Parting the Waters (97 page)

For King, this behavior at first may have seemed no more than another instance of the messianic adulation showered upon him for years, and for Anderson it may have begun as a lapse into a common, ecstatic church persona. In confinement, however, fervid eccentricity could intensify into mania. King tried to calm Anderson, as did Abernathy and Bernard Lee from the next cell. Anderson's passions were almost incandescent with energy, however. He kept jumping up to proclaim the thrill of fresh visions. Even late into the night, nervous exhaustion allowed him only a light, fitful sleep, which was interrupted frequently by Abernathy's extraordinary snoring. On this, Abernathy's first night in jail with King, the piercing volume of his nasal trumpet created a lasting legend. The humor was lost that night to apprehension about Anderson's condition. Each time Abernathy startled him back into full consciousness, it turned out that supernatural realities still were more vivid to him than his jail bunk, dashing the hopes of his fellow prisoners that sleep might restore him to normal.

It was a groggy King who announced his plans through the bars the next morning. “I will not accept bond,” he told visiting reporters. “If convicted, I will refuse to pay the fine. I expect to spend Christmas in jail. I hope thousands will join me.” A Negro reporter quoted him as pledging to remain in jail “as long as necessary” to force change in Albany's segregation. The strain of incarceration emerged in King's lofty but plaintive comments about the Sumter County jailers. They had pushed his dignity into its final refuge: the pulpit. “I wish some people could be a little more courteous,” he said. “The guards in this jail call me ‘boy.' I might note that I am the pastor of a church with four thousand members.”

Abernathy was gone—bailed out early to make Sunday services in Atlanta and to “rally the nation” from outside. Hopes that daylight would improve Anderson's condition were sadly unfounded. He began to hallucinate about extraterrestrial events, so deep in his own world that King and Bernard Lee discussed their worries in front of him. They were haunted by the memory of a Negro Episcopal priest who had come unhinged during the big Sunday march on the capitol in Montgomery during the early sit-ins of 1960. Firemen had pointed a hose at the priest to move him back, and although they did not turn on the water, something in the sight made the priest snap. His mind went away somewhere and never came back. Abernathy had seen it happen that day, along with Lee and Ella Baker, and King had arrived later to encounter the husk of an old friend. Now it frightened him and Lee to think that Anderson might be having a similar breakdown. They approached him about bailing out ahead of them, but the proposal horrified Anderson as a betrayal of King. He would not be like Simon Peter.

Wyatt Walker swept into the Americus jail late that day, almost quivering with adrenaline. Substituting for King as the main speaker at the previous night's mass meeting, Walker had preached and exhorted, prayed and ducked out to take scores of phone calls. “The SCLC has thrown its full resources behind the Albany Movement,” he had announced. His telegrams were summoning Daddy King, James Lawson, and the other SCLC board members to an extraordinary meeting in Albany on Monday night. He had barely slept before stepping up the pace that Sunday—dictating a nationwide fund-raising appeal to be sent over King's signature, giving press statements, making travel arrangements for the board members, allocating some of the SCLC's limited treasury to prisoners making the most desperate pleas for bail, while telling other supplicants that their relatives had to hang on in their cells. Now was the time to strike, he told them, because King was drawing the pressure of world opinion to Albany. They should be thinking about putting more people into jail, not taking any out.

All these matters were compressed into the briefing Walker had prepared for King. Inside the Sumter County jail, King punctured Walker's kinetic strategems. “Wyatt, you've got to get us out of here,” he said. “Andy's not going to make it.”

These words spun Walker's mind backward, toward visions of disaster. Early release would break the will of the movement, waste all Walker's labors at coordinating support, touch off howls from people demanding to follow King out of jail, and severely damage the credibility of King, who had just promised to stay in jail until Christmas. King thought Anderson could make it through one more night, perhaps.

Walker headed back to Albany with all his grand plans collapsed into one imperative: bluff toward a quick settlement. A second shock greeted him before he adjusted to the first. This time it was a rebellion. Walker's imperious manner had alienated some Albany Movement leaders even before he had assumed command of the last mass meeting. Then, at Shiloh that day, just as C. B. King and some of the locals had been frowning at the news that Walker's solicitation letter called for contributions to be sent to the SCLC in Atlanta, rather than to the Albany Movement, someone rushed in to tell them that Ralph Abernathy was appearing on television from Atlanta. They all rushed in to hear Abernathy tell the viewers of his night in the Sumter County jail and how the SCLC was calling for a nationwide “pilgrimage” to Albany. The conjunction of these two events had soured a number of the Albanians. Having naïvely measured King's treasury by his image, they had expected him to come to town with ample funds to bail out their emergency cases. It was a blow to discover that the money had to be raised first, compounded by the news that it would be siphoned through Atlanta. As for Abernathy, they had thought he was in jail in Americus, only to see with their own eyes that he had vanished to Atlanta already, and was taking charge of Albany from there. Suddenly they saw Abernathy and Walker as movement “pros” in a less exalted sense—as those who trafficked in the ordeals of innocents. They felt like hayseeds.

No one had voiced these resentments to Walker's face; he was too intimidating a presence as he jerked and crackled across Shiloh's floor like a downed power line. No sooner did Walker leave to visit Martin Luther King in Americus, however, than Charles Jones organized a special SNCC press conference. Jones knew many of the reporters personally, from earlier civil rights protests that year, and he promised them a big story. He and other SNCC leaders stood discreetly in the background as Marion Page read a statement drafted mostly by Ella Baker. It denied as “an unfortunate misrepresentation of fact” the news that the SCLC was in command of Albany. “Mr. Walker or no one else is assuming leadership of Albany,” said Page. He renounced nationwide “pilgrimages” and all further demonstrations in Albany, saying that he hoped to renew negotiations with the city's white leaders. When one of the startled reporters asked whether this meant that the Albany Movement was breaking away from the SCLC, Page replied, “We've never been united.”

The fresh public feud ambushed Wyatt Walker as soon as he returned from the Americus jail. Reeling under a barrage of press inquiries, Walker was shrewd enough to recognize tactical advantages even in this stinging rebuke to his authority. Had the press conference not taken place, Walker himself would have been forced to propose concessions in order to get King and Anderson out of jail. Since King had forbidden him to mention Anderson's condition to anyone—it became a subject of hushed gossip within the Albany Movement's inner circles—Walker would have been obliged to invent some pretext for retreat. Now he did not have to. Instead, he bit his lip, sent out a flurry of telegrams canceling the SCLC board meeting, and advised the Albanians to seek the best terms their divided ranks could command. For Walker, the SNCC-Page mutiny was a detestable affront that could not have come at a better time.

 

Far-flung reporters still were checking into Albany that Sunday night when James Gray delivered a television address to southwest Georgia. As Albany's first citizen, he spoke to local viewers much the way modern Presidents had come to address the nation. Gray owned controlling stock in the only television station in town, from whose studios his image was beamed that night, and he owned the region's dominant newspaper, the Albany
Herald
. He had grown up in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, three doors down from Norman Rockwell, and played basketball for Dartmouth College in the 1930s. At a dance after a game he had struck up a friendship with one of the opposing players from Harvard, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. The two of them roved together enough for Gray to visit the Kennedy vacation home in Palm Beach several times before Joe Jr. was killed in World War II. After that, and after Gray had moved South to marry the daughter of the
Herald's
owner, he maintained a friendship with the next Kennedy son, Jack.

Over the next dozen years, Jack had changed from Joe's kid brother into the dashing senator who wanted to be President, and Gray's media empire made him into something of a potentate in the small markets of southwest Georgia. In 1958, Gray sent his private plane to fetch Senator and Mrs. Kennedy to Albany for a weekend of barbecue, golf, and country-style politicking, during which Gray himself proved that it was possible for a Yankee to be popular among Southerners. Now that Kennedy was President, a great many prominent citizens of Albany had on their office walls a framed photograph of themselves shaking hands with Kennedy at Gray's reception, and everybody knew that Gray still called the President “Jack” in private. As chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party, Gray had been scheduled to debate Martin Luther King on television in late 1960, but the President-elect, reacting to the startling evidence that the Negro vote had supplied the margin of his victory, had asked his friend to withdraw in favor of James J. Kilpatrick.

This time Gray decided that he could not duck King and the segregation issue. He told his viewers that a “cell of professional agitators” was mounting a rebellion that “smacks more of Lenin and Stalin than of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.” He knew enough about the internal splits in the Albany Movement to refer to its weaknesses, but he also subscribed to the white folklore that any Negro rebellion was necessarily the work of the NAACP. As for King, Gray saw nothing but shallow opportunism: “He has learned that martyrdom can be a highly productive practice for the acquisition of a buck.” He closed with a tribute to segregation as “a system that has proved over the years to be peaceful and rewarding,” and a call for an end to disruption. “What we need is tolerance,” said Gray, “not tantrum.”

Privately, Gray advised Mayor Kelley and Chief Pritchett to make any deal that would get King and the protesters out of jail without surrender. Simultaneously, Gray was telling his friends in Washington that any intervention by the federal government would make it harder rather than easier for the Georgia whites to end the crisis. His argument landed on receptive ears, as Robert Kennedy was wary of jumping into quicksand in Albany. This was the political lesson of his baptism in civil rights earlier that year, when he had been green and impetuous. The Attorney General called in Douglas Kiker and other trusted reporters to announce that he had adopted a “hands off” policy after the spring Freedom Rides. “Real progress” in race relations, he said, required that “local leaders talk it out.”

Before dawn on Monday, December 18, Wyatt Walker sent off a plaintive telegram to the White House in King's name, requesting that President Kennedy “issue at once by Executive Order a Second Emancipation Proclamation to free all Negroes from second-class citizenship.” That morning, as headlines told New York readers that “Negro Groups Split on Georgia Protest,” Robert Kennedy huddled with Byron White and Burke Marshall at the Justice Department, sending out a stream of messages that he was in close touch with events in Albany, that the issue was “number one” on his agenda, and that he stood ready to give advice if requested by either side.

From Americus, King left by prison transport for trial in Albany along with Anderson, whom reporters described as “haggard.” The courtroom was a mass of confusion, with reporters jostling spectators and officials bustling in and out with whispered messages. Judge Abner Israel recessed the proceedings even before they began. Bailiffs put King and Anderson in a holding cell, where women's committees from the Albany Movement tried to reach them with gifts of food and cologne. Upstairs, a rumor circulated that negotiations were resuming. Marion Page and his lawyer C. B. King huddled in the mayor's office along with Donald Hollowell, representing SNCC, while Mayor Kelley and other city officials kept their distance in a separate room. Chief Pritchett shuttled between them with refinements on the truce conditions.

By ten thirty that morning, the whites had dropped their feigned inability to interfere with the operations of the courts and offered to release all local Albany Movement prisoners without any bond at all, provided that King leave town and demonstrations cease. But they held firm on high bail for the Freedom Riders, whom they considered professional agitators, and they refused to commit to writing any agreement with the Negro representatives. C. B. King and Hollowell—the same legal team that was still seeking Charlie Ware's release so that he could receive medical treatment for the neck wounds he suffered in July—bargained all day for binding statements of City Commission policy, but the most they could get was an unsigned note authorizing Chief Pritchett to speak for the commission on certain matters. Late that afternoon, Mayor Kelley summoned Judge Israel to ratify the new understanding, and the judge then announced from the bench a host of new rulings, including a sixty-day postponement of King's trial.

King appeared suddenly on the courthouse steps, freed after forty-eight hours of custody. Anderson, still unstable in the midst of his visions, was protectively ushered aside by Walker as King told the assembled reporters that he would leave Albany in spite of his dissatisfaction with the verbal truce. “I would not want to stand in the way of meaningful negotiations,” he said, in his only allusion to his own departure as one of the conditions.