Parting the Waters (60 page)

 

In Baltimore, after nearly a decade of persistent negotiations, the city's white and Negro Baptist preachers came together to discuss the role of the church in a time of racial tension. The meeting itself was a historic event, a gathering of uneasy strangers, and for the occasion the preachers of each race selected a representative to speak about their common religious heritage. The Negro preachers chose Vernon Johns, hoping that he would dazzle the white preachers with his learning. Indirectly, Johns was an employee of some of the white Baltimore preachers. His Maryland Baptist Center, which offered adult education to Negro preachers, was a kind of missionary program sponsored jointly by the white Southern Baptists and the National Baptist Convention.

On the appointed day, some 150 preachers met for lunch at the Seventh Baptist Church. There were no disputes over seating arrangements, the blessing of the food, the singing of “Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross,” or the meal itself. But as the chosen white preacher developed his sermon on the theme of Christian salvation, of being “washed in the blood of the Lamb,” Vernon Johns began to twitch noticeably in his seat. When the white man finished, Johns stood up abruptly. He did not wait to be introduced, nor did he begin with the effusive salutations that had been established as the order of the day. “The thing that disappoints me about the Southern white church is that it spends all of its time dealing with Jesus after the cross, instead of dealing with Jesus before the cross,” he growled, and a number of the Negro preachers already were sinking inwardly toward oblivion.

Johns turned to the white preacher who had just sat down. “You didn't do a thing but preach about the death of Jesus,” he said. “If that were the heart of Christianity, all God had to do was to drop him down on Friday, and let them kill him, and then yank him up again on Easter Sunday. That's all you hear. You don't hear so much about his three years of teaching that man's religion is revealed in the love of his fellow man. He who says he loves God and hates his fellow man is a liar, and the truth is not in him. That is what offended the leaders of Jesus's own established church as well as the colonial authorities from Rome. That's why they put him up there.”

To a stunned audience, many of whom seemed to be leaning backward, Johns sputtered through quick explanations of Dives and Lazarus, and a story about how God rebuked Abraham for driving a stranger from his tent. “There is a world of disparity between the idealism of Jesus and the practices of men,” he said. “But Jesus is not crazy. We are crazy. The church has not formally denounced the Sermon on the Mount. It has merely let it slide. I want to deal with Jesus before the cross. I don't give a damn what happened to him after the cross.”

With that, Johns sat down again, having consumed no more time than normally allotted to opening jokes and bromides. Faces were red. Appetites were lost. The tentative brotherhood of Negro and white Baptist preachers in Baltimore was stifled as a collective movement, and Johns soon was asked to resign his position at the Maryland Center. He drifted off again to the sermon and lecture circuit. In his own gruff, impolitic way, the old man had spoken up for the same idea of worldly religion that King supported at the Philadelphia convention, with similarly disastrous results.

 

The Johns debacle, the journeys of Bob Moses and John Doar, and the civil war among the National Baptists were obscure events to nearly everyone who was not directly involved. The national focus of religion and politics was the presidential campaign, specifically the controversy that erupted when Norman Vincent Peale and a committee of prominent Protestant clergymen questioned the wisdom of allowing a Roman Catholic in the White House, saying “our American culture is at stake.” Senator Kennedy responded directly to the challenge in a formal address to Protestant clergymen in Houston, endorsing “an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference…” Kennedy's Houston speech effectively drove the religious issue underground for the remainder of the campaign, where it joined the equally explosive issue of civil rights. Both candidates considered themselves overextended on race by pre-convention promises and formal party platforms. They downplayed the issue in the first of the four historic Kennedy-Nixon television debates on September 26. Focusing by agreement on domestic affairs, the two candidates agreed that America was wealthy, powerful, and free—but needed to be much more of each in order to fulfill itself and to compete with the mortal threat of worldwide communism.

On the Kennedy campaign staff, the civil rights people kept a profile in keeping with their issue—low and tucked away. Campaign manager Robert Kennedy put them in a K Street office building, physically separated from the national headquarters on Connecticut Avenue, and there was much internal controversy over the desire of Sargent Shriver and Harris Wofford to call their section the “Office of Civil Rights.” Among those close to the Kennedy brothers, Colorado attorney Byron R. “Whizzer” White argued most persistently that the proposed title was inflammatory to marginal white voters. In the end, a compromise was reached. In return for keeping their office name, Wofford and Shriver agreed not to use the phrase “civil rights” in the one major public event for which they had been promised the candidate's presence. Their Harlem conference on civil rights became the Democratic National Conference on Constitutional Rights.

For Shriver and Wofford, the status of their office was further diminished by unseemly infighting between two Negro groups competing for stationery privileges, office space, and public visibility with the candidate. A husband-wife team staked a claim based on the social relationship they had struck up with Senator Kennedy by mentioning their vacation home on Martha's Vineyard. However, Robert Kennedy scorned the couple as socialite ornaments even before he found out that the husband was one of the lawyers for Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters union.
*
Kennedy hired a Negro lawyer away from the Humphrey campaign, but the new choice only occupied himself in petty rivalry with the socialites before causing a full-alarm crisis in Oklahoma, where he was seen bringing a white woman onto the campaign plane during a stopover. None of this helped Wofford and Shriver, who considered all the rivals to be useless reflections of the Kennedy brothers' haphazard disregard. The Negro campaign workers might as well have been off in a minstrel show.

Shriver knew enough to appeal to Louis Martin—first to mediate the dispute and then to supplant all the rivals. Martin was no ordinary fixer. Hard-headed, fun-loving, and rich, he had bought and sold insurance companies, founded a newspaper in Michigan, edited the Chicago
Defender
for twelve years, presided over the Negro Newspaper Association, and worked in presidential campaigns since 1944. Shriver admired his bluntness so much that he asked what Martin recommended as the single most important step the Kennedy campaign could take to win Negro votes. “Well, as an old newspaper man I may be prejudiced,” Martin replied. “But I think you've got to go after the Negro newspapers. They lynched Sparkman and Kefauver
*
as Southerners, and they'll lynch Lyndon Johnson the same way if you don't do something about it. And I
know
those papers aren't going to do a damn thing for you unless you pay us some money.”

This remark struck Shriver as cold-blooded and cynical, but he knew it was precisely what the civil rights staff needed more of to be taken seriously. The watchword inside the Kennedy campaign was “tough.” Those who let their idealism or anything else get ahead of their toughness were downgraded as losers. Shriver recognized instantly that Louis Martin understood the inner workings of the Negro world in a way that could be communicated effectively to Robert Kennedy, Lawrence O'Brien, Whizzer White, and the other insiders of the Kennedy campaign. Martin knew how to transfer the money safely—through the purchase of advertising space—and he seemed to know precisely how much money each editor needed to temper his hostility toward Lyndon Johnson. These were areas across the racial divide where even Harris Wofford felt hopelessly at sea.

Shriver decided that Martin was a godsend. From the day he first talked with Martin about the campaign job, he did not rest until he had persuaded him to move to Washington. “I'll get the money for you,” he promised. The new staff man arrived just in time to solve the delicate problem of William Dawson of Chicago, dean of the Negro congressmen, whom Robert Kennedy had made the titular chairman of the campaign on the recommendation of Chicago's Mayor Daley. On Dawson's first day in the campaign, he complained about the civil rights name as offensive to “our good Southern friends” and refused to work until the K Street office was upgraded to suit his dignity. This put Shriver and Wofford into a quandary over how they, as white people, should respond to a well-connected Negro who was much more conservative on the race issue than they were. Martin told them not to fret about Dawson, whom he described as a corrupt old ward politician from the Daley machine. On Martin's advice, they built Dawson a specially partitioned private office, nicknamed “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” and left him alone except for ceremonial occasions.

Louis Martin did not always produce miracles, however, as glaringly demonstrated by his failure to persuade Jackie Robinson to endorse Kennedy. As Senator Kennedy had feared months earlier, the most widely admired living Negro announced his support for Nixon early in September. He went on the road almost full time to campaign for the Republican ticket. Inside the Kennedy campaign, this was a disaster that grabbed the attention of the advisers close to the candidate. To them, the single most important endorsement after Robinson would be Adam Clayton Powell. Since the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, Congressman Powell had been cruising on a yacht in the Mediterranean amid well-founded rumors in the Negro press that he was laying plans to divorce singer Hazel Scott, his second wife. From his cruise, which lasted nearly two and a half months, Powell sent radiophone instructions for an emissary to open negotiations with the Kennedy people. The emissary made his way to Sargent Shriver, who discerned that remuneration in the form of hard cash was involved. A hasty series of meetings among top Kennedy aides produced a decision to pass off the negotiations to Louis Martin.

When Powell's emissary, Ray Jones, laid out the terms—$300,000 cash in advance to buy a complete, nationwide Powell organization for turning out the Negro vote—Martin laughed out loud, as if to remind Jones that he was not dealing with some skittish white novice. Martin knew that there would never be any nationwide organization, that the money was for Powell himself, and that the elaborately described infrastructure was a sham. He and Jones quickly established a flinty, adversarial rapport that enabled them to reach a tentative agreement on the sum of $50,000 for ten Powell endorsement speeches. A temporary impasse then developed because Jones did not trust the Kennedy campaign to pay the money if Powell delivered the speeches first, and Martin did not trust Powell to give the speeches if he delivered the money first. This problem was solved by arranging for New York's mayor Robert Wagner to act as a middleman. Kennedy brother-in-law Stephen Smith would pay the money to Wagner, who would pay it out to Powell in $5,000 chunks on the completion of each scheduled speech. As a final touch, Martin tried to get Powell to agree to delay the announcement of his divorce until after the election, but Powell promised only to delay until after his first speech for Kennedy.

Powell ratified the arrangement on his return from the Mediterranean. Everything was in place before the two-day National Conference on Constitutional Rights opened in Harlem on October 11, at which Senator Hubert Humphrey, Eleanor Roosevelt, and some four hundred civil rights leaders gathered to prepare a report on how a Democratic president should approach the civil rights issue. Senator Kennedy drew cheers with a declaration that President Eisenhower should have called such a conference after the
Brown
decision six years earlier, and more cheers with his bold campaign promise to end racial discrimination in federally subsidized housing by presidential executive order, “with the stroke of a pen.” Caught up in the euphoria of the moment, he declared that racial freedom was an American idea, not a Russian one. He shouted out that in Africa there were no children named Lenin or Marx or Stalin, or, for that matter, Richard Nixon. All this brought roars of approval. “But there are children called George Washington,” Kennedy continued. “There are children called Thomas Jefferson! There may be a couple called Adam Clayton Powell!”

“Careful, Jack,” Powell called out devilishly from behind, and a peal of laughter went up in tribute to Powell's playboy reputation.

Ten days later, the announcement of Powell's divorce became the biggest story in the Negro press. Kennedy's advisers were still delaying the release of the promised report from the big civil rights conference, and King, most unexpectedly, was in jail.

 

King missed the New York conference because of his annual SCLC board meeting, which was held that year in Shreveport, Louisiana. It marked the third consecutive year in which the SCLC ventured to Mississippi or Louisiana around the opening of the school year. Coincidentally, for the third year, Mississippi authorities supplied grim news to the Negro preachers. Two years after Clennon King was institutionalized for applying to attend Ole Miss, and a year after Clyde Kennard was arrested on the premises of Mississippi Southern College as he left his admissions interview, police in Hattiesburg arrested Kennard for stealing five bags of chicken feed, which were found in his barn. The young Negro boy who admitted stealing them and putting them there said it was Kennard's idea—for which testimony the boy was returned to his job on probation. With Medgar Evers denouncing the trial as a transparent frame-up, Kennard was hauled off to serve seven years on the Mississippi chain gang. Henceforth, as a convicted felon, he was ineligible to apply to any of Mississippi's all-white colleges.