Parting the Waters (68 page)

Exactly a week after the Inauguration, Sinatra reassembled the celebrities for a five-hour tribute to King at New York's Carnegie Hall. Sammy Davis, Dean Martin, Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Nipsey Russell, and other popular entertainers joined Sinatra's cast. Although the event attracted no national attention, it raised $50,000 for the SCLC and established King as the possessor of a celebrity drawing power that ambitious politicians could not ignore. Advisers to New York governor Nelson Rockefeller built up a thick file of memos debating the fine points of Rockefeller's participation. Worries that Rockefeller might become tainted by association with the racy, gangsterish Sinatra crowd, for example, were dismissed with the observation that the Rat Pack was “already firmly associated in the public eye with Jack Kennedy.” The advisers decided that Rockefeller could get away with buying a $400 box of tickets unless the benefactors were listed by name and category in the program, in which case political considerations required him to buy the top box at $800. In the end, Rockefeller paid the $800. He also sent a cordial telegram to Carnegie Hall, as did President Kennedy.

From New York, King flew on to Chicago, Philadelphia, and Salt Lake City for speeches on successive days. In Chicago, he stayed with Mahalia Jackson, who was about to sing for Pope John XXIII on another of her European tours. They consumed a lavish soul-food feast, during which word came that Coretta had gone into labor with her third child. “You
better
name it Mahalia,” laughed Jackson. As King shuttled between the dinner and the phone, receiving bulletins from the Atlanta hospital, she kept up such banter that King agreed in a show of surrender to let Jackson or one of her best friends name a baby girl. If it was a boy, he said, the name would be Dexter, after his former church in Montgomery. A few calls later, he came back with a happy announcement: “It's Dexter.”

 

On January 28, the new President held an unusual Saturday meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House. All staff aides were barred from the top-secret review of plans to overthrow Fidel Castro's Cuban government by clandestine invasion. The Pentagon leaders pressed for greater force to insure the success of the military mission, while Secretary of State Dean Rusk pressed for either no operation at all or a much quieter one, the better to protect the U.S. diplomatic position in the world from charges of illegal intervention. President Kennedy kept saying he wanted to achieve both goals at once—success and anonymity. CIA officials proposed to do so by derring-do and deception. This was the first of ten White House meetings that led to the Bay of Pigs invasion in April. Although the United Nations already had debated and voted on formal Cuban charges that an American-sponsored invasion was imminent, war preparations remained a non-subject in public simply because the government treated them as such.

In King's world, scattered crusaders were as intent upon gaining recognition for their freedom plans as Kennedy was determined to conceal his. James Bevel and his student group announced a nonviolent campaign for desegregation of Nashville's movie theaters on February 1, the anniversary of the first Greensboro sit-in. Other student groups across the South were preparing “jail-ins.”
The New York Times
, reviewing the year of “stand-ins at theatres, kneel-ins at churches and wade-ins at public beaches,” declared that Negro protests threatened to “assume the proportions of a national movement.” In Birmingham, where Fred Shuttles-worth was running out of appeals on one conviction for which he faced a sentence of sixty to ninety days at hard labor, Alabama authorities gained court permission to seize his automobile in partial settlement of the libel judgment against him in the Sullivan case, which also was still on appeal. The same authorities seized personal property of the three other Negro defendants in the suit, including Abernathy's car and some land he had inherited. The car brought $400 at auction, the land $4,350. King protested these actions as blatant persecutions by Alabama officials, but the stories played no better than blurbs. The race issue remained generally avoidable, as measured by the public mood. Reporters asked President Kennedy no questions on the subject at his first televised press conference.

Still less known was a letter written on the second day of the Kennedy presidency by an obscure Air Force veteran in Mississippi named J. H. Meredith. Inspired by a broadcast of the Kennedy inaugural speech, Meredith decided that his best contribution to democratic rights was to seek admission to the University of Mississippi. He wrote for an application and then promptly sought the counsel of Mississippi's NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers. Evers, who felt wounded personally by the gruesome fates of the last two Negroes who had tried to integrate Mississippi's white universities, was none too happy to hear of Meredith's ambition. But he recognized the stubborn, military precision with which Meredith was pursuing his goal, and put him in touch with Thurgood Marshall's NAACP lawyers.

When the President insisted on the appointment of his brother Robert as Attorney General, the younger Kennedy added to the worries of a political manager the duties of the cabinet officer most directly responsible for progress in civil rights. Kennedy sent a terse directive—“tell me what you're doing”—down into the various parts of the Justice Department, including the Civil Rights Division. John Doar, his boss having resigned, replied for the division as the senior Republican holdover, though he had only seven months' experience himself. Doar was just back from a successful series of court appearances in which he had convinced judges that eviction notices served on Negro sharecroppers in Tennessee were illegal reprisals against them for registering to vote. On behalf of the U.S. government, Doar had won court orders vacating the eviction of some three hundred sharecroppers. Others, evicted already, were encamped in tent cities known as “Freedom Villages,” whose struggle to exist was being chronicled daily in Negro newspapers across the country. Mahalia Jackson sang a song over the telephone for a rally benefiting the embattled sharecroppers, who repaid her by naming a strip of mud “Mahalia Jackson Avenue.”

Doar was only slightly less a hero to the inhabitants. Voting records from counties all over the South, recently obtained under the new Civil Rights Act of 1960, had been wheeled into his office on dollies and stacked high against the walls. As Doar and his staff pored through the records, he put pins in a map of the South indicating counties practicing the most egregious, systematic, and effective repression against Negro voters. Some lawsuits were filed already; many others were in preparation. Doar's summaries of them made the most compelling reading of the report he sent to Robert Kennedy, who, like his predecessors under Eisenhower, came quickly to the conclusion that voting rights were the strongest political and moral opportunity for the Justice Department in the field of civil rights. Squeezing Doar into one of his planning meetings, Kennedy said briskly, “I want to move on voting.” He asked Doar to stay on in the new Administration even though he was a Republican.

The search for a Democrat to replace Doar's boss passed through the Kennedy talent-scouting operation, headed by Sargent Shriver, where Harris Wofford screened candidates for the government job he wanted most himself. To Shriver's mind, Wofford was by far the most qualified person available to head the Civil Rights Division—based on his legal education and experience, his service to the Kennedy campaign, and his voluminous personal knowledge of the people and issues of civil rights. Unfortunately for Wofford, however, Shriver's recommendation ran into the opposition of Byron R. “Whizzer” White, the All-American football player from Colorado, Rhodes scholar, and national chairman of Citizens for Kennedy. Robert Kennedy made White deputy Attorney General over Wofford's objection that he was stubborn and humorless. White returned Wofford's low opinion in full measure. He convinced Robert Kennedy that Wofford could never conceal from hostile Southern congressmen his long history of sympathy for Gandhi, King, and the doctrines of civil disobedience.

Shrewdly, White recommended to Kennedy as a neutral candidate Wofford's friend and law partner Burke Marshall, whom White had known at Yale Law School. Marshall was a highly respected corporate lawyer who had represented Standard Oil, the Du Ponts, and other powerful clients in some of the biggest antitrust cases of the previous decade. Only two items in his career—both traceable to Wofford's recruitment—jarred slightly against the popular image of the gray-flannel lawyer: he had once taught a course on corporate law at the predominantly Negro Howard University Law School, and he had once read Arnold Toynbee in an executive reading group led by philosopher Scott Buchanan. Marshall knew none of the civil rights leaders and had contributed to none of the civil rights organizations, nor had he ever shown any interest in race issues. To Byron White, it was precisely his lack of expertise in the substance of civil rights that recommended Marshall to head the Civil Rights Division. In no other legal field was ignorance a qualification, but the race issue was so controversial that any history of personal interest was tantamount to a political statement. Wofford himself half agreed, and he put Marshall's name on the recommendation list in spite of his antipathy for White.

Robert Kennedy invited Burke Marshall to his office for a talk that soon became legendary in the Justice Department as the “silent interview.” Like Kennedy, Marshall was slight of build, wispish and reedy of voice, though much less rumpled and windblown than the thirty-five-year-old Attorney General. Also like Kennedy, he could be extremely sparing of words. When they met, Marshall knew he was being considered for a post, but he had no idea which one. He presumed that it would be in the Antitrust Division, in which event he planned to decline. The Civil Rights Division was mentioned in passing, but neither man had much to say about the issue except that there were laws which must, of course, be enforced. And since both men preferred silence to small talk, they divided the better part of half an hour into long silences broken by mumbled civilities. When the interview was over, Marshall believed he had blown his chance for any job in the Justice Department, but Kennedy, to the surprise of his aides, decided he had found just the man for the Civil Rights Division. To him, Marshall was an elite lawyer too smart to make mistakes, too self-possessed to blunder compulsively into controversy, too honest to claim he had all the answers.

 

King wrestled with offices and appointments during his own period of transition, relying heavily on Gardner Taylor at the juncture of politics and religion. With Harry Belafonte, Taylor helped King design a voter registration plan that would bypass the foundations and other large funding sources with a direct, “dollar per person” appeal to Negro churchgoers. When Alabama officials continued to confiscate the property of King's colleagues, Taylor raised and delivered personally to Atlanta a $5,000 contribution for the defense in the
New York Times
libel case. At the same time, Taylor gently told King that if Abernathy and Shuttles-worth felt so oppressed in Alabama that they must abandon the South for safer pulpits in the North, King must let them go with his blessing. Early in 1961, Taylor sponsored Abernathy in a trial sermon at the Mount Lebanon Baptist Church in Brooklyn.

King and Abernathy were “Taylor men” in the church schism whose outcome would determine their stature in the national clergy. When in January Taylor lost his last appeal for court recognition of his election in Philadelphia, J. H. Jackson had the national church board declare the Taylor preachers to be an illegitimate, secessionist group. In response, Taylor publicly denounced the resolution as a “veiled dagger” aimed at church democracy, and pledged to launch a nationwide “truth saturation program” to vindicate his claim at the next general convention that September, in Kansas City. Thomas Kilgore and several others took leave of their church duties for a full thirteen weeks to tour the country, lining up votes and money for Taylor. King did the same—quietly—at scores of church stops on his speaking schedule.

As a member of the National Action Council of the Congress of Racial Equality, Taylor was looking for a new national director. The consensus of his selection committee was that CORE, as a pioneer of Gandhian direct action in pursuit of racial integration, should not have faded into obscurity at a time when the student sit-ins were bringing national publicity to such techniques. The CORE leaders dispatched an emissary to Atlanta to offer King the position. King replied that he was already overextended and would consider the job only if he could merge the predominantly white, Northern intellectuals of CORE with the Southern Negro preachers of the SCLC. The impracticalities of this notion were so manifest that he declined the offer almost immediately.

With King out of consideration, the maneuverings within CORE centered on one of the founding members from 1942, James Farmer. He was a large hulking man of forty-one, nine years King's senior, whose father had been the first Negro to earn a Ph.D. degree in the state of Texas. Young Farmer had grown up something of a prodigy, well-connected enough to have secured a White House audience with FDR as a teenager. His earliest memories were idyllic scenes of his erudite father sitting under a tree reading books in Latin, Greek, German, French, and Aramaic. Since leaving CORE in the mid-1940s, partly because of chronic bureaucratic clashes with Bayard Rustin and A. J. Muste, Farmer had lived for a time at a Gandhian ashram in Harlem and bounced around between union organizing jobs before finally settling in at the NAACP. There was a note of personal tragedy in his past—his first wife had miscarried and divorced him shortly after finding a love note from the white mistress who became Farmer's second wife—but it was his parvenu ambition that marked him at the staid NAACP. Feeling blocked from advancement within the hierarchy there, Farmer worked eagerly with old friends to secure the opportunity at CORE, once King had declined. Gardner Taylor made the official selection.