Parting the Waters (62 page)

In Miami that day, both Kennedy and Nixon made headlines with addresses to the national convention of the American Legion. Nixon called for a full economic quarantine against the “intolerable cancer” of communism in Cuba, but Kennedy drew more applause by charging that Nixon's preference for economic solutions indicated a lack of military resolve. “I have never believed in retreating under fire,” said Kennedy. He ridiculed Nixon for having said to Khrushchev, in the famous kitchen debate, “You may be ahead of us in rockets, but we are ahead of you in color television.” Kennedy drew laughs and cheers from the legionnaires when he added, “I think I'll take my television in black and white.”

Also that day, Atlanta student movement leader Lonnie C. King called his pastor at Ebenezer to make a final plea for the demonstration. “You are the spiritual leader of the movement, and you were born in Atlanta, Georgia,” he told King. “And I think it might add tremendous impetus if you would go.”

“Where are you going to go tomorrow, L.C.?” asked King.

“I'm going to be on the bridge down at Rich's.”

“Well, I'll meet you on the bridge tomorrow at ten o'clock,” said King. With these words, he took his first deliberate step toward prison.

Eighty demonstrators, their watches synchronized, requested service in eight different segregated establishments at precisely eleven o'clock the next morning, October 19. King's group was refused service at a snack bar in the covered bridge that connected buildings of the Rich's complex on either side of Forsyth Street. Company officials did not ask the foregathered police officers to arrest them, however, and the demonstrators then took an elevator to the sixth-floor Magnolia Room, the store's most elegant restaurant for shoppers. There the board chairman of Rich's interceded personally. Failing to persuade the demonstrators to leave, he had them arrested under a state anti-trespass law.

As the first to be arrested, and the only nonstudent among the defendants, King was first to speak in court that night before Judge James E. Webb, who set bond at $500 pending trial. “I cannot accept bond,” said King. “I will stay in jail one year, or ten years.” In a brief, nervous courtroom oration, King explained that he did not want to go to jail, nor to “upset peace,” but that his decision to choose jail was in accord with the principles of a movement that went “far beyond” dining room segregation and other Southern folkways. He urged the judge to vacate the charges. When Webb refused, King was hustled off to spend the first night of his life behind bars. Thirty-five students followed him in quick succession.

Tension gave way to euphoria shortly after the new prisoners found themselves in a special cell block of the county jail, in the care of Negro guards who supplied games, books, and phone messages. The first prison meal—steak smothered in onions—wiped out any lingering doubts that these particular prisoners had been marked for favorable treatment. The high quality of the food quickly seduced them out of plans for a prison fast. The students, realizing that the worst was over, turned with enthusiasm to the task of creating a communal regimen that would see them through weeks, even months, in jail together. Bernard Lee eagerly claimed the bunk just above King's. He noted with scarcely concealed pleasure that their co-prisoners in the female cell block were sending messages envious of the males for having King among them. King was a special prize to the students generally and to Lee in particular. He joined with them in organizing a prison routine—sang with them, participated in their workshops, and addressed them in sermonettes on nonviolence. Lee was delighted to find that he could beat King regularly at checkers, and King, pondering the checkerboard, vowed playfully that he would get even as soon as he could catch Lee around a pool table.

Boredom had no chance to penetrate the cell block, especially since news filtered in hourly about how their arrest was gripping the city of Atlanta and beyond. Mayor William Hartsfield was holding meetings. Atlanta police chief Herbert Jenkins was giving the demonstrations his personal attention. Reporters counted as many as two thousand Negro student picketers around segregated targets on Thursday, the second day. Three more prisoners came into the cell block, and twenty-two others went into the city jail. No nerves failed—no one bonded out.

On Friday, jail authorities allowed King and student leaders to hold a press interview, at which King spoke quietly, almost shyly, about his reasons for joining the student protest. “I had to practice what I preached,” he said. He spoke proudly of the fact that his fellow prisoners included five of the six student body presidents from the Atlanta University complex, plus two “college queens” and a number of honor students. Of his own sacrifices, King mentioned only the loss to the SCLC of revenue from his scheduled speeches during the most lucrative quarter of the year. “I was to have been in Cleveland on Sunday,” he said. The Cleveland preachers had guaranteed the SCLC $7,000 from the event.

That night, 85 million Americans watched the fourth and final debate between Kennedy and Nixon. Confined by agreement to issues of foreign policy, the debate was an unrecognized milestone of American politics in that it featured the clandestine preoccupations that had been growing within the U.S. government since World War II. Kennedy, who later maintained that his CIA briefings had not covered the subject, criticized the Republicans for not doing precisely what they were doing: helping Cuban exiles prepare to overthrow Castro by covert warfare. Nixon, who already had helped launch this plan, decided he must protect the operation's secrecy by opposing his own policies. He criticized Kennedy in the debate for making “probably the most dangerously irresponsible recommendations” of the campaign. If the United States followed Kennedy's prescription for secret warfare, Nixon declared, we would violate no fewer than five treaty commitments prohibiting intervention in the internal affairs of Latin American nations. All through the debate, Kennedy and Nixon attacked each other in coded language that was not always clear to each other—let alone to most viewers, who still knew little more about the CIA than they had known about the Manhattan Project before Hiroshima.

Although he worked in the Kennedy campaign, Harris Wofford responded to the surface realities like almost everyone else, and he found himself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Nixon. At his home the next morning, Wofford heard radio reports that the Ku Klux Klan was marching in opposition to student picketers on the streets of Atlanta. King was spending his fourth day in the county jail. Wofford, as one of King's few friends outside Atlanta who knew how badly he had wanted to avoid this ordeal, chastised himself for doing nothing to help. Wofford impulsively started calling Atlanta contacts, among them a prominent attorney named Morris Abram, who agreed to talk with Mayor Hartsfield about getting King out of jail.
*

Abram found Hartsfield in the center of a maelstrom at city hall. Telegrams for and against King were arriving hourly in stacks from all over the country. Police officials were rushing in with reports about the growing threat of violence between white and Negro picketers. Hartsfield, negotiating in the city council chamber with many of the city's most influential Negro leaders, was offering to begin intensive negotiations toward the desegregation of all downtown stores, and to say so publicly, if the Negroes would come out of jail and refrain from demonstrations during a truce period. The sticking point, Abram learned from the mayor, was that King and the students were refusing to accept release on bail. They would come out of jail only if the charges against them were dropped. This stand entangled mediator Hartsfield in bureaucracy as well as racial politics. As mayor, he could arrange to drop the charges against those in the city jail, but he had no jurisdiction over King and the others held in the county jail pending trial on state charges. These could be dropped only by the state prosecutor or by the criminal complainant, Rich's department store. Its owner, Richard Rich, was consumed by fear that if he gave in, Negroes would descend on his stores with demands for nothing less than complete desegregation, which would drive white business to Rich's competitors. This was a fate only slightly worse to Rich than his current one of being exposed in an ugly racial conflict. Rich had broken down in tears on hearing that his board chairman could get King and the demonstrators out of the Magnolia Room only in handcuffs.

To a wily old politician such as Hartsfield, the best way to run such a formidable gauntlet was to announce the desired settlement before the diverse parties agreed to it. This required more than a little fudging, with its attendant political risk, and the mayor was casting about for a way to avoid taking all the political responsibility for the gambit. When Abram mentioned the call he had just received from Harris Wofford, whom Hartsfield knew as a Kennedy campaign aide, lights seemed to flare up in the mayor's head. It occurred to him that he might accomplish a great deal by announcing that Senator Kennedy had asked him to get King out of jail. Not only would this buttress the truce with a name of national importance, making it harder for Governor Vandiver and other state Democrats to denounce, but the move might also win Negro votes for Kennedy in closely contested Northern states. The more Hartsfield thought about the brainstorm, the better it seemed to him. He might not only extricate his city from a dangerous, embarrassing racial conflict but perhaps even elect a president of the United States.

Soon Abram was calling Wofford from the Mayor's office to broach Hartsfield's bold proposal. Wofford almost fainted when he heard it. He was feeling even more on the political fringe of the Kennedy campaign, and he knew from hard personal experience that the last thing his bosses wanted was to be associated with King in a Southern racial confrontation. Frantically, Wofford begged Abram and Hartsfield not to go forward with the plan unless Senator Kennedy approved, and he reminded Abram that his own call earlier that morning had been strictly personal, not political. Wofford promised to seek Senator Kennedy's permission, but, being extremely reluctant to subject himself to further ridicule, he made only halfhearted attempts to locate the candidate, who was barnstorming through Kansas. Then Wofford called the Atlanta mayor's office again to report that it was impossible to make contact and that therefore the plan was off. By this time, however, a battered Hartsfield was desperate for a solution. He grabbed the phone from Abram and said, “Now, Harris, I'm just so certain that his taking a position will help him with this doubtful Negro vote all over the nation that I'm going to take it on myself to tell this group that Senator Kennedy is asking me to intervene. That he has asked me to turn Martin Luther King loose. Why should he be ashamed of that? I'm going to turn him loose anyway.”

Wofford's panic returned instantly. He poured into the mayor's ear all the arguments that had been thrown at him inside the campaign, about how Kennedy was in danger of losing Georgia, the South, and the entire election because of his association with civil rights. Hartsfield did not believe this, but he promised Wofford that he would contact Kennedy himself. Using Wofford's private numbers, Hartsfield tracked Kennedy from telephone to telephone in Kansas—now hearing bands playing in the background, now hearing a policeman say Kennedy had just left. Finally, Hartsfield gave up and returned to the city council chamber to bargain with Daddy King and the others. There, under pressure, he invoked Kennedy's name behind his own truce conditions. A reporter who had sneaked into the chamber quickly put the story of Kennedy's involvement on the national wires.

Very shortly, enraged Southern politicians, including Kennedy's Georgia campaign strategists, called Hartsfield demanding to know exactly how and why the Democratic nominee had been dragged into the King controversy. The mayor dissembled adroitly and then called Wofford with a warning. “Now, I know that I ran with the ball farther than you expected, Harris, my boy,” he said, trying gamely to be casual, “but I needed a peg to swing on and you gave it to me, and I've swung on it.” Hartsfield told Wofford not to let Kennedy disavow Hartsfield's announcement under pressure from Southern governors. In this new emergency, Wofford did manage to reach the Kennedy campaign plane in Kansas City. His report caused shock—“Hartsfield said
what
? You did
what
?”—followed by curses and fury. When Pierre Salinger, Ken O'Donnell, and other top aides signed off to draft a statement protecting Kennedy, a chastened Wofford waited to see whether they would call Hartsfield a liar. As it turned out, the statement released was vague and noncommittal: “…Senator Kennedy directed that an inquiry be made to give him all the facts on that situation and a report on what properly should be done. The Senator is hopeful that a satisfactory outcome can be worked out.” This accomplished the primary objective of minimizing the story, which received practically no attention in the press.

Hartsfield spent the rest of that Saturday trying to sell his plan to the Negro conclave in the city council chamber. After many urgent messages to and from the county jail, it turned out that King and the students would not accept bail on Hartsfield's promise to get the state charges dropped. Sticking to their “jail, no bail” slogan, they insisted that they could wait until the charges actually were dropped, or until their trials. It was nightfall before the mayor bypassed this last obstacle. He ordered the unconditional release of the students held in the city jail, pledged to have King and the others out of the county jail by Monday morning, and declared victory. There would be no demonstrations on Monday by either Negroes or Klansmen, he said, and he would begin desegregation talks with the downtown merchants that same day. Speaking for the Negro delegation, Reverend Borders praised the agreement, the mayor, and the city. “This was the best meeting we've ever held in the city of Atlanta,” he told reporters, adding that “the shortest route to heaven is from Atlanta, Georgia.” All that remained was for Hartsfield to visit Richard Rich and the state prosecutor, separately, and to tell each of them that the other had agreed to drop the charges.

 

The next day, Governor Nelson Rockefeller preached Sunday sermons at four different Negro churches in Brooklyn, wearing a gray tie with a little pink elephant on it. Rockefeller managed to endorse the Republican ticket without mentioning Richard Nixon by name. Leaving the hard partisan pitch to his pulpit companion, Jackie Robinson, the governor gave his “fellow Baptists” a talk on the love verses of I Corinthians. “We've got to make love a reality in our own country,” he said. “When the great spiritual leader, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, finds himself in jail today because he had the courage to love, we have a long way to go in America.” One of his hosts that day, Daddy King's old friend Sandy Ray, told the congregation that he was sticking with the Republicans again in the upcoming election, although he was not that happy about the ticket. “To be frank,” said Ray, “most of us wanted the Governor to be the nominee.”