Parting the Waters (98 page)

Prisoners began to spill forth from the jails of southwest Georgia. It would take until nearly dawn to empty them, by which time contending assessments of their week-long travail were on their way to interested readers across the nation. King himself put the most positive face on the deal, telling a cheering Shiloh crowd that “it wasn't necessary” for him to stay in jail, as promised. The bus and rail terminals had been “thoroughly integrated,” he said. Bail requirements had been swept away to free hundreds of unjustly arrested protesters, and the City Commission had promised to appoint a biracial commission to address the segregation issue as a whole. Even as King spoke, however, Chief Pritchett was denying that the city had granted a single point. He insisted that Albany had obeyed all laws, including the ICC desegregation ruling. All charges against the demonstrators, including Slater King and the suspended students, remained in place pending trial. As for the biracial commission, Pritchett insisted that the City Commission had agreed only to entertain such a proposal, as it would do for any timely and proper recommendation from local citizens. At the Shiloh mass meeting, Marion Page told his listeners to disregard white victory claims and pay attention to “official” announcements from the Albany Movement.

“In appreciation for the accurate coverage of Albany's difficulties,” as they announced it, Albany leaders treated white members of “the national and international press corps” to a steak dinner Monday night at the Radium Springs club where James Gray had played golf with John Kennedy. Mayor Kelley announced that Attorney General Kennedy had called within an hour of that afternoon's truce to congratulate the city for preventing an outbreak of violence. Perhaps the city's shrewd hospitality helped set the tone for news reports that described Albany's crisis as having been safely navigated by wise restraint, and that criticized King's protest methods for stirring up a dangerous but ineffectual discontent. Journalists had spiteful reason to fault King for nondelivery. Many of them had just traveled to Albany at considerable expense on King's promise of a protracted, newsworthy confrontation, only to have the story fizzle almost upon their arrival. Elsewhere, too, there was lingering disgruntlement over King: Page, Charles Jones, and other leaders of the Albany Movement privately blamed him for the meager settlement.

The New York
Herald Tribune
called the Albany truce “a devastating loss of face” for King, “one of the most stunning defeats” of his career. Most reporters took a sportswriter's approach and billed the week's events essentially as Segregation 1, King 0. More thorough press reflections focused on the discovery in Albany of bureaucratic divisions within the Negro movement. NAACP officials supplied much of the confidential information, but they were careful not to reveal the parochial motivation that dominated their own internal communications. Privately admitting that the Albany branch of the NAACP was “almost defunct,” and had been so for nearly a decade, they had maneuvered singlemindedly to disparage any competing organization. They offered to make William Anderson president of the local branch if he would dissolve the Albany Movement as unnecessary. They made similar overtures to Slater King. They tried to stop demonstrations and fumed over the popularity of the movement songs. This starkly self-interested perspective extended to Mississippi, where field secretary Medgar Evers boasted to his superiors that strong NAACP chapters had prevented student registration projects from making any headway. Evers assured headquarters that King had raised very little money for the Freedom Riders in Mississippi, and he strongly implied that Moses, John Hardy, and other registration workers had brought persecution on themselves when they “became involved with some hoodlums, law enforcement officers, and voter registrars.”

To some degree, Evers and other NAACP employees tailored their reports to the expectations of their superiors, but the antagonisms were real. NAACP sources openly derided student activists and then subtly confirmed those same activists in their criticisms of King. The outlines of such quarrels escaped to the white press. Claude Sitton's reprise on Albany in the next Sunday's
New York Times
, headed “Rivalries Beset Integration Campaign,” traced the quarrels to the sit-ins of 1960. In a more sensational article entitled “Confused Crusade,”
Time
quoted Roy Wilkins in scathing appraisal of SNCC: “They don't take orders from anybody; they don't consult anybody. They operate in a kind of vacuum: parade, protest, sit-in…When the headlines are gone, the issues still have to be settled in court.” King's gingerly reply—“I think it would be a mistake to try, as some civil rights leaders want to, to throw the students out of the movement. The little conflicts are inevitable”—was barely heard amid cross-firing attacks from anonymous SNCC leaders, who criticized King for status-seeking, for whirlwind speech-making, and for “meekly” shirking his jail time in Albany. Such attacks in
Time
brought SNCC a public identity more than all its previous campaigns. James Forman, who resented King's bourgeois habits and his quest for media recognition, was featured as one of the four established national leaders. He posed for the
Time
photographer in a starched white shirt and tie, with a pipe.

All this bilious contention was too much for Stanley Levison, who promptly wrote a letter protesting the lack of “ordinary fairness” in
Time
's presentation. “Status seekers do not generally go to jail, even for limited periods,” he wrote. “…Ironically, there are those who have argued that Dr. King is so extraordinarily self-sacrificing that he must be seeking martyrdom, while now a new voice charges that he avoids sacrifice. He is indeed damned if he does and damned if he does not.”
Time
did not publish Levison's letter.

In Albany, Charles Jones and Cordell Reagon were more abrasive than Sherrod in their judgment of King. They called him “De Lawd,” a SNCC nickname mocking both King's pomposity and the submissiveness of ordinary church folk. They also intimated that they had orchestrated the Albany negotiations toward precisely the result that followed: King's removal from Albany, bearing the onus of a weak settlement. This remained their secret almost as much as Anderson's mental crisis remained King's. They privately endorsed a weak settlement in order to promote a strong movement, privately sought King's release from jail and then criticized him for not staying there. They justified competitive maneuvers on the theory that their goals could not be advanced or protected without influence to offset King's. This was SNCC's classical revolutionary dilemma. To oppose their ally, they became more like what they said they opposed, beginning a cycle of imitation and rejection.

In later years, Wyatt Walker conceded that his manner toward the SNCC students was perhaps too “flint-faced,” but at the time he blamed their jealous insubordination for damaging the Albany Movement. He did not bother to address their grievances against him until Charles Jones made some headway in convincing Harry Belafonte that Walker's autocratic style was dividing the movement. This seized Walker's attention because he knew that Belafonte commanded King's attention, but even then he complained that Jones had “brainwashed” Belafonte with false tales about Albany. Belafonte, for his part, took the dispute privately to King and found him to be almost blithely philosophical. Walker and the students were not as different as they might appear, King replied.

To mitigate Walker's abrasiveness toward the SNCC students, King had hoped to use Bernard Lee, but it was now clear that Lee identified too closely with King to be effective in that role. Lee already had come to dress like King, walk like King, and even to imitate King's long, measured phrases. After talking with Belafonte, King called James Bevel and asked him to mediate between the SCLC and SNCC.

 

Bevel was in Mississippi, living on his small stipend from the SCLC. Still struggling to turn Jackson into Nashville, he was the foremost preacher among the SNCC students, and among the most unpredictable of their free spirits. A case in point was his recent marriage to Diane Nash. This union of SNCC leaders matched social opposites. Nash had been runner-up in Chicago's “Miss America” trials. Poised and proper, so light-skinned that she could pass for white, she had been raised in a middle-class Catholic family. Now she confronted a wild man from Itta Bena, Mississippi, a self-described example of the legendary “chicken-eating, liquor-drinking, woman-chasing Baptist preacher.” Their tempestuous romance, held together by the passion of the movement, had elements of Shakespearean richness to it, rearranged along lines of Negro American culture: she as an upper-class Kate and he as a vagabond Prince Hal.

Bob Moses found the newlyweds at Amzie Moore's house in Cleveland, north of Jackson. He had obtained release from the Pike County jail on a $1,000 appeal bond on December 6, having served thirty-seven days for disturbing the peace during the McComb student prayer march back in October. Moses emerged to find that time and fear had made him a relative stranger. Jerome Smith, one of the New Orleans students who had responded to James Farmer's plea to take up the first Freedom Ride, had been so inspired by reports of the outpost in McComb that he organized a Freedom Ride to the McComb Greyhound station in November, shortly after finishing his sentence at Parchman.
*
After a white mob beat them severely at the station, a bloodied Smith vowed to send another team of riders, and the next attempt, on December 1, attracted forty FBI agents, a squadron of police, a score of reporters, and a white mob of five hundred. The cordon of officers allowed the Negro riders to achieve the first-known peaceful integration of a bus-station waiting room in Mississippi history—it lasted three minutes, while their bags were being unloaded—but the mob took out some of its anger on the white reporters observing in the background. Simmons Fentress,
Time
's Atlanta bureau chief, was thrown into a plate-glass window, and several others were bruised or cut. The attack on the reporters prompted an outraged editorial in
The New York Times
, whose correspondent, Claude Sitton, believed he escaped a beating because the mob had mistaken him for an FBI agent. Sitton had moved on to cover King in Albany.

Meanwhile, U.S. District Court judge Sidney Mize effectively canceled the integration at McComb by banning further Freedom Rides. Judge Harold Cox upheld and extended the order, ruling that it did not conflict with federal law because the ICC ruling applied to Negroes whereas the injunction applied only to agitators. Burke Marshall was obliged to seek reversal of such blatant sophistry.

All this racial violence had subdued Negro McComb by the time Moses emerged from jail a few days after the attack on the reporters. John Hardy, one of his registration colleagues, had just survived a shotgun blast into a bedroom of the house where he was lodged in downtown McComb. Neither Hardy nor Moses could persuade people to attend the registration classes. The Masonic Temple was closed to SNCC. Moses, finding that Steptoe and the others wanted to rest for a time, decided that it was pointless to continue work in southwest Mississippi. With Hardy, Curtis Hayes, Hollis Watkins, and several other young people, he decamped for Amzie Moore's house in the Mississippi Delta. There he found Bevel and Nash, who, like himself, were freshly out of jail on appeal.

Although the three of them had vastly different personalities, they groped together toward a revised plan. Because the state was even tougher than they had thought, they decided to abandon hopes for alliances with Negro churches or businessmen and with white liberals. They resolved instead to scale down—to depend only on tiny cadres of proven young workers. Bevel's idea was to run Negro candidates for Congress in two Delta districts. He did not dream that they could win—indeed, part of the idea was that whites would not harass such a ludicrous effort—but he hoped that the campaigns would plant the very idea of voting in the minds of Negro citizens, 90 percent of whom were unregistered. The cadres then could build upon that idea in their registration classes, using live candidates and new dreams. Moses agreed to stay in Jackson as the unofficial campaign manager for Rev. R. L. T. Smith. Bevel went north into the Delta to Greenwood, near his hometown of Itta Bena, to work for Rev. Theodore Trammell. “We can't lose,” Smith declared when Mississippi whites allowed him, more or less as a novelty, to announce his candidacy on television.

Starting over in a new area, Moses was as philosophical about his tribulations around McComb as was Martin Luther King about Albany. “We had, to put it mildly, got our feet wet,” Moses wrote. “We now knew something of what it took to run a voter registration campaign in Mississippi.”

 

In Atlanta, Wyatt Walker recuperated quickly enough from the tangled passions of Albany to send to the Afro-American Newspapers his personal evaluation of the year gone by. Despite his frequent, vociferous criticisms of those in and around the civil rights struggle, Walker had developed in his first full year at SCLC a professional's detached eye for the political center. For American of the Year in 1961, Walker nominated the Attorney General. “Moved with decisiveness in Montgomery violence,” Walker wrote of Robert Kennedy. “Petitioned ICC for new ruling with teeth…. has given clear evidence that his department means business.”

Walker acknowledged few peers in composure, but he did humble himself before King's phenomenal personal ballast. Even as they returned together from their first ordeal in Albany, King was joking about the intense, conflicting pressures that had bombarded him there. “I had the displeasure of meeting the meanest man in the world,” he said drolly of Sheriff Chappell. Although stung by press criticism, the infighting among his allies, and the disintegration of friends (a fragile, recuperating Dr. Anderson was practically barricaded in his home, which renegade Albany Movement students pelted with tomatoes because of his failure to resume marching), King still was able to look amiably to a future of pain and glory coming at him almost randomly. What stuck in his throat more than Albany was the debacle in Kansas City. Less than forty-eight hours after leaving the Americus jail, King sat down to write a long letter to one of his family mentors in New York. Rev. O. Clay Maxwell was national president of the NBC's Sunday School Congress, from which King had just been removed as vice president. Having had made his own pained choice to stay with the National Baptist Convention, Maxwell wanted to know whether King intended to fight the banishment edict of the triumphant J. H. Jackson, who was away on a European tour that included a private meeting with Pope John XXIII.