Parting the Waters (72 page)

When Kennedy made a second trip to the buffet table, Harris Wofford made a point of falling in behind him, smiling in the warmth of a minor satisfaction. “You remember that fellow you were worried about my having associations with, that I didn't remember?” he whispered.

“Who's that?” Kennedy replied.

“Stanley Levison,” said Wofford. To Kennedy's noncommittal look, he added, “Well, you better remember him now, too, because that's him you're sitting next to.”

“Oh, really,” Kennedy said drily. “That's interesting.” Without another word he returned to his seat next to Levison, the companion King had chosen to bring to this highly unusual introductory meeting with the Kennedy people. Wofford, for his part, was pleased that the Attorney General seemed to have appreciated the irony of the situation as well as Wofford's implied message that the mild-mannered white man with King did not seem so dangerous in the flesh.

Levison did not say very much during the meeting, nor did King. To the Kennedy people, in fact, the most noticeable aspect of King's private behavior was his quietness. He did not preach, bargain, or strike postures. When called upon for response, he heartily endorsed all the Administration's plans in the field of voting rights, promised to step up the SCLC's registration work in tandem with the lawsuits, and indicated his full understanding of the need to conceal the Administration's facilitating role in the registration work itself. Although King did say that voting was not the only avenue of progress toward Negro rights—and that sit-ins, mass meetings, legislation, boycotts, and a host of other tactics could make contributions—he stressed no point of difference. With his slow cadences of speech, his lofty expressions, and his amiable demeanor, King struck the Kennedy people as a saint or a pushover, or both. He was not the type they would think of asking out for a beer, but he was reasonable. Louis Martin, who had known King only slightly, would never waver from the opinion formed that day that King was “the most self-effacing national leader I have ever known.” In later years, Burke Marshall revised his opinion of King's political abilities upward, saying that he was “easy to underestimate.”

King noticed that Louis Martin grabbed the bill for the lunch, and as the meeting began to break up he made his way to Martin's side. Nodding toward the papers Martin was handling for the payment, he dropped his formality just long enough to ask, “Whose tab?”

Martin hesitated for an instant, taken aback to hear King ask so directly about such housekeeping. “Mine,” he replied. “My account at the DNC.”

“Thank you,” said King, shaking his head in approval and giving Martin a quick smile that was almost a wink. Martin took it to mean that King was pleased to see him handling the money himself, rather than performing the usual retainer role for one of the white bosses. Martin said simply, “You're welcome,” together with a quick nod of recognition, which he hoped would say that he was equally pleased to learn that King paid attention to such small but significant details. This passing moment marked the first germ of friendship between the only two Negroes in the room.

King's overall performance so relieved and reassured the Kennedy officials that they moved almost by group instinct to cultivate him politically rather than to disengage. Attorney General Kennedy set the tone with his response to King's remark that harassed and endangered voter registration workers often had trouble reaching the FBI for assistance. Kennedy wrote down the telephone numbers of John Seigenthaler and Burke Marshall and handed them to King. “Any hour of the day or night,” he said, “you call.” From the Mayflower, Wofford found a reason to take King back to the White House for a chat and a tour, during which the President “discovered” that King was there—almost certainly upon the report of Ken O'Donnell, who had been much more skeptical of King before the meeting—and popped out to pay his respects. “It's good to see you,” said President Kennedy, shaking King's hand for the first time since their campaign meeting seven months earlier. Kennedy said he had been keeping up with King's work through the Attorney General. He alluded briefly to the confidential plans to promote Negro registration in the South and promised his support. To King's polite inquiries about how he was doing, Kennedy replied that everything was fine except that the world had fallen in on him since the disaster in Cuba.

In honor of his pledge to keep the Mayflower meeting secret, King made no public reference to it then or later, and he did not even acknowledge his chance meeting with President Kennedy until after the assassination in Dallas. The only news King generated was a small item in a Negro gossip column, stating accurately that he planned to “join the colony at Oak Bluff” on Martha's Vineyard for a month that summer, to relax among exclusive company on the grounds of a nineteenth-century Methodist camp meeting. King still had a powerful appetite for prestige and for luxuries, but competing against it was an ego strong enough that he did not need to chatter about his attentions from the Kennedys. That ego, in the crucible of the Freedom Rides, would blow apart the Administration's hopes for a cozy, private partnership.

 

John Doar faced new competition inside the Justice Department. On the political recommendation of Southern Democrats, Burke Marshall hired an Arkansas lawyer named Jerome Heilbron, who came into the Civil Rights Division representing the thesis that persuasion was more effective than lawsuits. Heilbron argued that Southerners had never been approached correctly, by people who knew their language and habits. They could be won over with honeyed threats, he said, whereas lawsuits would backfire.

Doar knew better than to scoff. He was the outsider, the Republican in a Democratic Justice Department. The Attorney General already had begun to tease him, saying, “You're the best weapon the Republicans have,” by which he meant that Doar's civil rights suits alienated Democratic Southern voters. Doar knew that there were substantial legal reasons to take Heilbron seriously. Even the most ardent civil rights liberals conceded that the Justice Department faced crippling handicaps in litigation, of which the most vexing was the
Screws
precedent. Over countless cups of coffee, the Doar school of lawyers agreed with Heilbron's on one legal point: there was no easy way around
Screws
. Aptly named, the case was a monster on their shoulders.

Fortified with alcohol, Sheriff Claude Screws went one night with two retainers to the home of a Negro named Robert Hall, arrested him, and took him in handcuffs to the courthouse yard in Baker County, Georgia. There, in public view, Screws beat Hall with fist and blackjack for at least fifteen minutes, then dragged his lifeless corpse feet-first into a jail cell. Although no state murder charges were brought, federal prosecutors presented evidence of such egregious brutality that an all-white jury convicted the sheriff under a Reconstruction statute designed to protect the civil rights of Negroes. After that, Screws pursued an appeal in which, conceding that he had intended to kill Hall, he argued that the Constitution protected him from any charge except the appropriate one of murder, under Georgia law. (“The defense is not pretty,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Rutledge.) The Supreme Court reversed Screws's conviction by a twist of reasoning that even the defense lawyers had not offered. The government had failed to prove that Screws had attacked Hall with the specific intent to deprive him of his civil rights, the Court ruled. Prosecutors had shown merely that Screws intended to kill him. This was the Court's strict interpretation of the word “willfully” in the statute. Incredibly, it meant that henceforth federal prosecutors in such cases had to prove that the defendants were thinking about constitutional violations while they committed heinous, primordial crimes. This was the
Screws
precedent, from a decision written by liberal Justice William O. Douglas in 1944. Within the tiny fraternity of civil rights prosecutors, the decision was an unpleasant echo of
Dred Scott
. And no matter how badly they wished to discard the case as a wartime aberration, like the Japanese internment cases, it was controlling law still.

The same standards of specific intent applied to civil actions on the intimidation of voters under Section (b) of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Civil rights prosecutors called them “b-suits” for short, and Doar knew better than most that the
Screws
case made b-suits nearly impossible. They were nightmares that required objective proof of a subjective intent. For the protection of voting rights, this left prosecutors with “a-suits,” which were nightmares of tedium. Under Section (a) of the 1957 act, federal prosecutors could obtain injunctions against local officials if they could prove that racial discrimination existed. Practically speaking, this meant that they had to obtain and present to the court the actual voter registration applications, then prove to the court that individual Negroes were denied registration whereas whites of equal or lower competency were not, and that no factor other than race explained the discrepancy, and then prove that such discrepancies occurred in sufficient numbers to constitute a “pattern” of discrimination. This had to be done slowly through the courts, against obstruction and delay by the opponents, on a county-by-county basis. There were 159 counties in Georgia alone.

Doar saw no alternative to this laborious scheme. He fully understood why a newcomer to the field such as Burke Marshall would welcome Heilbron's alternative, or any other. Certainly Heilbron's plan would be quicker if it worked, and Doar could not quarrel with the severity of the chosen test, as Heilbron volunteered to try out the honeyed-threat idea in the remote and forsaken home county of the
Screws
case itself. He negotiated for Negro voting rights in “Bad” Baker County, where the retired Sheriff Screws had been succeeded in recent years by Sheriff L. Warren “Gator” Johnson. Negroes did not vote in Baker County.

Doar continued along the path he already had chosen: the relentless production of a-suits. Having learned that the local federal prosecutors would not help at all in the South, and that the FBI was a blunt instrument, Doar and his colleagues invented their own system to expedite the process in spite of the handicaps. The first principle was that they had to meet the Negroes personally. They had to establish trust. They had to learn how to tell a reliable witness from one who would crumble under the fear. They had to learn which counties to choose first and how to go about looking for supporting witnesses. They had to do these things and many others without the slightest assistance from the established local institutions. In fact, they had to avoid local whites altogether. By the spring of 1961, Doar had seen enough to know that he could not do his job from behind a desk in Washington. To be a regular legal bureaucrat was to be blind and helpless.

In early April, Doar and a colleague named Bob Owen flew into Jackson, Mississippi, incognito. They wore khaki pants, work shirts, and old boots. They would prefer that the FBI not know they were there, lest the Bureau get huffy about trespass on its investigative territory, but the disguises were mostly to fool the local whites. To minimize the chances of provoking curiosity, they drove out into the remote countryside and checked into a flophouse motel. Before dawn the next morning they introduced themselves to Medgar Evers. Sitting at his kitchen table, Doar explained their purpose, and soon Evers, who knew almost every Negro on their list of those who had complained about voting discrimination over the years, was marking spots on their special-issue large-scale maps. Doar and Owen used the marks as guides to a dirt-road farm in one county and a back-alley house in the next. They drove down to Natchez, over to Hattiesburg, then up to Clark County—knocking on doors, poking their way out into cornfields, interviewing rejected Negro voters, asking each one for the names of others. They would send the new names to the FBI for interview.

The scouting trip through Mississippi was the first of many that helped them refine an assembly line for a-suits. They did not need to interview white voters; Bob Owen could scan the handwriting on approval forms, subpoena twenty or so with the poorest literacy, select witnesses on the basis of one-minute interviews outside the courtroom, and send the best ones to the stand for questioning by Doar. They learned quickly that they needed predominantly rural counties, with lots of farmers, because teachers and other middle-class urban Negroes felt too much economic pressure to testify. Large counties offered a higher pool of potential witnesses than small ones, and the degree of discrimination tended to vary directly with the proportion of Negroes in the county.

Using these and other makeshift guidelines, Doar and Owen surveyed a county map of the South with a view toward initiating an a-suit in each federal court district. In Alabama, the maps led them to stick a pin in Dallas County. By this selection method, the Justice Department went to work in Selma, the local county seat, long before SNCC or Martin Luther King. From testimony before the Civil Rights Commission, Doar and Owen had the name of Amelia Boynton of the Dallas County Voters League, and on their next trip they went promptly to see her. Boynton ran a small insurance office. On her wall, the lawyers found a plaque with stars next to the names of Dallas County Negroes who had
tried
to register. Boynton's honor roll was a bounty of witnesses, which enabled the Civil Rights Division to move swiftly. Doar filed an a-suit before the end of April.

These were the days, Robert Kennedy later said wistfully, “when we thought we were succeeding because of all the stories on how hard everybody was working.” In early May, Dallas County registrar J. P. Majors resigned to avoid turning over his registration records to the federal prosecutors, forcing Doar to return to Selma to modify his pleading so as to keep the a-suit alive. Doar did not see the avalanche ahead that was to sweep him into nearby Montgomery. Nor did King, who flew off to address the annual convention of the United Automobile Workers in Detroit, on the invitation of union president Walter Reuther. Nor did Robert Kennedy, who, while trying to figure out what had gone wrong at the Bay of Pigs, decided to give a major civil rights speech at the University of Georgia. John Lewis had by far the clearest premonition of the upheaval that would bring them all to Montgomery, and he thought he was going to New Orleans.