Parting the Waters (96 page)

Three times she led them in this call and response, and then they all raised the one-word chorus:

The verses kept rolling forth until without signal the sound collapsed all at once into silence. Pious souls would maintain long afterward that they thought the Lord Himself had arrived, so awed were they. More skeptical observers were hardly less stupefied. Pat Watters, a newly arrived Atlanta
Journal
reporter, was so undone by his first exposure to a Negro mass meeting that he scribbled notes furiously to keep hold of himself. For posterity, he later wrote on the cover of his notebook: “Includes the night Dr. King entered the church.”

King began slowly and sonorously with points about the relevance of the concurrent independence movement in Africa. He told the crowd that time was neutral to the history of moral causes. They could not sit back and wait for an inevitable march of progress—it was possible for race relations to hurtle backward, as Chief Luthuli said South Africa had done since the creation of apartheid in 1948. Democratic morality was nothing more or less than what they made of it, and it was an internal as well as an external state. He went on to draw his usual distinctions between love and justice, between changed hearts and regulated behavior, and then to describe nonviolence as the application of Christian ethics to worldly politics. The lecture had the effect of dampening the mood of the crowd. It established a sober atmosphere of history and great responsibility before King wound to the purpose of the suffering in Albany. “They can put you in a dungeon and transform you to glory,” he said. “If they try to kill you, develop a willingness to die.”

Then a quickening pace of oratory consumed the distance between King and the crowd. When he spoke of going to jail “without hating the white folks,” they answered with a clap of applause. “Say to the white man, ‘We will win you with the power of our capacity to endure,'” he urged. “How long will we have to suffer injustices?” he cried. A deep bass voice shouted back “God Almighty!” and reporter Watters quickly looked up and saw that it belonged to an old man with a very black face. The old man's cries kept punctuating King's rising “How long…Not long” litany, and Watters lost ground in his desperate efforts to jot down each spoken word. King was soaring now, as he spoke of redemptive suffering, the possibility of martyrdom. “But we shall overcome,” he cried, and both churches shouted back, “Shall overcome!”

The song of that title sprouted softly here and there beneath his oratorical descent. “Don't stop now,” King admonished them. “Keep moving. Walk together, children. Don't ya get weary. There's a great camp meeting coming…” Suddenly, without the usual cries of jubilation from a hymn or a prophet, his voice trailed off. King stepped away from the pulpit, as though even he had been overwhelmed by the powers he elicited from the congregations. They sang “We Shall Overcome,” swaying gently back and forth in the pews as they waved aloft their white handkerchiefs, whose flutter made the church look like a cotton field in cross-cutting breezes. After a number of verses, a clearly transported Dr. Anderson raised his arms for silence. He thanked King profusely for his appearance and pledged that the Albany Movement indeed would keep moving. And then, crowning the moment, he invited King himself to walk together with them against the bastions of segregation.

As the crowd rocked in approval of the suggestion, the leaders huddled on the platform to discuss this departure from the schedule. Unable to hear one another, they retired to Reverend Boyd's study for a brief conference. Anderson argued that King's continued presence alone might produce a settlement, which would make another march unnecessary. King agreed to stay, notwithstanding other commitments, including an obligation to preach for Daddy King on Sunday. That being decided, someone expressed reservations about advertising Dr. King's whereabouts in advance, given the rumors that redneck whites or stoolie Negroes might try to kill him. Hastily, the leaders devised an announcement designed to encourage the congregations while minimizing the security risk. Then they stepped back out into the music. First sight of Anderson's beaming face told the crowd that King had agreed to stay. When he gained enough silence, he announced in a winking, joyful code, “Be here at seven o'clock in the morning. Eat a good breakfast. Wear your warm clothes and wear your walking shoes.”

Shiloh and Mount Zion remained open all night for prayer. After midnight, with King safely ensconced in his home, Anderson sent a telegram to Mayor Kelley: “We waited the night of the 15th of December for an acceptable response, but it was not forthcoming. We shall prayerfully await an acceptable response by 10
A.M.
this morning at Shiloh Baptist Church.”

The telegram backfired. Kelley and the other commissioners, not being accustomed to city business early on a Saturday morning, opened it only shortly before the deadline. They took offense, especially when Chief Pritchett delivered intelligence reports on the King and Anderson speeches of the previous evening, indicating that the Negroes intended to march again if rebuffed. Mayor Kelley addressed a terse letter of rejection to Marion Page instead of Anderson, perhaps to underscore the commission's disapproval of Anderson's recent conduct. He summoned reporters to announce that Albany was breaking off negotiations.

A forlorn Anderson returned to the Shiloh pulpit after a last desperate trip to city hall. “We found no common ground for discussion,” he reported gravely. “We will kneel and pray until God comes and helps to show us and the world the way to take a step toward freedom.” Wyatt Walker stepped forward to say that it was time to get down to business. When he asked for a show of hands of those prepared to march to city hall behind Dr. King, about 150 people responded. “That is not enough,” Walker said sharply. Quick speeches of exhortation produced few additional volunteers, as the most dedicated people were in jail already. The hand count stalled far below the number of the two big marches earlier that week, made without King.

Walker retired gloomily to the pastor's study, where King had been socializing with the pastors of the twin churches on Whitney Avenue. Like King, Boyd and Grant were Morehouse men, the former a college contemporary of King's brother A.D. and the latter a schoolmate of Daddy King's, back in the late 1920s. King teased them both for supporting J. H. Jackson at Kansas City. Socially, their congregations in Albany were paired much like Dexter and First Baptist in Montgomery, or like Ebenezer and Abernathy's new West Hunter Street Baptist in Atlanta. Abernathy relished pointing out that in Atlanta he and King had reversed their social positions from Montgomery, with Abernathy now holding the more prestigious West Side congregation, “out-doctoring” and “out-professoring” his friend King. When Walker delivered his gloomy news about the scarce volunteers, the preachers turned painfully to business, and decided to go with one last appeal.

Claude Sitton of
The New York Times
noted that it was 4:16
P.M.
when King and Anderson came out of the church arm in arm, with Abernathy and Mrs. Anderson the first of 265 others marching two by two behind them. There were a hundred youths below the age of seventeen, including some thirty on bail from previous arrests that week, and a few older people who had trouble keeping up. There was a lone white person, a student from the University of Georgia. (Reporters, pawing for any explanation of his singular presence, seized upon his statement that he had recently visited Ohio.) Now the white student was a conspicuous fleck in the long column moving through Harlem, Albany's Negro business district. They walked past the joints and pool halls, which were gearing up for Saturday night, past gas stations and food stores. Everyone stared at the procession—grizzled drinkers and young children alike. A few of the marchers tried to recruit reinforcements from the spectators, but for the most part they were silent.

It was a chilly December day for Albany, and threatening to rain, so that when the marchers turned toward city hall on Jackson Street the slickered troopers heading toward them appeared to be a mass of yellow in the distance. A number of the Negroes clutched tightly at Bibles under their arms, and among those uttering prayers, the tall, handsome Dr. Anderson drew attention because he spoke with a furtive chipperness that clashed with his normal executive composure. “God bless you,” he kept saying to no one in particular. “God bless each of you. Strike me first. God bless you.”

The opposing lines converged on either side of Oglethorpe Street, which divided downtown from the Negro section. Two motorcycle policemen pulled up to the curb to block the path across the border. They did not move when King led the Negro column around to their rear, but Chief Pritchett then stepped forward with his amplified megaphone to meet them in no-man's-land. “Do you have a written permit to parade or demonstrate?” he asked, his voice crackling through the drizzle.

“We are simply going to pray at the City Hall,” King replied, adding that he did not believe a parade permit was necessary for that purpose. Pritchett disagreed, ordered the marchers to disperse, and then announced that they were all under arrest. His men—a composite force of policemen, sheriff's deputies, and state troopers—marched across the intersection to herd the procession into the street. Motorcycle officers stopped traffic in all directions; others already had sealed off the area around the city jail. The march resumed in a new formation, down the middle of Jackson Street into downtown, with yellow-slickered lawmen scattered along both flanks. Photographers walked backward to snap shots of King, who was singing “We Shall Overcome” with the others. The entire panorama puzzled, angered, or entertained bystanders according to their perceptions. Its meaning was not obvious to all strangers, including the young white couples who came blinking out of the movie theater's matinee performance of
Come September
, starring Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida. The procession seemed to be combustible and yet orderly, almost rehearsed, with both the Negroes and the officers looking solemn but not grim. At first glance, it could have been anything from a Mardi Gras parade to a mass execution.

After the officers steered the column into the sealed-off alley behind the jail, the true character of the event revealed itself. Moans and prayers went up when King and the other leaders disappeared among the first batch into the jail. One marcher shouted out above the others: “The blessed Son of God was born about this time of the year two thousand years ago to bring peace to this world. And here we stand two thousand years later.” Suddenly, somewhere in the midst of the huddled marchers, the sounds intensified into hysteria as about a dozen men pushed their way out of the alley. They were carrying a young woman who was gasping and writhing, with a spoon jammed between her teeth. Police guards responded to desperate cries for water merely by parting to let the men rush frantically down the street with their stricken cargo. Gawking bystanders parted too, until, some distance down the street, the young woman's seizure abated. When her bearers had assured themselves that she was fully recovered, they dutifully retraced their steps to the alley to await admission to jail. Groups being herded inside for booking passed those coming out for transport to prisons in the outlying counties. Pat Watters was struck by the sound of their song, “We Are Not Afraid,” and how it seemed steadfast even when muffled behind the doors of a departing paddy wagon. He included this detail in a vivid dose of surrealism that landed on page 10 of the next day's Atlanta
Journal
, between Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson's wedding photograph and a plane crash story from Iowa.

Chief Pritchett closed all liquor stores and cocktail lounges that night, and doubled police patrols. Military sound trucks roamed the streets blaring the announcement that all soldiers on leave should return to the Marine Corps Supply Depot or Turner Air Force Base. City hall was emptied except for a few straggling bystanders and the main body of reporters, who waited to find out what was happening to King. Along with Anderson and Abernathy, he first was hauled from the crowded holding cell to Pritchett's office. Later, these three ranking prisoners emerged dramatically in the midst of an armed police escort. One plainclothes officer carried a Thompson submachine gun. They all piled into the chief's shiny new Buick Roadmaster. Then they were gone—headed north, Pritchett disclosed, for the Sumter County jail in Americus. Then and later, white citizens complained bitterly about the Roadmaster and all the special protection for King, saying that he was receiving privileges far beyond the due of a white prisoner, let alone a Negro. Pritchett defended his measures as enlightened segregation. If King were to be killed in Albany, he said, “the fires would never cease.”

 

Fred Chappell was a tough, independent sheriff, who said “nigger” to and about any person of color, famous or not. He did so with a half-smile of defiant assurance, as though to emphasize his disregard for polite convention. With his deputies, Chappell slammed a cell door on King's first full day in the Albany Movement. King became one of some 750 demonstrators arrested there in the past week, one of more than 400 still in jail. Nothing approaching such magnitude had ever occurred in the civil rights movement. Albany now combined the dimensions and the tactical advances of all its recent predecessors, from Montgomery through the Freedom Rides, including—now that King was in jail—nationwide headlines.

Anderson had been shaky even before the march. His mumbling had been a sign of slippage. Now, having been taken to the jail in his own hometown of Americus, where his father had first achieved prominence as a traveling salesman for one of the pioneer Negro insurance companies, the experience was so intense for him that it had to be salvation itself, or the abyss. “Thank you, Jesus,” he told King. He prowled the dingy cell until claustrophobia and the malice of Sheriff Chappell rubbed a thin spot in his psyche, and then he greeted King again. “You are Jesus,” he said, as though it should have been obvious all along. Anderson knew his Bible—the descent of the spirit upon the anointed one at Shiloh, which everyone could feel, the march into Jerusalem, the dungeons and revilement. “And we are the saints,” he cried, looking not just at his fellow prisoners but out upon a great assembly of their comrades that appeared only to him. “The hosts which no man can number.”