Parting the Waters (92 page)

Each person was asked to make a short statement of belief and to discuss why he or she wanted to work full time for SNCC. Prayers and dramatic testimonies were offered up until Moses halted the proceedings suddenly by declining to speak on the subject. He said only that he was anxious to get back to Mississippi. He thought the students were grandstanding, trying to surpass one another in eloquence, but he would not say so, any more than he would pressure Mississippi farmers to register, because he recoiled from seeking to dominate others with his presence. Moses was a mystical purist. He valued SNCC for the succor it provided to like-minded people, but he remained aloof from the more pragmatic functions of an organization, such as fund-raising, discipline, and publicity. His experience in Mississippi had left him more suspicious of command, more preoccupied with moral leadership by example.

His silence probably had a greater effect than any speech he could have made. It signaled that he was positively eager to get back to the wasteland of Mississippi. Whereas the consciences of movement people previously had sustained only forays into danger, Moses seemed to require such exposure constantly and to be oppressed by the trivia of ordinary life. He reversed the psychic balance between tension and relief. He was a predominant force within SNCC in spite of himself. One immediate effect of his silence was to dampen the internal power struggle by making its issues seem petty or moot.

Ironically, it was Moses, so mindless of image and self-advancement, who shaped the public perception of the early SNCC. The image of SNCC came to be not so much a sit-in student or Freedom Rider but rather a kind of priest who chose to isolate himself deep behind the lines of segregation for years at a time, armed only with nonviolence. The SNCC worker came to be heralded as a figure of relentless sacrifice, against all conventional ambitions. SNCC mythology, borrowing from that of the early Christians as well as from the labor movement, would focus upon the “organizer” who cared nothing for comfort or recognition, who would meet rejection by cheerfully shaking the dust from his feet and moving on to another outpost. This description, amplified partly as an antipode to the more regal leadership image of Martin Luther King, made “grassroots” a popular term of political discourse in the 1960s.

Returning from Atlanta with a carload of his Mississippi veterans, Moses quickly established that SNCC had not yet snuck from McComb. Their most immediate crisis was that Principal Higgins was refusing to allow the hundred students arrested on October 4 to resume high school classes unless they first signed pledges to refrain from any further racial agitation. The students were holding Higgins to a standoff in daily marches to the school, always with speeches, negotiations, and a march home again after a mass refusal to sign such a pledge. Negro teachers feared that the unprecedented student strike threatened their jobs. There was a nearly continuous danger of violence—both between the opposing Negro factions and from whites hostile to the entire dispute.

To protect student morale from erosion over time, the SNCC leaders created an emergency school of their own, which they called Nonviolent High. Many of the SNCC teachers possessed qualifications more advanced than the regular teachers, and this fact itself touched off one of the countless subtopics of controversy. The excitement warded off much of the normal classroom boredom, and the teachers found themselves learning as much as the students. In the history class, a young boy rose to ask Charles McDew whether the course would cover “the War for Southern Independence.”

“The war for what?” McDew replied. He was puzzled until he realized that this was one of the diehard Confederate terms for the Civil War, and that even the young Negro crusaders in his class had absorbed unconsciously a great deal of the Southern point of view. Moses, McDew, and the other teachers knew they faced obstacles as subtle as they were enormous. They also realized that Nonviolent High owed its beginning partly to the grace of white authorities who had not yet bothered to concentrate their opposition.

One night during the chaotic first week of the makeshift school, an extremely nervous visitor called on Moses at the Masonic Temple. Louis Allen told Moses that he had been summoned before a grand jury that was to consider the coroner's findings in the Herbert Lee murder. Allen said he did not want to lie again. He wanted to know if Moses could arrange for the federal government to protect his life if he testified against E. H. Hurst. Admiration welled up in Moses, along with the bittersweet thrill of a murder solved and the joyful hope that some justice might be done in spite of Amite County's blanket of fear. Moses advised Allen to keep silent until he could make inquiries in Washington.

He relayed Allen's offer to John Doar, setting off a round of bureaucratic wrangling. Doar had taken a personal interest in the Lee murder since finding the note on his desk three weeks earlier. On October 19, he had filed his third investigative request on the case with the FBI, asking the Bureau to reinterview the witnesses, to question Sheriff Caston about the discovery of the alleged tire iron, and to obtain the minutes of the coroner's jury testimony. The Bureau had resisted the instruction, arguing that it was fruitless to reopen a civil rights murder inquiry against Hurst in view of the fact that all the county authorities and witnesses agreed that it was self-defense. Doar disclosed to the Bureau that the case was different now because Allen was prepared to change his testimony.

FBI agents eventually returned to Liberty to comply with Doar's request. Louis Allen took the fateful step and told them officially that he had seen no tire iron and that Hurst had simply shot Herbert Lee in a rage. The agents also reinterviewed the only other witness, a white man who had testified that he saw Herbert Lee raise a tire iron against Hurst. Now this witness conceded that he never saw the tire iron until “it was removed” from beneath Lee's body. The passive construction “was removed” appeared four times in the FBI interview report, without any sign that the interviewing agent ever asked who it was that had removed the tire iron. Such neglect of logical, urgent investigative leads drove Doar to despair. The judge who had presided at the coroner's inquest was interviewed, as Doar requested, but the interviewing agent did not obtain the minutes of the inquest, nor even report that he had asked for them.

Doar reported only a summary of this to Moses, leading to the decision that the Justice Department would file no indictment in the Herbert Lee case. This cruel finality compounded the moral conundrum haunting both of them. They knew that without a federal indictment there would be no effective protection for Louis Allen. Therefore it would be almost pointless, as well as dangerous, for Allen to testify against Hurst in the grand jury. Moses and Doar found themselves in the miserable position of cautioning Allen against the consequences of telling the truth—warning him in effect that he should lie again. For Moses it was a betrayal of Allen's courage and of his own philosophical approach to his mission in Mississippi.

Even worse, it was too late to pull back. Nearly everyone in the county, it seemed, already knew of the renewed FBI investigation and of Allen's willingness to accuse Hurst before the grand jury. Allen was a marked man even after he declined to do so. Whites who had bought his loads of pine logs for years began to say they did not need them. Donis Hawkins' gas station cut off his credit, and so did Daryl Blaelock's. Allen's ominous plight left Doar and Moses with the worst of both worlds: they had exposed him to mortal risk without gaining even a chance of justice. From the standpoint of Allen's well-being, it would have been better had they advised him from the beginning to lie or keep silent—to follow the rules for good niggers in Mississippi. Louis Allen had perceived this clearly on the day of the murder, but the movement philosopher and the minister of U.S. justice came around only after they had coaxed Allen fatefully toward a different truth.

Doar tried to restrain Moses in his criticisms of the FBI, arguing that Moses never could hope to make headway by fighting both the segregationist powers of Mississippi and the Bureau. The key to the FBI lay in its name—
Bureau
. Buried within its labyrinthine bureaucratic ways and its extraordinary domination by the personality of J. Edgar Hoover were levers that might be used for civil rights. The FBI abhorred embarrassment and public failure, for example. Most of its agents were Northern Catholics, not Southerners. The Bureau's traditional cooperation with local authorities was nearly always undercut by rivalry—with sheriffs and policemen resenting the high and mighty Bureau, and the FBI agents looking down on the provincial ways of the locals. Doar stressed that it was a practical imperative to study and cajole the Bureau, and to fasten the FBI's vast institutional pride to the new job of enforcing the civil rights laws.

Although it was not easy to say such things to Moses, Doar persisted in his usual terse manner. He had to do so—not only to keep functioning himself but to signal to Moses that the fault was not entirely with the FBI. What Doar could not say was that he and his colleagues had prepared a powerful “b-suit” based on the Lee murder and a number of the lesser plagues in southwest Mississippi. Doar had come to like Louis Allen personally, and he believed that Allen's plainspoken, fearful honesty could make him a convincing witness. He also knew that it could have a sobering effect on segregationist officials just to see Hurst arrested and tried, regardless of whether a jury convicted him. Following Justice Department rules, Doar kept all this to himself because he did not want to confess that Burke Marshall had rejected the case. Marshall feared chaos, and felt a need to maintain the government's posture of control. Doar grudgingly accepted the judgment, but some of his assistants—especially those few who had worked in Mississippi—remained in a state of open dissent. Among other objections, they argued that the policy made a perversion of the Justice Department's ongoing effort to convince civil rights groups that the federal government would protect them in voter registration. Doar told them that nowhere else could they make their case as freely as under Marshall. Nowhere else were line prosecutors so close to the top. They should keep plugging.

In McComb, some of the students surrendered to Principal Higgins' pledge. The SNCC leaders arranged hurriedly for scores of others to be taken in by a Negro college that offered high school courses. All this was accomplished by October 31, when nearly the entire faculty of Nonviolent High went on trial for the October 4 protest march. After a quick trial, Moses, McDew, Zellner, and fifteen others were taken in handcuffs to the drunk tank of the county jail in Magnolia, to begin serving prison terms of four to six months. On smuggled paper, Moses wrote that Judge Brumfield, while imposing sentence, had scolded him for leading the Negro children to slaughter: “‘Robert,' he was addressing me, ‘haven't some of the people from your school been able to go down and register without violence here in Pike County?' I thought to myself that Southerners are exposed the most, when they boast.”

The prisoners became objects of curiosity among local whites who had business near the county jail, and some went so far as to make special trips to take a look at them. It was generally accepted that the twelve special ones crammed into one cell were Communists, and few Magnolians had seen a real Communist before. Some asked the guards to point out Moses, whose name was being circulated as their leader. A businessman remarked soberly that they should keep Moses and the others in jail just as long as the Russians imprisoned Francis Gary Powers, the American U-2 pilot. A young girl was thrilled when Charles McDew, yielding to her pleas to hear them “say something in Communist,” gave her a few words of Yiddish.

These zoolike diversions at the expense of innocently or ignorantly hostile visitors were rare. For the most part, the cramped prisoners had to stave off boredom and despair on their own. They exchanged advanced Nonviolent High lectures among themselves. Moses and McDew played chess with pieces made of matchsticks. “It's mealtime now,” Moses wrote. “We have rice and gravy in a flat pan, dry bread and a ‘big town cake'; we lack eating and drinking utensils. Water comes from a faucet and goes into a hole.

“This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg. Hollis [Watkins] is leading off with his tenor, ‘Michael row the boat ashore, Alleluja; Christian brothers don't be slow, Alleluja; Mississippi next to go, Alleluja.' This is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg…”

Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon made a special bus trip to attend the Moses trial in McComb. They watched their friends being led off to jail, then they returned to their new outpost in Albany, Georgia. Since criminal charges arising from their own McComb arrests had been dropped in mid-October, they had been working to re-create the Mississippi registration project in the cotton, pecan, and peanut region of southwest Georgia around Albany. They had arrived there full of zeal and empty of nearly everything else, sleeping at times in parked cars or on porches. Having spent the summer in Mississippi, they thought of Albany as a slightly larger version of McComb, and of Terrell County as a forsaken plantation of violence, like Amite County.

From the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, Sherrod had obtained the name of C. W. King, a prosperous Albany Negro who was a supporter of liberal causes. Patriarch of a remarkable family, C. W. King had seven sons, all highly educated, many of whom had studied abroad. The eldest, Clennon, was the professor who had been declared insane in 1958 because he was crazy enough to apply for admission to the University of Mississippi. The youngest, Preston, was an expatriate professor of philosophy at the University of South Wales, in Australia. Of the five middle brothers, two remained in Albany as pillars of the young Negro establishment. Slater King was a builder and real estate broker, like his father. C. B. King was one of only three Negro lawyers in all of Georgia outside Atlanta. (He had secured his brother Clennon's release from Whitfield Asylum in Mississippi.) He wore a neatly trimmed beard and tailored suits, and he discussed all subjects in a melodious, polysyllabic stream. Yet with all his affectations, C. B. King remained in Albany to press the legal claims of maids, mechanics, and drunkards. Local white lawyers did not quite know what to make of him.

The eccentric senior King allowed Sherrod and Reagon to occupy an empty room in one of his buildings. The two young SNCC workers seemed a scruffy and unlikely pair of political leaders. Reagon was only eighteen. As a high school student in Nashville, he had so resented James Lawson's rule barring him from the nonviolence workshops as too young that he had crashed some of the Nashville demonstrations. By his own account the seriousness of the movement had not sunk in until he arrived at Parchman Penitentiary in a truck with the first Freedom Riders and saw the guards there beat, shock, and strip the two prostrate Chicago pacifists. Reagon was fearless, but most of his SNCC elders regarded him as a kid who was a little too eager to keep up.

Sherrod was the only SNCC veteran who tolerated his company, and to the Albany Kings, Sherrod himself was a young man of mixed qualities. There had always been something about him that was dangerous as well as innocent. When as a teenager he had announced his intention to locate and introduce himself to his white relatives around Petersburg, Virginia, horrified Negro relatives throttled this violation of taboo. When he returned from his first racially mixed discussion group, he expressed amazement at his discovery that there were things white people did not know. In equal extremes, he seemed both shy and touchy, lazy and driven, a man of the cloth and of the street. Sherrod and Reagon spent their first days simply playing basketball on the playgrounds of the Negro high schools, answering questions as they came. Reagon developed quickly as a star attraction among his age peers, many of whom were agog over his tales about the Freedom Rides. After a week of playground bull sessions, more than a dozen of the students responded positively to the idea of attending a church meeting. They accepted the assertion that they could not understand the sit-ins and Freedom Rides without knowing how nonviolent resistance came straight from the Bible.

Sherrod conducted the first meetings outdoors. He introduced himself as a fellow preacher to the pastors of the churches within walking distance of the high schools, and one of them, Rev. H. C. Boyd of Shiloh Baptist, agreed to let Sherrod use a room in the church. Boyd, attending the first few sessions himself, heard chapter and verse from the Bible on brotherhood and justice. He later came to believe that Sherrod deceived him by emphasizing Christian virtues and a better Albany, while making only passing references to jail or protest, but at the time Boyd soothed himself with the thought that Sherrod was accomplishing what no Albany pastor, including himself, could do—he was attracting a growing number of eager teenagers into church two, three, four times a week.

The first of Albany's Negro leaders to react strongly against Sherrod and Reagon was Tom Chatmon, adult supervisor of the local NAACP Youth Council. A Morehouse graduate in his early thirties, Chatmon already had manifested business skills that would win him several fortunes as a distributor of Negro cosmetics, and also a compulsive gambling habit that would devour more than one of those fortunes. Possessed of a gambler's humor, Chatmon was a popular man in Albany's Negro establishment. His position within the NAACP corresponded roughly to the presidency of the white Jaycees—a stepping-stone toward senior leadership—and as the adult most closely in touch with Albany's young people, Chatmon learned early that the two vagabond outsiders were stealing the enthusiasm of his best Youth Council members. Defensively, he concluded that the SNCC pair might be Communists.

Chatmon's worries unsettled even the boldest and most restless of Albany's Negro leaders. Some members of the prestigious Criterion Club suggested that they be run out of town, or, as C. B. King put it to Sherrod, “have opined that the community might be well advised to divest itself of your presence.” A prominent Albany Negro placed “an urgent and distressing call” to NAACP regional headquarters in Atlanta, warning that the two young SNCC activists were about to seduce the local youth into suicidal demonstrations. Three NAACP officials rushed down to Albany to try to restore discipline against such a possibility.

As November 1 approached, Chatmon found it increasingly difficult to resist his Youth Council members who wanted to test the white waiting room of the Trailways bus station on the effective date of the new ICC desegregation rule. Chatmon did not deny that it had cost the Freedom Riders much more pain to obtain this rule than it would cost Albany's youth to test it, and he heartily agreed that both justice and federal law supported any Negro's right to fair treatment at the station. Still, he belabored himself with limits. If he sought approval within the NAACP, he was likely to be refused and almost certain to be accused of bending to the SNCC line. If he went ahead without approval, he invited censure within the hierarchical NAACP. If he did nothing, his Youth Council charges would follow Sherrod to the bus station and discredit Chatmon as the figurehead leader of a timid, inert NAACP. Chatmon reluctantly began negotiations with Sherrod toward a “test” at the bus station on November 1. High school students from the Youth Council would carry it out, but they would not act in the name of the NAACP and they would avoid arrest. A tentative, secret agreement was reached before Sherrod left for the Moses trial in Mississippi.

Word of it seeped back across race lines to the city authorities, prompting Mayor Asa Kelley to call a special meeting of the Albany City Commission on October 30. In closed session, Police Chief Laurie Pritchett reported that “certain demonstrations were expected to occur.” Pritchett was a studious, farsighted police officer, notwithstanding his hulking ex-football player's frame and his ever-present cigar. In anticipation of such a crisis, he had studied the performance of Alabama authorities during the Freedom Rides. Concluding that their chief error had been to permit violence, which drew publicity and forced federal intervention, he had lectured his officers on how to enforce the race laws without nightsticks or guns. To the City Commission, Pritchett announced that he had instructed his men to make no arrests under the segregation laws themselves, which were vulnerable to legal attack, but to defend segregation under laws protecting the public order. He said he had put the entire Albany police force on alert status “during the period of expected tension.” All vacation time was canceled. The commissioners thanked him for his sophisticated preparations.

When Cordell Reagon and Charles Sherrod approached Albany in a Trailways bus on the morning of November 1, they were about to make Albany one of scores of cities across the South to be tested that day as a follow-up to the Freedom Rides. Gordon Carey of CORE had sent instructions to more than seven hundred volunteers in seven states. The plan for Albany was a kind of pincers maneuver: Sherrod and Reagon were to test the Trailways facilities as passengers, while a group of Chatmon's Youth Council students was to meet them, testing the bus station facilities from the outside. When Sherrod and Reagon walked into the white waiting room, however, no students were in sight. Their greeting party was composed instead of a half-dozen or so grim-faced Albany policemen. Chilled with disappointment, the two SNCC workers left the station quickly to find that paranoia was loose among the Negroes, who had warned of beatings and even massacres at the station. It took all day for them to rally the spirits of the Youth Council members enough for nine of them to venture to the Trailways station that same afternoon. Sherrod and Reagon waited outside as the students entered the white waiting room. When police ordered them to leave, they retreated in compliance.

Although this was the tamest of demonstrations by Freedom Ride standards, Sherrod reported that “from that moment on, segregation was dead.” Word flashed through Negro Albany that “the children” had dared to confront Laurie Pritchett's men at the bus station. All but the most conservative of the local NAACP leaders came quickly to agree that someone would have to get arrested at the station, if only to establish grounds for a test case on police violations of the new ICC order. Sherrod preached Lawson's theme that Supreme Court edicts piled high as the clouds were irrelevant so long as Albany's Negroes enforced segregation upon themselves by cowering before the police. High school students flocked to his meetings in greater numbers, bringing with them older relatives. College students turned up, as did a few preachers and even a schoolteacher or two. Sherrod and Reagon were also holding voter registration workshops every Saturday, but the town was consumed with interest in what would happen next at the bus station.

 

C. B. King was working on a criminal case that touched the rawest passions of race. Violence had erupted in the county of the notorious
Screws
case—“Bad” Baker County, one of the plantation areas that ringed Albany. High finance in Baker County was dominated by an illiterate multimillionaire cattle breeder, who wrote checks on scraps of grocery bags and signed them with an “X,” and by Coca-Cola chairman Robert Woodruff, who owned a 30,000-acre resort plantation called Ichuaway.

Every Fourth of July, Woodruff's plantation overseer presided at a giant free barbecue for Negroes only. Three thousand had attended that year's festivities, during which a Negro field hand named Charlie Ware made the mistake of flirting with the white overseer's Negro mistress. The overseer complained to the sheriff, L. Warren Johnson, who fawned upon the powerful overseer almost as deferentially as the county's Negroes fawned upon the sheriff. Both Ware and Sheriff Johnson had a fifth-grade education and a fondness for drink. “Gator” Johnson also had a reputation for meanness, as he was alleged to have killed four or more Negroes under his custody. As successor to the infamous Sheriff Claude Screws, he was from the “old school.” On the night of the 1961 barbecue, Johnson drove to Charlie Ware's house and proceeded to beat his wife intermittently until Ware came home. Then Johnson beat Ware on the head, arrested and searched him, and drove to Newton, a town so tiny it could not support a restaurant. Parked outside the Baker County jail, with Ware handcuffed beside him on the front seat, Johnson picked up his radio transmitter and said, “This nigger's coming on me with a knife! I'm gonna have to shoot him.” He fired two .32-caliber bullets into Ware's neck. “He's still coming on! I'm gonna have to shoot him again,” said Johnson, and fired a third time.

This, at any rate, was the account of the FBI agent who investigated the shooting after doctors later brought Ware miraculously back to life, with no permanent injuries except those caused by vertebra fragments that seeped into his spinal fluid. The FBI agent supported Charlie Ware's version almost completely, but his conclusions counted for very little in Baker County. A grand jury promptly indicted Ware for felonious assault upon Sheriff Johnson. Later in July, officers transported Ware from the hospital to the jail. He was still there in November, when C. B. King appealed to a judge to free him on the grounds that Ware was not a risk to flee and that he suffered both mental and physical aftereffects of the shooting, with blood still dripping from his ears. The judge refused to lower the bail bond, forcing the impoverished Ware to remain in jail more than a year until trial, but in the meantime C. B. King filed a civil suit against Sheriff Johnson in federal court, arguing that Johnson's story was preposterous on its face. The sheriff was a full head taller than Ware, outweighed him by more than a hundred pounds, and possessed all the psychological advantages of a white sheriff in a Black Belt county where the air of feudalism still mingled with the heat. King alleged that the sheriff had committed a monstrous violation of Ware's civil rights.

What was new for southwest Georgia was Charlie Ware's refusal to plead guilty to whatever charge pleased Sheriff Johnson. By all previous standards, he and C. B. King were leaping into deep caves with only a single match. But the news of their crusade fanned the incipient rebellion in Albany. A week after C. B. King filed his bail motion for Charlie Ware in Baker County, more than twenty people crowded into Slater King's home for a tense Friday-night summit conference. Representatives of seven Negro organizations in Albany, plus SNCC, gathered in an atmosphere of charged anticipation, undercut by rivalry and suspicion. Anxieties caused them to stress their points of agreement. All the representatives, from the Federated Women's Clubs to the Ministerial Alliance, subscribed to the NAACP's official goal of ending all segregation in Albany. They also agreed that it was preferable to achieve these goals by negotiation rather than demonstrations, which they called by the euphemism “positive actions,” but they split over the crucial question of who should decide when positive actions were required. No organization welcomed such responsibility, especially in the pregnant knowledge that Sherrod's youth cadres were burning to go ahead, but none trusted the others, either. Almost inevitably, by a process reminiscent of the bus boycott's first days in Montgomery, they decided to create a new organization called the Albany Movement.