Parting the Waters (91 page)

This spectacle so aroused the authorities of the sleepy little farm town that they went to the Illinois Central railroad yards the next morning to arrest C. C. Bryant on a warrant signed by the police chief, who reasoned that as NAACP president Bryant was “behind some of this racial trouble.” Police also arrested Cordell Reagon, a teenage Freedom Rider from Nashville, and Charles Sherrod. The only SNCC leader who remained free in McComb was Charles Jones, Sherrod's cellmate from the Rock Hill jail-in. Petrified, Jones put on a blood-smeared white smock and crouched in a corner of the shop beneath the Masonic Temple, hoping to pass for a butcher. On a pay phone, Jones alerted outside news services to the first civil rights mass arrest in the history of Mississippi. Fearing that Moses and the others could be dragged out of jail to a lynching at any time, he also called Harry Belafonte and John Doar for help. Doar went immediately to McComb, slipped into the butcher shop by night, and whispered that Jones should draw all the shades. When Jones recovered from this introduction to the mighty federal government, he counted it as a significant moment in his political and racial education to realize that its boldest representative was almost as apprehensive about Klan surveillance as he was.

C. C. Bryant had not attended or even known about the student march. If he had known, he would have disapproved strongly, but the sting of his own arrest nullified some of his tactical arguments about maneuvering to keep the goodwill of white people. Such things didn't matter in a crunch, he decided, and he was surprised to discover that many parents rallied behind their arrested sons and daughters. Hollis Watkins' father delivered a moving speech of support at the first mass meeting. Some parents expressed new interest in registration classes. At an NAACP meeting after he obtained bail, a changed Bryant declared, “Where the students lead, we will follow.” His new outspokenness as an NAACP leader, plus the arbitrariness of his arrest, made him the news focus for the reporters who began to trickle into McComb. To a
Time
correspondent, Sheriff Clyde Simmons attributed the crackdown frankly to Bryant's attitude, saying he “puts himself in the class of the white people.”

In court, Judge Hansford Simmons sentenced Brenda Travis indefinitely to reform school, released a hundred of the younger students to their parents, and ordered Moses, McDew, Zellner, and a score of the older students held pending trial on disturbing the peace charges. Guards transported the prisoners to the Amite County jail in Liberty, across county jurisdiction, in a move that was explained as something to make them think about the fate of Herbert Lee before they got into more trouble. Harry Belafonte sent them $5,000 in bail money a few days later.

Moses and the newly freed SNCC workers drove to Atlanta for an emergency staff meeting to discuss whether they could continue tactics that posed such enormous legal costs and immobilized nearly all SNCC's national leadership. The sleepy omniscience of rural communities was attuned by then to the tension buried around McComb. The Negroes seemed to have an idea of what was being discussed at the White Citizens Council meetings, and whites were vaguely aware of SNCC's movements. On the morning after the leaders departed for Atlanta, a hand-lettered victory proclamation was found taped to the front window of the Masonic Temple in McComb: “SNCC Done Snuck.”

On September 26, the day after Herbert Lee was murdered, King went to Nashville for the SCLC's annual three-day conference. The killing and other sacrifices of the Moses project tempered the congratulatory spirit of the Freedom Ride summer. Neither James Farmer nor James Lawson called for extending the rides into Mississippi. Farmer vaguely predicted that Negroes someday might have to withhold income taxes from states that enforced segregation. Lawson declared that the Freedom Riders, for all their success, had been too few in number to pack the Jackson jails. Tacitly, he was rejecting the notion that nonviolent direct action could be enlarged to attack all segregation in the core state of Mississippi. The cost was too high, and repression would be so harsh as to crush rather than encourage a movement. After the heavy sentences meted out to James Bevel and Diane Nash, young people were shying away from demonstrations, just as they were falling away from registration classes after the Herbert Lee murder. For that reason Lawson disappointed those who hoped that he would move his workshops to Mississippi and spend years re-creating the Nashville experience. Without his guiding discipline, nonviolent direct action stood no chance of sustained application there. As events turned out, direct action never did rise to the supreme test in Mississippi, leaving voter registration specialists like Moses to wonder whether Lawson could have made a difference.

The SCLC leaders confessed their worries more freely among themselves than in public. They wanted time to consolidate the gains of the Freedom Rides and to recuperate financially. The SCLC was already burdened by legal debts from demonstrations in North Carolina as well as the defense of the Freedom Riders. Most pressing of all was the
New York Times
v.
Sullivan
libel judgment, which was still making its way upward through the appeals courts of Alabama. To raise money to pay all these lawyers, they rented the Grand Ol' Opry for a “Salute to the Freedom Riders” fund-raising concert. Harry Belafonte, the headline performer, recruited Miriam Makeba, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and several other popular entertainers to back him up as the “Belafonte Troupe.” Unfortunately, Belafonte himself fell ill before the concert. Public announcement of his cancellation stifled ticket sales, and the SCLC wound up losing a large sum on the venture.

Financial straits complicated King's delicate, multilayered diplomacy with the Kennedy Administration. Burke Marshall, Harris Wofford, and other Kennedy officials remained important people in the complex arrangements to create the Voter Education Project, from which the SCLC stood to gain enormous grants of tax-free money for voter registration. The Administration's demand for strict secrecy meant that King had to be careful about discussing the VEP negotiations even in the SCLC's closed board meeting at Nashville. Wyatt Walker's report on the SCLC's voter registration plans for 1962 did not mention the subject, and the Nashville board meeting drifted into what King's friend Lawrence Reddick feared it would be: a ceremonial procession of preachers' speeches, “in which every ‘dignitary' present has to have his say.” The official minutes recorded a “very, very lengthy discussion on what the Conference [SCLC] should do to show its appreciation to the President, Dr. King, Jr.” Eventually, on the motion of Ralph Abernathy, the board asked King to appoint a committee on resolutions to formulate a presentation for King. Someone amended the motion to include Coretta. Abernathy later moved that the board issue a proclamation to let J. H. Jackson know that it would not back away from King. After a nonpreacher on the board objected that a personal attack on Jackson would be a mistake, Abernathy's motion also was referred to a committee.

King sent Robert Kennedy an immediate telegram of protest over the rash of events in Mississippi—the beatings, the Lee murder, and the mass arrest—calling them “an apparent reign of terror.” Even so direct a request was swallowed up, however, by overriding questions of political etiquette. What registered in Washington was that Robert Kennedy first heard about King's Mississippi telegram from a reporter. This insult undercut Kennedy's confidence that he and King could do business privately. King surrendered the point. Wyatt Walker sent Kennedy an abject follow-up telegram accepting blame for the earlier one as “my own personal administrative error.” He advised Kennedy that “it is never Dr. King's or SCLC's practice to release the text of any message to the press without it first being transmitted.”

King soon received what he thought was an opportunity to repair his political relations with the Kennedy Administration. Harris Wofford invited him to meet privately with the President. Again, like the spring luncheon with Robert Kennedy at the Mayflower Hotel, the session was to be completely off the record. Implicitly, at least, it was another test of King's willingness to play by the rules, after the public controversies over the Freedom Rides. King welcomed the chance, but he knew something else was afoot as soon as he saw Wofford's uncommonly grave face at the White House. Wofford said he had been instructed by the President and the Attorney General to deliver an official message about Stanley Levison.

The genesis of the message lay in FBI Director Hoover's memo notation (“Why not?”) during the Freedom Rides in May, demanding to know why the FBI had not thoroughly investigated the troublemaker King. That question had reverberated among his subordinates, who gleaned from Bureau files the information that both King and Harry Belafonte were close friends of Levison. Summary comments about Levison had sounded so ominous to Burke Marshall in the Justice Department that he requested to see all the Bureau's files on Levison. The FBI responded that the files were too sensitive to be shared with Marshall but that Levison was an important operative of the Soviet espionage network in the United States. Soon thereafter, Marshall had lingered in Harris Wofford's office following one of the interagency meetings to raise the matter in strict privacy.

For Wofford, the charges against Levison were an unwelcome return of McCarthyism. He resisted Marshall's argument that King was tainted by association. In response to his request for proof, Marshall obtained FBI briefings on exactly what he could and could not say about the evidence against Levison. Essentially, he could say nothing, because the evidence was classified to protect the FBI's intelligence sources. By the inverted logic of spy cases, the more important the charge, the more closely held was the evidence and the more constrained was the government in taking action.

An unhappy Wofford told King, in words he said had been carefully chosen by his superiors, that the United States government considered Stanley Levison a prime security threat. It was not a matter of leftist beliefs or Communist sympathies, Wofford added, or even of membership in the Communist Party, but that Levison had been identified at the highest levels of the U.S. government as a key element of the Soviet espionage network, a “direct link to Moscow.” The Kennedy Administration was warning King confidentially, but in the strongest terms, to cease all contact with Levison.

King was stunned. He replied that he found it almost impossible to believe such a thing about Levison, who had worked tirelessly and selflessly in King's behalf for nearly five years. King asked Wofford how the government knew such a thing. Had FBI agents caught Levison taking rubles from the Soviets or sending secret messages to spies? Wofford, who had asked those same questions of Marshall but was now on the other side of the table, could reply only that the evidence was secret. Unlike Marshall, Wofford advised King that his own experience made him doubt the accuracy of the FBI's suspicions, but he conceded that his doubts counted for little against the word of the FBI Director.

King eventually fell silent in Wofford's office. The government made it a question of trust, he said finally, and he had far more reason to trust Levison than he did to trust J. Edgar Hoover. King felt ambushed—diverted, perhaps deliberately, from the hopeful agenda he had brought to the White House. To him the new charges were yet another extraneous issue bedeviling his efforts to raise the central moralities of the race question, and it was especially bitter for him to feel so personally the sting of anti-Communist suspicion. The Levison burden was being passed along to him by a chain of people each claiming to be personally removed from the mysterious grievance, each explaining basically underhanded requests in the language of honorable intentions. For King it boiled down to the fact that his best friend in the government was telling him to shun a friend as an alien being, for reasons no more tangible or convincing than suspicion itself.

Deeply depressed, King told Wofford he did not know how he would respond to the warning. He composed himself for his meeting with President Kennedy, which turned out to be a private luncheon in the White House living quarters with Jacqueline Kennedy as well as the President. There was an edge to the arrangements, especially after the delivery of Wofford's message, in that such privacy could be either an honor or a means of concealing King's off-the-record presence, and Mrs. Kennedy's presence could be either a kind social gesture toward King or a signal that business talk was unwelcome. King was accustomed to this sort of ambivalence, and the charm of the Kennedys made for an engaging meal with the First Family. Afterward the three of them went for a tour of the newly renovated White House, featuring Mrs. Kennedy's cultured tastes and acquisitions, which were the subject of much front-page journalism at the time.

When they passed through the Lincoln Room, King saw a way to break through the pleasantries without offending the President—in a request that was at once casual and significant, and which might appeal to Kennedy's sense of history. As they passed by a framed copy of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation on a mantel, King said, “Mr. President, I'd like to see you stand in this room and sign a Second Emancipation Proclamation outlawing segregation, one hundred years after Lincoln's. You could base it on the Fourteenth Amendment.” Kennedy responded positively enough to ask King to prepare a draft proclamation for him to consider. King said he would be happy to submit one. This exchange allowed him to leave with a presidential mandate that partially offset the imperious demand for Levison's head.

 

Moses said very little during the Atlanta SNCC meeting, where he joined about a score of younger students from across the South. They carried with them in fledgling form the institutionalized memory of the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides, interpreted in the context of prior generations by their ever-present mentor, Ella Baker. What they had was literally embodied in themselves, and they were in a transfused state. Advanced far beyond their years, most of them were star students who recently had seen more than one jail from the inside. They had seen their own names in the newspapers, and they had felt both the concentrated fears and the most extravagant praise of their elders. They were becoming self-consciously aware of the historical present. James Lawson was just then writing a magazine article entitled “Eve of Nonviolent Revolution?”