Parting the Waters (87 page)

King flew back to Atlanta for a day or two between the high-level foundation meetings and Freedom Ride speeches in Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Hartford, San Francisco, Miami, Syracuse, and White-water, Wisconsin—in the breakneck pattern so familiar that he claimed he could recognize airports around the country by their distinctive smells. He ventured into Jackson, Mississippi, on July 6 to welcome Farmer, Lawson, Bevel, Lewis, Doris Castle, Jerome Smith, and the others out of Parchman Penitentiary. “We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer,” he advised white Mississippians, adding that “segregation is dead” and that the only remaining question was “how expensive” they would make Jim Crow's funeral. In all his talk of martyrdom and death, he pictured himself not as a victim but as an orator presiding over the last rites.

King still yearned for a life of prestigious, intellectual repose such as he had tasted in his pipe-smoking graduate-school days. Two weeks after the Jackson rally, he added to his schedule for the coming year a commitment to teach a Morehouse seminar on his favorite philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. In a letter marked
CONFIDENTIAL
, the dollar-conscious Benjamin Mays instructed King not to tell anyone except Coretta of the college's $1,500 fee, lest Mays face a revolt of Morehouse professors paid less generously per classroom hour. Then King broke away to spend his first August vacationing on fashionable Martha's Vineyard, in a cottage arranged for him by Stanley Levison. The versatile Levison was working diligently with Harry Belafonte to help King push on both sides of the Freedom Ride controversy. They were encouraging the Kennedy-sponsored voter registration drive, which would siphon energy from demonstrations, but they were simultaneously raising money to continue the Freedom Rides. “I deposited a check of one hundred dollars in the SCLC account,” Levison wrote King that summer, “because the maker died suddenly and I wanted the check to clear before the bank froze the account.” For the sharp-eyed, practical Levison, death inspired thoughts of probate courts instead of funeral orations.

Yet it was Levison to whom King entrusted the task of presenting his personal interpretation of the Freedom Rides to the readers of
The New York Times Magazine
. This particular task required a penetrating cross-cultural sensitivity, because King wished to build his message around the class character of the Negro protesters. Levison's draft opened with King's memory of Mother Pollard saying “My feet is real tired” during the bus boycott and then, jumping ahead five years, pointed out that the contemporary Freedom Rider was not “an elderly woman whose grammar is uncertain” but students who were “college-bred, Ivy League clad, youthful, articulate, and resolute.”

Many readers doubtless puzzled over this as an odd point to single out, and perhaps a snobbish one besides. But King did not wish merely to marshal credentials for himself or his cause—he wanted desperately to communicate how much those protesters were willing to sacrifice. Unlike similarly educated whites, their hold on middle-class respectability was extremely tenuous. Any slip—a lost job, a scrape with the law, a psychological breakdown, a personal scandal—could easily send them sliding back into the oblivion of the Negro underclass. Against such sharp risks, Negroes had poured generations of rigid training and lifetimes of effort into slavish imitations of white refinements. They had made themselves into what sociologist Gunnar Myrdal described as the “exaggerated American,” dedicated to conspicuous consumption and status symbols, as King told the
Times
readers.

This cultural context was what made the Freedom Rides so revolutionary to King. “Today the imitation has ceased,” he said. For the first time in history, white students were imitating Negroes. “I am no longer surprised to meet attractive, stylishly dressed young girls whose charm and personality would grace a Junior Prom,” King went on, almost in amazement, “and to hear them declare in unmistakably sincere terms, ‘Dr. King, I am ready to die if I must.'” By risking identities and attachments that had come to seem more precious than life itself, the students were discovering something that King believed truly was more precious.

Such preoccupations were close to King's heart as he rested on Martha's Vineyard for the upcoming church battle against J. H. Jackson. He stayed there on August 3, sending Wyatt Walker to the emergency meeting when the state of Mississippi tried to collect some $300,000 of Freedom Rider bail bonds as forfeit. He was there on August 7, when Moses and a Freedom Rider volunteer opened their first voter registration school in Mississippi, on August 9, when the Southern Baptist Seminary apologized to its constituent churches for letting him speak, and on August 11, when the SNCC students began their clash at Highlander. On August 13, as the exhausted students were accepting Ella Baker's compromise, King made a day trip to New York to preach in Riverside Church. East German shock troops were throwing down barbed wire as the first line of a Berlin Wall, sealing off West Berlin. Full attention of the superpowers made that Cold War drama eclipse all other freedom stories of the year.

C. C. Bryant was a practical, plainspoken leader in the mold of Montgomery's E. D. Nixon. Like Nixon, he was a railroad man who drew his paycheck from the faraway mecca of Chicago, which guaranteed him a measure of freedom from the local white economy of McComb. Although Bryant worked as a laborer, operating a loading crane for the Illinois Central, his independent stature rose above the teachers and preachers and the few other local Negroes from the traditional leadership positions. He was a deacon, a Sunday school teacher, a Boy Scout leader, and president of the Pike County NAACP chapter. He was also a high official of the Freemasons, and in this capacity he gained permission for Bob Moses to use the second floor of the all-Negro Masonic Temple as a voter registration school. The first floor was rented out to a butcher.

Moses knocked on doors through the blistering August days, telling all those who would listen that he was C. C. Bryant's voter registration man. His studies at Amzie Moore's house already had made him an expert in Mississippi's arcane registration laws, which, among other tests, required applicants to interpret a section of the state constitution to the satisfaction of the county registrar. This obstacle alone put voting out in the wild yonder of dreams among Mississippi Negroes, and Moses counted it as an initial victory if he could get someone in a McComb household even to imagine being inside the registrar's office in the county courthouse, where few Negroes dared to venture. Behind that psychological barrier lay fears of being branded a renegade, plus piercing doubts of literacy, self-worth, and entitlement. Moses addressed all these each night in his class at the Masonic Temple. Voter registration, as Amzie Moore and C. C. Bryant had perceived, was a full-time job.

Hollis Watkins, a teenager from the tiny hamlet of Summit, Mississippi, poked his head into Moses' office one day and said he'd heard a rumor that Martin Luther King was in town working on some big mysterious project—was he Martin Luther King? Moses, sensing that there was a hard kernel of grit behind Watkins' youthful naïveté, said he didn't know anything about Martin Luther King coming to McComb but that there was a new class in town to teach Negroes how to vote so they could become first-class citizens. Watkins was interested. He had “plans” to go to college but no money or job. Living with his parents, staving off the inevitable plunge into adult worries, he had plenty of time. Very shortly he and a similarly situated teenager named Curtis Hayes became the project's first two volunteers. They distributed leaflets advertising the registration classes.

Luckily for Moses, a few of those attending his first classes on August 7 were people who had been promising Bryant that they would try to register. Four of them pronounced themselves willing after the first night's class. Moses accompanied them to the county courthouse in the nearby town of Magnolia the next day, and three of the four were registered. Three people came forward after the second night's class, of whom two were accepted by the registrar the next day. Their success and another night's class produced nine more volunteers on the third day. By then the registrar was alerted to the possibility that this surge of Negro traffic through his office was not incidental, and he approved only one of the nine applicants.

Pike County's racial barometer was sensitive enough that the appearance of sixteen Negroes in the courthouse on three successive days was a development worthy of a story in the McComb
Enterprise-Journal
. While warning local segregationists, the news generated excitement among the Negroes scattered through the depressed farm-and-timber country of southern Mississippi. Within days, farmers from the surrounding countryside made their way into McComb and up to Moses' corner of the Masonic Temple. After listening to his talks on nonviolence, elementary civics, and the Mississippi constitution, they beseeched him to expand his fledgling project into two of the adjacent counties, where not a single person from the Negro majority population had voted within memory. Relative to the rural wilderness of Amite and Walthall counties, McComb's 12,000 people and 250 registered Negro voters made it a progressive metropolis.

Moses could not bring himself to tell them that it was too dangerous, or that it was tactically unwise for him to divert attention from McComb. After discussions with Bryant, he also decided that he could not earn the trust of the unregistered populace if he avoided what he called the “tough areas.” Accordingly, Moses addressed the logistical problems of working without money outside McComb. To cover large distances in the countryside he would need to borrow a car, and he needed a place to stay in remote areas. It took time and patience to arrange such things in a region where spare cars were scarce and an educated Northerner suspect. Sometimes he spent half the day arranging where he would spend the night. But soon a farmer in Amite County named E. W. Steptoe offered to put him up. Steptoe and his wife had nine children, all but two of whom were grown. He had been a leader of the county NAACP chapter until the sheriff had confiscated the membership rolls two years earlier. The NAACP had been defunct in Amite County since then.

On the morning of August 15, Moses and the first three Amite County volunteers drove to the county courthouse in the town of Liberty, some twenty-five miles from McComb. A plaque on the lawn proclaimed that it was the oldest courthouse in Mississippi, built in 1839, and boasted that Cecil Borden's condensed milk had been invented in Liberty, as had Dr. Tichener's antiseptic powder. The four Negroes passed the plaque and the Confederate memorial statue, entered the enormous white brick structure, and made their way to the office of the county registrar, who asked rather sternly what had brought them there.

A very old Negro man waited helplessly for one of the two women volunteers to reply, but both of them also stood speechless with fear. Moses finally spoke up from behind. “They would like to try to register to vote,” he said. The registrar questioned Moses about his interest in the matter and then told them all to wait. While they did, curious officials came by for silent looks at the oddities who were making themselves the chief topic of the day's conversation. The sheriff stopped in, followed by deputies, clerks from the tax office, and an examiner from the driver's license bureau. A Mississippi highway patrolman sauntered in and took a seat.

Six hours later, Moses finally escaped the tension of the courthouse. His three volunteers knew they would be rejected as voters, but they were elated anyway, because they had been allowed to fill out the forms. This was a first for them, and they celebrated until they noticed the highway patrolman from the registrar's office coming up behind them. He followed them at bicycle speed for ten miles down Highway 24 toward McComb. Fear grew steadily among the Negroes as they pulled off the highway, took side roads, and did everything they could think of to salvage the hope that the tail was a coincidence. The patrolman matched every maneuver. At last he turned on his flashers, pulled them over, and ordered them to follow him. Now there were moans of apprehension and regret in their car, as the Amite County volunteers vowed never again to set foot in the registrar's office.

In McComb, Moses alone was placed under arrest. The Pike County attorney rushed down from Magnolia that same evening. At first he proposed booking Moses for the crime of interfering with an officer in the act of making an arrest, but he changed his mind upon reflecting that Moses was the only one who had been arrested. He substituted the vaguer charge of interfering with an officer in the discharge of his duties. Then he notified the local justice of the peace and asked Moses if he was prepared to stand trial. Moses requested the proverbial one phone call.

When permission was granted, he fished an emergency number from his wallet. He had never spoken to John Doar, and had no idea whether Doar would be in his office so late at night. For effect, he amplified his instructions to the operator: Washington, D.C., he said, the United States Department of Justice. When Doar not only came on the line but also agreed to accept a collect call, Moses felt a surge of relief. Noting the surprised looks on the faces around him, he gave Doar a description of the day's events. It was detailed, clinical, and neutral in all but his conclusion that his arrest was fraudulent of purpose and clearly designed to discourage voter registration by acts under the color of law, as prohibited by the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. After conferring with Doar about the prospects for a federal investigation, Moses signed off and pronounced himself ready for trial.

The justice of the peace found Moses guilty that night and fined him $50. Perhaps sensitive to the prisoner's obvious connections with the U.S. Justice Department, he offered to suspend the fine if Moses would pay $5 in court costs—what amounted to a nominal fee for pulling the judge away from his supper. Moses quietly explained that he could not pay the fee, because it was part of an unjust prosecution, whereupon the judge sent him to the Pike County jail. Moses spent his first night behind bars. His was the first SNCC jailing in Mississippi other than the Freedom Riders, who were still landing in prison by way of the Jackson bus station.

Two days later, an NAACP lawyer came down from Jackson to secure Moses' release by paying the full fine. He did so with the grudging approval of NAACP superiors who considered this another case of getting stuck with legal bills for activities that were neither sponsored nor approved by the NAACP. The bruised feelings of NAACP officials were not assuaged any by the fact that Moses was less than totally grateful for their generosity. He was happy to be out of jail, but he had refused on principle to pay the fine himself and was ambivalent about whether others should have done so.

Moses went into McComb and found that the Masonic Temple had been transformed during his brief absence. Nearly a dozen Freedom Riders had come into town from Jackson, where the convictions of Bevel and Lafayette on contributing to the delinquency of minors had halted sit-in recruitments temporarily, and several SNCC leaders had made their way into McComb after the fractious debates at the Highlander Folk School. The news of Moses' arrest had blurred the sharp distinctions drawn at Highlander between “safe” voter registration and “dramatic” nonviolent demonstrations. Overnight, McComb became the summer's new magnet town. Ruby Doris Smith, one of the four SNCC veterans of February's Rock Hill jail-in, arrived in a Freedom Rider group, and Charles Sherrod came in from his fledgling registration project in Georgia. Charles Jones was on his way, as was former SNCC chairman Marion Barry. Picking up on Moses' door-to-door registration work, they added a twist from Jackson by recruiting local high school students to help them.

Moses missed most of the new excitement in McComb. He returned quickly to Steptoe's farm out in Amite County, hoping to repair the damage caused by the harrowing experience of his first three volunteers. Word of his arrest had spread through the county. Steptoe reported that Negroes working around the courthouse had overheard whites talking about how the Moses project was being discussed at meetings of the White Citizens Council. With such fearful news on the Negro grapevine, it took days for Moses and Steptoe to persuade anyone to go near a registration class. Steptoe himself, though bold enough to give lodging to Moses, was not quite ready to try registering. Nor did he want too many people to be seen coming and going near his farm, which sat directly across the road from the home of Mississippi state representative E. H. Hurst. As Steptoe explained it to Moses, Hurst was a pillar of segregation, but the real threat was his daughter's husband, Billy Jack Caston, whose name had a fearful ring to the ears of Amite County Negroes. Caston had a reputation as a wild, violent ruffian.

Steptoe did not rest until he had arranged for Moses to hold his registration classes in a one-room Baptist church, way out in the woods—the same church into which the sheriff had burst to confiscate the Amite County NAACP records. (The sheriff, in another touch of Faulknerian reality, was Billy Jack Caston's cousin.) A few of the boldest Amite County Negroes appeared at the nightly meetings to hear Moses talk about registration. He refrained from pressuring them, to the point of never asking whether anyone wanted to try to register. The unspoken question was left hanging. Finally, nearly two weeks after the first attempt, a farmer named Curtis Dawson volunteered to go down, and an old man known only as Preacher Knox jumped up to join him. Though their offer was applauded heartily in the meeting, Moses and Steptoe discussed it long into the night. Dawson was solid, they agreed, but Preacher Knox was flighty, voluble, and sometimes daft—given to random enthusiasms and endorsements of all opinions. Moses worried about whether it would be correct to refuse Knox's offer, and if he did, whether it would be fair to let Dawson go alone. Moses decided to take his chances on Knox.

The next morning, August 29, the three of them found the sidewalk near the courthouse blocked by three young white men. Dawson recognized the one in front as Billy Jack Caston; the second was another of the sheriff's cousins, and the third was the sheriff's son. There was very little talk. Caston asked Moses where he was going. To the registrar's office, Moses replied. Caston said no he wasn't and struck a quick, swiping blow to Moses' forehead with the handle of his knife.

In a mystical discovery even more vivid than the pains shooting through his head, Moses felt himself separating from his body as he staggered on the sidewalk. He floated about ten feet up in the air so that he could watch the attack on himself comfortably. His fears became as remote as Caston's grunts, and time slowed down so that he could hear Preacher Knox running away on the sidewalk before he saw Caston slapping and shaking him. In peaceful surrender, he saw Caston hit him again behind the right temple, saw himself sink to his knees, saw Caston drive his face to the pavement with a crushing blow to the top of the head. Through waves of concussion, he distinctly heard Curtis Dawson pleading with Caston to stop the beating.