Parting the Waters (63 page)

Daddy King outpreached Rockefeller that same day in Cleveland. Filling in for his jailed son, he preached six different sermons at the SCLC fund-raisers and then flew home to Atlanta in time to join the jubilant crowd outside the county jail Monday morning, waiting for the release of the prisoners.

The sense of crisis returned in new form when jail officials notified Negro lawyers that they had received a bench warrant ordering them to hold King in jail on other charges. Cries of betrayal went up. The lawyers eventually established that the warrant was issued on the authority of a judge in neighboring De Kalb County, where Emory University was located. The previous May, King and Coretta had driven writer Lillian Smith to Emory Hospital there for her cancer treatments, and a De Kalb policeman had stopped them for questioning—as was frequently done when patrol officers spotted interracial groups of travelers. The officer, finding that King was still driving on his Alabama license some three months after moving to Georgia, had charged him with the misdemeanor of driving without a proper permit, and Judge Oscar Mitchell had sentenced King to a twelve-month sentence, which he suspended, plus a $25 fine. Now Judge Mitchell asked Fulton County to keep King in jail pending a hearing on whether the Rich's arrest violated the terms of his suspended sentence in the May traffic case.

King's cellmates mutinied over the news. While jail officials were processing their release papers under the Hartsfield agreement, the students were banding together in a pledge not to leave the jail without King. They accused Hartsfield of bad faith, and it took some time for the mayor to convince them that he was as upset about the bench warrant as they were. He suspected political machinations on the part of Governor Vandiver, who held a press conference that morning to announce that he had talked personally with Senator Kennedy and received assurances that the candidate had “no authority, intention or desire” to intervene in Georgia's criminal processes. Even as Hartsfield was countering this move with his own press conference, in which he made fuzzy statements about just who had urged him on Kennedy's behalf to release King, he was scrambling to persuade angry Negroes not to renounce the deal. He argued that Judge Mitchell had no case against King. The traffic charge was a minor misdemeanor in the first place, and the charges were now dropped in the Rich's case. King's lawyers sustained him with a dozen technical arguments, saying the De Kalb matter could be cleared up quickly. To reassure King's cellmates, Daddy King and other adult leaders were permitted into the cell block to make speeches. “M.L. will be all right,” he said. King himself made a speech urging his cellmates to abide by the agreement, and when the other thirty-seven marched out regretfully, but peacefully, to freedom, he spent his first night in jail alone.

The students reassembled outside the Fulton County jail early Tuesday morning in a vigil of support, waiting for King to be transferred to De Kalb County for Judge Mitchell's hearing. A group of white theology students, in Atlanta on a mission to encourage the sit-ins, joined them in quiet prayers until the first sight of King turned all their hopeful apprehension into cold fear. Emerging from the jail between two De Kalb County detectives, King wore not only handcuffs but also leg and arm shackles. The students fell silent enough to hear the clang of metal as King was marched briskly to a squad car and put into the backseat next to a police dog. The car sped away, leaving the students behind, helpless. As for King, who was trying not to look at the ferocious German shepherd beside him, it was a sudden return to the terror of his first arrest nearly five years earlier in Montgomery, when visions of lynching had undone him. Now that he had given the white authorities a tiny legal opening at the Magnolia Room, it was they and not he who would control his exposure to danger.

Nearly two hundred King supporters—including Roy Wilkins, who was in town, and four presidents from the Atlanta University complex—crowded into Judge Mitchell's hearing. The De Kalb County territory was alien to the Atlantans. Worse than unfamiliar, it was fearful, as everyone knew that county officials recently had sanctioned a Ku Klux Klan parade through the corridors of that same courthouse. The hearing was permeated with an atmosphere of latent race violence, and with survival instincts more suited to a murder trial than a traffic case. Solicitor Jack Smith demanded a harsh penalty, saying that King had shown “no sign of penitence or remorse.” Donald Hollowell, King's chief attorney, presented character witnesses and a host of arguments, but Mitchell banged the gavel, revoked King's probation, and ordered him to serve four months at hard labor on a state road gang, beginning immediately. The spectators gasped in shock. Hollowell jumped to his feet to ask that King be released on bond pending appeal of both the current ruling and the original traffic sentence, but Judge Mitchell denied the motion. He ordered the sheriff's deputies to take King away.

The emotion in the courtroom was such that the dignified Samuel Williams—Morehouse philosophy professor, preacher, SCLC board member, Atlanta NAACP president—flung himself forward to cry out against the injustice. Deputies wrestled him to the floor and soon pitched him into the holding cell with King. When Williams recovered his composure, he was brought back into court for a lecture from Judge Mitchell and then released. The judge allowed the King family a parting visit in the holding cell. As King saw his wife and his sister Christine approaching the cell in tears, he said, “Corrie, dear, you have to be strong. I've never seen you like this. You have to be strong for me.” His pleading tone, and the tiredness that had crept into his face after six days in jail, only made Coretta collapse further into weeping. Daddy King was so upset that he scolded her for it. “You don't see me crying,” he said. “I am ready to fight.”

King tried to make peace. “I think we must prepare ourselves for the fact that I am going to have to serve this time,” he said. There was not much to say, and the family soon left him behind. Coretta, who was six months pregnant, gave way to self-pity as she contemplated bearing their third child with her husband in jail.

In the aftershock outside, Mayor Hartsfield worked diligently to dissociate his city from the De Kalb proceedings. “I have made requests of all the news agencies that in their stories they make it clear that this hearing did not take place in Atlanta, Georgia,” he announced. Governor Vandiver's press spokesman, on the other hand, warmly praised Judge Mitchell's decision. “I think the maximum sentence for Martin Luther King might do him good,” he said, “might make a law-abiding citizen out of him and teach him to respect the law of Georgia.” At the SCLC, Wyatt Tee Walker fended off Negro reporters who wanted to know why he had not responded to the sentence by setting up protest pickets around the De Kalb County courthouse. There was “too much tenseness,” he said, and it was too dangerous to operate away from “home ground.”

Instead, Walker spread an alarm by telephone in advance of headline news. For the time being, he forgot partisanship, protest, and even segregation, believing that the only issue now was King's life. The state road gang meant cutthroat inmates and casually dismissed murders. King had to be freed or he would be dead. This was the emergency message that Walker and a band of colleagues sent to every person they could think of who might conceivably have influence. Stanley Levison called lawyers, union leaders, Rockefeller aides, politicians. Harry Belafonte called every entertainer he knew, as well as aides on both sides of the presidential race—Robert Kennedy, Sargent Shriver, E. Frederic Morrow, Jackie Robinson. All the while, Donald Hollowell was hurriedly preparing a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that Georgia law did not permit a judge to withhold bail in a misdemeanor case. This was unassailable legal ground, but those around King had lost faith in the law.

In Washington, Harris Wofford responded to the alarm that same day by drafting a dignified statement of protest for Senator Kennedy to make. His draft was promptly buffeted around inside the Washington campaign headquarters and over the wires to the Chicago suburbs, where Kennedy was making speeches. Inevitably, phone calls buzzed down into Georgia and back by the dozens, and Wofford was soon hearing that Governor Vandiver had promised to get King out of jail on the condition that Kennedy make no public statement about the matter. Vandiver wanted to send out a strong, clear signal of segregationist resolve in Georgia; he made the Gestapo tactics Wyatt Walker was describing sound like a small tactical maneuver. The governor and his allies won the quick round of infighting within the Kennedy campaign, which earned the loser, Harris Wofford, a quick mollifying call from Senator Kennedy that night. “What we want most is to get King out, isn't it?” Kennedy asked.

Wofford agreed. Still, he was miserable when Coretta King called soon thereafter wanting to know if he could help. He could not tell her about the Vandiver agreement, for fear that public news of it would make Vandiver renege on his promise, and he had no other good news to offer. Disconsolate, Wofford went out for an after-work beer with Louis Martin. The two of them groped for ideas. They wanted to do
something
to help, but it had to be something that would not run them into the political buzz saw inside the campaign. Out of these constraints came their idea of getting an important personage to call Coretta with encouragement. This was only a small gesture, but it was something that would make them feel better. Politically, they knew that there might be some advantage if they could keep the gesture beneath the threshold of white attention. If Vandiver and his allies were not aroused in anger, the Kennedy campaign might be able to spread the word privately among Negro voters.

Recharged by this idea, Wofford managed to reach his old mentor Chester Bowles, who, as it happened, was entertaining Adlai Stevenson at his home for dinner. Bowles readily agreed to call Coretta King at once with his personal good wishes and the best assurances he could give her that all was being done to free King. This he did, and after Stevenson went home Bowles reported to Wofford that his call seemed to lift her spirits. The only hitch, he told Wofford, was that Stevenson had refused to take the phone even to say hello to Coretta, saying it was not proper as he had not been introduced to her. Bowles and Wofford puzzled over their friend's skittishness. It might be traced to political caution—Stevenson hoped to be Secretary of State if Kennedy was elected—or, as Wofford thought more likely, to Stevenson's simpler, more personal discomfort in the presence of Negroes. This trait, which Wofford had observed firsthand, was one of the factors that had moved him to switch from Stevenson to Kennedy early in the election year.

These and countless other phone calls went on until after midnight. By then, King and eight other prisoners had divided up the bunks inside a crowded cell at the De Kalb County jail and King had dropped off to sleep, only to be wakened by a voice calling “King! Get up!” Seconds later came more shouts and a flashlight shining into his eyes. Grabbing his suit, he stumbled out into the hands of sheriff's deputies, who wordlessly handcuffed and shackled him. He was led clanking through the cell block out into the night, then deposited inside a police car. When he received no answers to his questions about where they were taking him, he fell silent.

 

Hollowell called the jail just before eight o'clock that Wednesday morning to advise the authorities that he was on the way with his writ of habeas corpus. The writ would do no good now, he was told, as King had been transferred to Reidsville, the maximum-security prison. Hollowell recoiled in shock. His news swept through Negro Atlanta within the hour, and the alarm calls went out again. Coretta King was nearly hysterical by the time she reached Harris Wofford. She had just received the one phone call King was allowed on arrival at the Reidsville state prison. They had yanked him out of jail in the middle of the night without warning, she said. No one had any idea what would happen next.

Wofford went to Louis Martin with the latest details, which further undermined their faith in the Vandiver promise. A few retellings of the Reidsville story revealed to them, however, that the Negro and white perceptions of the event were growing ever farther apart. Those who identified with King felt the terror of the shackles and the tough cops, the quick bang of the gavel, and the unscheduled nighttime ride 230 miles out into rural Georgia. Those with more detachment saw the case as a matter of Southern ignorance that would be reversed sooner or later, and to them the issue of how and when King was transferred to Reidsville was relatively unimportant. Morris Abram argued that King actually was safer at Reidsville than he had been at the De Kalb County jail. Such nonchalance undercut Wofford's efforts to stir up new interest within the Kennedy campaign. In fact, Kennedy's aides were neglecting to return his phone calls, the better to avoid his nagging.

Wofford called his own boss, Sargent Shriver, who had been spending most of his time lately in his crucial home state of Illinois, running Businessmen for Kennedy and Johnson. Shriver was in Chicago, where the candidate's entourage was passing through like a storm. Senator Kennedy had just finished a campaign breakfast with about fifty Illinois businessmen at O'Hare Airport and was huddled with his advisers in a special holding suite near the runway, waiting for his plane to leave. Wofford's call found Shriver there, and Shriver gave him the kind of flyspeck attention lower aides usually get from officials standing within thirty feet of a candidate for President. In emergency shorthand Wofford blurted out the headlines—King snatched off to state prison, no release from Vandiver, Coretta hysterical, the campaign civil rights office swamped with calls. He said he and Louis Martin had given up the idea that Kennedy should make a public statement, but they had something simpler and less controversial in mind. “If the Senator would only call Mrs. King and wish her well,” said Wofford, “it would reverberate all through the Negro community in the United States. All he's got to do is say he's thinking about her and he hopes everything will be all right. All he's got to do is show a little heart. He can even say he doesn't have all the facts in the case…”