moral philosophy that had absorbed him before the interruption of his education at Harvard. On the recommendation of Bayard Rustin to Ella Baker, he took a bus South to work for Dr. King.

Atlanta, like the Harvard philosophy department, was not quite what Moses expected. There were only three people in the SCLC office, and one of them—Ella Baker—was preparing to return again to New York to make way for the incoming Wyatt Tee Walker. The second was Dr. King's secretary, Dora McDonald, who spent her time answering the phone, logging King's phone calls and correspondence, and typing stencils for fund-raising appeals. The third was Jane Stembridge, the SNCC volunteer from Union Seminary. King was away at the political conventions, and no one could quite think of anything for Moses to do every day. At first he kept looking for a “work force” somewhere—for the rooms where volunteers must be stuffing envelopes, canvassers preparing to knock on doors, organizers training to go out into the field—but the New York—style beehive simply did not exist.

As the reality sank in that the SCLC was but a church office with three frantic telephones, Moses made friends with Stembridge and consumed long hours with her debating the merits of Paul Tillich. Through her, he met some of the leaders of the Atlanta student movement, who were engaged almost daily in picket lines and planning meetings. Moses, hungry for something to do, joined them on picket lines outside Atlanta supermarkets that refused to hire Negro clerks. On some days, when the students were otherwise engaged in lengthy meetings, Moses was the only one on the line. For the sake of company, he found and joined another picket line in town, and one day the police arrested him and his fellow demonstrators. He was identified in news accounts as Robert Moses of the SCLC. When the Atlanta students called him in shortly thereafter and asked how he had managed to locate an alternative picket line, Moses replied that he had heard about it while attending a mathematics lecture entitled “Ramifications of Goedel's Theorem.” His answer did nothing to allay the students' suspicions that this hyper-intellectual Yankee volunteer might be a Communist.

In King's church study, Moses' passive nature rendered useless one of King's most valuable traits—his patience as a listener and resolver of conflicts. Forced into the offensive, King recounted what he had heard about the picket line, the arrest, and Moses' identification as an SCLC volunteer. When Moses offered no challenge to the account, King explained that the group sponsoring that picket line, the Southern Conference Education Fund, was a spin-off of one of Eleanor Roosevelt's old interracial groups, sponsored by Aubrey Williams and Myles Horton, among others, and now run by Carl and Anne Braden. It was the group Senator Eastland had been investigating for Communist ties back in 1954, when Clifford Durr had gone berserk in the New Orleans hearing room.
*
“I'm not saying that any of that is true,” King told Moses, “but I advise against any more demonstrations with the SCEF people. Some people think it's Communist, and that's what matters. We have to be careful.”