Parting the Waters (94 page)

This time there was no need to organize a summons. More than two hundred eyewitnesses formed a ready-made mass meeting, and their relatives and friends poured into the church by the minute. As their songs swelled up with fervor, everyone knew this was big, that it would sweep the Albany Movement into unknown regions. Back at city hall, Laurie Pritchett tried to explain his action to reporters, saying, “The situation was tense and there could have been general disorder at any time.”

On Monday morning, as the leaders of the Albany Movement huddled to frame a negotiating strategy around the crisis, Marion King, wife of Slater King, joined a small group of those who decided they could not let the day go by without doing something. They went downtown to offer a prayer for justice outside city hall, and soon found themselves in jail on the same charges as the Freedom Riders. Although by police code citations these two episodes were essentially the same, those back at Shiloh perceived a jolting difference between a demonstration by young outsiders and a prayer vigil by some of Albany's most respectable Negroes. The very idea of jailing Marion King—a Spelman graduate, a physical therapist who helped rehabilitate people with crippling injuries—shocked more conservative Negroes into attending that night's mass meeting, which overflowed from Shiloh across the street into Mount Zion. The Albany Movement voted to march downtown again in the morning to support the defendants.

Sherrod ducked out of the singing that night for smaller meetings with what he called his “ace group” of young high school students, mostly girls. The police seemed to be arresting anyone who refused to disperse, he said, and that meant they had a chance to fill up the jails. It was time for them all to go. “Now, you're not going in just to get right back out,” he added. “You've got to stay and make a sacrifice. You're gonna be heroes to everybody in this town.” Privately, Sherrod told Cordell Reagon that he would go to jail himself to help shore up their resolve to stay, and Reagon should stay outside to build up the next group until either Sherrod or Charles Jones came back out. Sherrod was excited. The student movement had been working almost two years toward a chance to fill up the jails, and now in Albany they finally might do it. When Reagon doubted that even such a feat could make segregation crumble, Sherrod laughed. “My uncle always told me that
enough
pressure can make a monkey eat pepper,” he said.

In spite of a steady December rain, about four hundred Negroes formed at Shiloh the next morning and, three abreast behind Sherrod, marched to city hall. As the trial of the Freedom Riders commenced inside, the long line circled the block singing “We Are Not Afraid.” They went twice around, trailed by police squad cars, while an enormous crowd of both races—at least three times the number of the marchers—accumulated on the perimeter, most of them holding umbrellas. Chief Pritchett halted the march in the third lap. Instead of picking out the leaders, as was expected, he ordered his men to fan out and then herd the entire mass of marchers into a blind alley behind the jail. One line of officers stood guard at the mouth of the alley; others took marchers a few dozen at a time to be booked and jailed. As soon as he realized that they were all being arrested, an ecstatic Charles Sherrod cried out, “We are going to
stay
in jail! We shall overcome!” It took more than two rain-soaked hours to clear the alley.

Page 51 of
The New York Times
of Wednesday, December 13, contained an AP story headlined “Albany, Ga. Jails 267 Negro Youths.” About a hundred of the prisoners had bailed out by the time the newspaper reached the streets of Manhattan, but some 150 stayed inside with Sherrod, swamping not only the thirty-person city jail but also the county jail and the work farm. Chief Pritchett had stayed up late the previous night making rental arrangements with the sheriffs of the plantation counties, and at dawn a makeshift fleet of vehicles began to scatter the overload into rural southwest Georgia. Marion King was terrified to learn that she was in a truck with forty women headed for Sheriff Johnson's Baker County jail. Sherrod, on his way to the Terrell County jail, tried to console himself with the ironic thought that he had finally found a place to stay in his original target county, where Negroes had been too frightened to let him spend the night.

At Shiloh, the first panic of the morning rippled outward from the earliest rumors that the prisoners had been moved to the notorious bad-land counties. The Albany Movement strategists, eyeing the pattern of sharp reaction by the white officials, fluctuated between moves that would send conciliatory signals and hard ones. A similar chemistry was operating at city hall, where Chief Pritchett and Mayor Kelley were moving in and out of an almost continuous session of the City Commission. Pritchett argued that mass arrests might well backfire by recruiting new demonstrators for the Albany Movement, but the commissioners replied that unswerving toughness eventually would crush the rebellion. Pritchett told reporters that once he might have entertained some of the Albany Movement's new settlement demands, such as hiring Negro policemen, but the City Commission's anger over the marches now made it “vain and useless” even to discuss them. Still, Pritchett enjoyed the confidence of the commissioners, and when a relatively small group of seventy-five showed up that morning to kneel in prayer outside the trial of the Freedom Riders, he decided not to arrest them all. In fact, he accosted only the leader, Slater King, and took him inside to explain openly to the trial judge why they were praying outside his courtroom. Slater King's recitation of the Albany Movement's grievances did not favorably impress Judge Abner Israel, who sentenced him to five days for contempt of court. Defense counsel C. B. King watched the bailiff haul his brother off to jail.

The psychology of the combatants tumbled again, like a pair of wrestlers rolling downhill. At Shiloh, news of Slater King's fate inflamed substantial numbers of people who had preferred a mass march to a prayer vigil in the first place, and more conservative Negroes came to agree that the white people might not respond well to prayer after all. Cordell Reagon decided to activate his clandestine communications system. On his word, volunteers called their sisters and cousins among the few schoolteachers cooperating with SNCC, and the teachers quietly advised trusted groups of students to slip away at a certain hour. They reached Shiloh in great numbers just in time to reinforce the group stepping off behind Reagon to city hall. Chief Pritchett allowed them to march around once. Then, under fire from the city commissioners, who believed this march was the city's sour reward for its leniency earlier that day, he ordered his men to herd them into the alley.

With 202 more marchers in jail by nightfall, Pritchett and Mayor Kelley faced questions from the growing number of national reporters flying into town. Kelley announced that the City Commission saw “no area of possible agreement” with the Albany Movement on integration or prisoner release. Pritchett said Albany “could erupt into violence at any minute,” sparked either by angry Negroes or by Klansmen. He vowed to put demonstrators “in jails all over Georgia” if he had to. “We can't tolerate the NAACP or the Student Nonviolent Committee or any other nigger organization to take over this town with mass demonstrations,” he said.

In court that afternoon, Judge Israel bound over the eleven people arrested after the Sunday Freedom Ride for trial on new state charges of unlawful assembly. Forman, Bob Zellner, and six others remained in jail. Three bailed out. Tom Hayden left to make a speech to a student group in New York; Charles Jones came out to replace Cordell Reagon; and Bernard Lee was eager to report to Wyatt Walker in Atlanta. Lee told Walker he had never heard of anything like Albany. Negro maids were going to jail under false names, to conceal the arrests from their white mistresses; kids were going to jail two and three times. The people of the Albany Movement were discovering miracles in themselves every day, Lee reported, and at the peak of their fervor they invoked the name of Martin Luther King. The adulation was astonishing. Lee found that whenever he identified himself as youth field secretary for the SCLC, people almost fainted with recognition and clutched him in hopeful wonder, saying, “You're with Martin Luther King?” He thought King should consider coming to Albany, but he warned Walker that a few of the local leaders spoke poorly of King and would probably oppose it. Walker asked crisply for their names.

 

During the six-week gestation of the Albany Movement, King unwittingly approached the Albany jail on an airborne path of exhaustion. He arrived home from London just as the November 1 ICC ruling went into effect. There seemed to be a bus crisis in nearly every Southern city that day, including Atlanta. In Tennessee, state auctioneers were selling off Highlander's land, buildings, and all confiscated property, including the books from Myles Horton's library. King, leaving the protest telegrams to Wyatt Walker, stayed mostly in transit between airport and rostrum. He returned to Montgomery as a surprise guest speaker at a huge “Testimonial Service of Loyalty and Devotion,” marking Ralph Abernathy's departure from the First Baptist Church there. He went to Seattle, Portland, to Mankato College in Minnesota, to Cleveland, and shortly after that into a hospital for tests and two days of rest. From there he went to California for three days and then on to address the Fourth Constitutional Convention of the AFL-CIO in Bal Harbour, Florida.

The speech before the enormous assembly of AFL-CIO delegates fulfilled several complementary objectives of King's recent past. It was a coup for him—an honored forum at the pinnacle of the labor movement—and a welcome sign of recovery from his private disaster at Kansas City. The Alabama libel case against the SCLC and
The New York Times
lent an urgent practicality to King's speeches to organized labor. Having spent more than $27,000 in the early appeals stage of that case, with much larger expenses ahead, he stressed to labor groups that a loss in the Supreme Court would threaten to cripple union organizing as well as civil rights. If the judgment was sustained, he warned, no union leaflet or fund-raising appeal would be safe from a libel suit, especially in the hostile South. Using this theme of common defense, King had recruited a group of labor specialists headed by New York lawyer Theodore Kheel. Stanley Levison, who hoped that King could begin to join the power of a rejuvenated labor movement to the cause of civil rights, was excited enough to write King's speech for him and then follow him to Miami to witness the result.

“Negroes are almost entirely a working people,” King said. “There are pitifully few Negro millionaires and few Negro employers.” He likened the sit-ins to the pioneer sit-down strikes of the 1930s. Chiding the labor delegates gently for their persecution of Randolph, he summoned them to “admit these shameful conditions” of segregation within unions and to “root out vigorously every manifestation of discrimination…. I am aware that this is not easy nor popular,” he conceded, “but the eight-hour day was not popular nor easy to achieve” either. Nor were child labor acts or minimum wage laws. “Out of such struggle for democratic rights you own both economic gains and the respect of the country,” said King, “and you will win both again if you make Negro rights a great crusade.”

It was a “white” speech, restrained and formal, but by then he had long since disarmed a skeptical, even hostile audience. The huge assembly of meatcutters, pipefitters, carpenters, and steelworkers came to their feet as in the old days. Gone for a moment were the dull pension plan reports and the wage increase targets, replaced by an orator who revived the energy of a less bureaucratic era. Some of the Negro unionists, who had quarreled bitterly with George Meany earlier that day, wept openly in the hall. Everyone knew instantly that this was not the ordinary beer chaser of a speech; King had budged the center of gravity of organized labor, with all its political tonnage. Among professional politicians, the AFL-CIO speech was received as the most important development concerning King since his
Time
cover in 1957 and his Atlanta arrest just before the 1960 election. Such events stretched King's influence beyond his given constituency. Even those analysts inclined to minimize the significance of the Negro vote now had to consider King's demonstrable impact on organized labor.

His speech was a minor news item of the day, far behind Eichmann's conviction in Jerusalem, President Kennedy's departure for South America, riots in the Congo, and Zulu chief Albert Luthuli's acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in Stockholm.
*
Also that day, two U.S. Army helicopter units landed in South Vietnam as the first overt American participants in that country's war against Viet Minh guerrillas. For King, none of these events matched the immediacy of a news story that appeared on his television the night he returned home from the Bal Harbour convention: he saw long lines of Negroes marching through the rain in Albany, Georgia, two hundred miles south of Atlanta. He immediately called Ralph Abernathy, who was freshly reunited with him in Atlanta, installed at his church across town on the prestigious West Side. Knowing that Abernathy was a friend of Rev. E. James Grant (who had grown up a member of First Baptist in Montgomery, and had joined King as a speaker for Abernathy's testimonial in November), King asked whether Abernathy could find out what was behind the events in Albany. Abernathy was already talking with Grant, and also with Albany Movement president William G. Anderson, who had been a college friend at Alabama State. Anderson had been an aspiring disc jockey in those days, Abernathy recalled, but he was a good talker. Abernathy promised to scout Albany by phone.