Pillar of Fire (38 page)

Future critics would uphold “A Change Is Gonna Come” as the outpouring of Sam Cooke's accumulated artistry, but he had the misfortune to perform his new release on national television the same Friday the Beatles arrived at the Plaza Hotel with “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Not yet fully aware how completely their acclaim swamped him and his song, Cooke flew south to visit the Miami training camp of his friend Cassius Clay, who still boastfully ignored ten-to-one odds that the heavyweight champion would crush him. Uncannily, the Beatles followed Cooke to Miami, too, and climbed into the ring with Clay to promote each other in front of the chortling press. “You guys ain't as dumb as you look!” Clay shouted to the Beatles. “No, but you are,” replied John Lennon in his deadpan put-on, and Clay pantomimed as mighty Tarzan standing over four pretended knockout victims.

 

I
N
M
ISSISSIPPI
, Byron de la Beckwith stood trial for shooting Medgar Evers in the back. The defendant regularly entered the Jackson courtroom with a swagger and a smile in spite of the evidence against him: his fingerprint on the murder rifle, his ownership of the telescopic sight. He acknowledged making the statements offered to establish motive, such as his courthouse speech (“I believe in segregation like I believe in God”) and his letter to the National Rifle Association (“For the next fifteen years we in Mississippi will have to do a lot of shooting to protect our wives and children from bad niggers and sorry white folk.”) Beckwith took his flamboyant gamesmanship so far as to refuse an alibi and to toy with taking credit for the deed. From jail, he submitted to an outdoor magazine a droll allegory under the heading, “Shooting at Night in Summertime for Varmints.”

His confident predictions of acquittal were so widely shared that supporters scheduled a victory dinner in his honor and the widow, Myrlie Evers, prepared an advance statement of protest against the verdict, but the jury returned on Friday, February 7, deadlocked seven to five for Beckwith. Reporters wrote of shock that some Mississippi jurors held out for conviction of a white man for murdering a Negro integrationist; the correspondent for the
Saturday Evening Post
called the mistrial “a victory for the law.” At a mass meeting that night, Bob Moses tried to calm celebrations by reminding his listeners that the recent ex-governor Ross Barnett had strolled publicly into the courtroom to shake Beckwith's hand during jury deliberations. Two nights later, Moses introduced the itinerant Al Lowenstein to tell COFO's statewide convention of ambitious plans for a summer project. As a sobering indicator of fear, some COFO delegates proposed that farmers be allowed to use assumed names even on the “Freedom Registration” rolls within the movement.

 

S
EVEN
N
EGROES
were summoned, but none chosen, for the Beckwith jury. Throughout considerable controversy over the all-white panel, Mississippi's legally required exclusion of women from the ninety-five prospective jurors escaped notice as common practice, especially in capital cases. National assumptions about gender rested comfortably apart from the furor over racial identity and citizenship, which accounted for the amused bewilderment that greeted Virginia Rep. Howard Smith's proposal to add the word “sex” to the civil rights bill. “Now I am very serious about this amendment,” Smith told his colleagues on February 8, a rare Saturday session in Washington toward the end of the nonstop debate. On the floor of the House, Smith read a letter—“to show you how some of the ladies feel about discrimination against them”—he claimed to have received from a Nebraska woman upset about the nation's “surplus of spinsters.” He explained through interruptions of howling laughter her tart demand that Congress equalize the sexual ratio in the population, and recited her indignant charge that “instead of assisting these poor unfortunate females in obtaining their ‘right' to happiness, the Government has on several occasions engaged in wars which killed off a large number of eligible males.”

Judiciary Committee chairman Emanuel Celler of New York, floor manager of the civil rights bill, rose to oppose the amendment as unnecessary because of the “delightful accord” that had prevailed in his own household for fifty years. “I usually have the last two words,” he told Smith, “and those words are, ‘Yes, dear.'” The House leaders engaged in a tongue-in-cheek duel of henpecked witticism. Celler found it “anomalous that two men of our age should be on opposite sides of this question.”

“I'm sure we are not,” said Smith.

“As long as there is a little levity here,” said Celler, “let me repeat what I heard some years ago, which runs as follows: ‘Lives there a man with hide so tough/Who says, ‘Two sexes are not enough.'”

Eleven of the twelve female representatives stood indignantly to challenge the jocular mood. Had there been any doubt that “women were a second class sex, the laughter would have proved it,” Martha Griffiths of Michigan told the House. She demanded respect for the amendment on its own merits—not as a Southern ploy to kill the civil rights bill. Technically, Smith's amendment applied to the declaration and enforcement sections of Title VII, which outlawed racial discrimination in employment, but Griffiths accused Congress of exploiting women over Negroes in many other respects since the Civil War. “Your great-grandfathers were willing as prisoners of their own prejudice to permit ex-slaves to vote, but not their own wives…” she declared in a blistering, overwrought speech. “Mr. Chairman, a vote against this amendment today by a white man is a vote against his wife, or his widow, or his daughter, or his sister.”

Republican Katherine St. George of New York rushed immediately to her support, saying that women, too, had been treated as chattels, and were not even mentioned in the Constitution. “We do not want special privilege,” she exclaimed. “We do not need special privilege. We outlast you. We outlive you. We nag you to death. So why should we want special privileges? I believe that we can hold our own. We are entitled to this little crumb of equality. The addition of that little, terrifying word, ‘s-e-x,' will not hurt this legislation in any way.”

Embolded, Southern opponents of civil rights stampeded in earnest for passage. “Unless this amendment is adopted,” cried George Andrews of Alabama, “the white woman of this country would be drastically discriminated against in favor of a Negro woman!” A Georgian gallantly observed that no Southern gentleman could vote to leave women deprived of employment rights guaranteed to Negroes. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina agreed, saying, “I know this Congress will not be party to such an evil.”

By then, legislative historians would record, “pandemonium reigned on the floor.” Merriment turned to nervous titters, faces flushed, and panic spread among the marshaled forces of civil rights. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach had warned that chairman Smith might try a desperate ambush of this sort once the bill was wrested from his Rules Committee to the floor, but no one had anticipated that the segregationist Smith could bait the trap with a clear up-or-down vote on female rights. Unexpectedly, Smith's goading and Celler's condescension aroused a storm. Male representatives did not want to speak against the surprise amendment for fear of seeming anti-woman, or anti-white, and the Johnson administration prevailed upon only one female loyalist to speak for the opposition. Rep. Edith Green of Oregon—lamenting that “after I leave the floor today, I shall be called an ‘Uncle Tom,' or perhaps ‘Aunt Jane'”—told the House she did “not believe this is the time or place for this amendment.” It was a difficult decision for her, having watched only recently a female editor being led up the fire escape through the back door of the all-male National Press Club. “I hear more jokes about women in politics than about women in any other field,” said Green. Nevertheless, she said, for every slight to women, “there has been ten times, maybe a hundred times, as much humiliation for the Negro woman, for the Negro man and the Negro child, yes, and for the Negro baby who is born into a world of discrimination.”

Off the floor, administration lobbyists scrambled to remind representatives of the hard parliamentary realities ahead in the filibuster graveyard of the Senate. President Johnson vociferously opposed even the slightest amendment to the civil rights bill, saying the bill must survive the two chambers in identical form. Otherwise, the dominant Southern chairmen would bury the legislation in an inter-house conference committee. A hundred arguments tugged at the coat sleeves of the representatives who lined up to vote. “We've won! We've won!” shrieked a jubilant supporter of the National Woman's Party as Smith's amendment gained approval, 168-133. For this startling breach of decorum, attendants hauled her bodily from the House gallery.

Only a short weekend determined the impact of the surprise amendment to the civil rights bill. Constitutional expert Alexander Bickel scolded the House for what he called “the apples-and-bananas fallacy…burdening with the regulation of bananas an agency already sufficiently overwhelmed with the problem of apples,” but other observers dismissed the change in the lighthearted spirit of the Smith-Celler colloquy. The
Washington Post
quipped that the vote made it “pretty plain…who's head of the House up there on the Hill.”
Newsweek
dedicated the amendment to May Craig, “the frilly-bonneted Maine reporter seen so often on TV.” Serious implications did not register, and powerful industries that advertised and regimented employment as much or more by sex as by race—female stewardesses, male pilots, legions of low-paid telephone operators, secretaries, and nurses—were not inclined to stand publicly against the tide of racial reform.

“Smith outsmarted himself,” said a Michigan Republican in the House. “At this point there was no way you could sink the bill.” On Monday night, February 10, with the gavel banging for order and bedlam threatening in the corridors, the full House voted by roll call on final passage of H.R. 7152, the omnibus civil rights act of 1964—ten titles of which outlawed segregation in schools, public accommodations, and federally assisted programs, while one title outlawed both racial and sexual discrimination in employment. When the tally rolled to decisive approval, 290-130, floor manager Emanuel Celler nearly collapsed with joy over what he called the zenith of his forty-one years in Congress. “I sort of feel like I climbed Mount Everest,” he said.

President Johnson jubilantly worked telephones from the White House. “I'm proud of you,” he told Majority Leader Carl Albert, who gamely replied that “we stayed put” even though he feared Oklahoma voters “may take me out” over the bill. (“You should see the telegrams I got from home today,” Albert told Johnson. “Gosh, they were awful.”) Johnson rushed on to consult advisers about whether to praise Albert by name in public statements—“You reckon he wants to be congratulated?”—and about tactical pressures for the Senate. Recognizing that Southern senators were stalling civil rights behind the tax-cut bill—sabotaging tax negotiators until “they couldn't pee a drop”—Johnson instantly proposed to Robert Kennedy and Nicholas Katzenbach that they flip the Senate calendar ahead to civil rights “and then let these tax boys wonder whether we're gonna let the tax bill get through or not.” Katzenbach chuckled respectfully at Johnson's giddy schemes. “Whatever you want,” Johnson told Kennedy, “I'll be for.”

Celebrations erupted that night among an unusual combination of lobbyists. To Robert Spike of the Commission on Religion and Race, plus the hordes of church letter-writers and ministerial visitors supervised by his new Washington coordinator, James Hamilton, the most gratifying positive votes came from fifty-four of fifty-five representatives from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and from eight of the twelve upper plains states Republicans. Jane O'Grady of the garment workers union had stayed up all Sunday night baking Equality Cookies, embossed with an equal sign, which her cadre of volunteers shared with allied message runners, mimeograph operators, and phone managers.

The two chief civil rights lobbyists did not get any cookies. A thirteen-year-old boy banged at a door of the House Gallery with the news that President Johnson was calling lawyer Joseph Rauh and NAACP representative Clarence Mitchell at their temporary office in the Congressional Hotel. Mitchell and Rauh ran anxiously to a pay phone, unaccustomed to emergency calls from the White House. Both of them had spent careers opposing Johnson as a Texas senator, and a Johnson partisan actually had decked Rauh as a liberal intruder outside the LBJ suite at the Democratic convention in 1960. Now Johnson bellowed at them as civil rights commander: “Why are you still there? You fellows get on over to the Senate and get busy.”

N
IGHT RIDERS
shot the Hayling bulldog late on Valentine's evening, and within a month, by the patchwork circuitry of the movement era, the plight of St. Augustine engaged theologians throughout New England. In December, the parents of the four juveniles incarcerated since the July sit-ins had capitulated to Judge Charles Mathis of St. Augustine, offering pledges that their children would forgo demonstrations and obey a nine o'clock curfew until adulthood, as the judge required. Even so, Mathis refused to release the youths for Christmas, with a hard determination that stifled protest and celebration over the four young heroes. Fannie Fulwood did not refer to them in January when she gained audience with the city commissioners. Still seeking a biracial committee, she gave them assurance that Hayling had resigned his NAACP post and would not be a participant, but her surrender, like that of the parents, did not go far enough for them. The commissioners wanted to know why Mrs. Fulwood had not retracted her written complaints to Washington about segregation in the upcoming Quadricentennial, which they felt endangered the city's hoped-for $350,000 federal subsidy. They rejected her petitions, and expressed confidence that racial friction would take care of itself now that Hayling was out of the leadership.

Vigilantes found harsher ways to take care of aspiring Negroes. They firebombed a car owned by Charles Brunson, a deaf-mute employed at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind (alma mater of Ray Charles), while Brunson and his wife were attending a parents meeting. On Friday night, February 7, they burned the home of Bungum Roberson, another parent who had volunteered for the first year of court-ordered school integration at Fullerwood Elementary School. By the following Friday, when small-town St. Augustine buzzed with rumors about likely targets, Hayling stood guard against something more serious than cross burnings in his yard. At midnight, just after calls confirmed that a gasoline-soaked tire had ignited the car and garage of Rev. J. H. McKissick, pastor of First Baptist, warnings that Hayling's dental office was next sent him racing to protect his livelihood. In his absence, a fusillade tore into his home at 1:25
A.M.
Four shotgun blasts destroyed windows and furniture, and deer rifles penetrated the walls. Mrs. Hayling and two daughters escaped injury, but a .30-caliber bullet killed their bulldog in the front hallway.

An enraged Hayling moved his family to safety in Cocoa Beach, then told confidants in St. Augustine that it was time to put in the phone call to Martin Luther King. He had resisted taking this step, because nonviolent preachers were not to his taste as an Air Force veteran and freethinker, scornful of religion. Still, seeing no better alternative, he managed to locate King on speaking tour in California. King had followed St. Augustine among a hundred other simmering movements in 1963, and now said he wanted to help, but he could not see Hayling until his next trip to Florida three weeks later. When Hayling pressed the emergency, King steered him to Rev. C. K. Steele, president of King's Florida affiliates. Steele had developed influential contacts in his home town of Tallahassee, the state capital, since leading a bus boycott there in 1956, and he used them to arrange an audience for Hayling and himself with an aide to Governor Farris Bryant. The aide promised to look into Klan violence around St. Augustine.

Hayling flew at his own expense to New York, and tried without success to patch up his feud with NAACP headquarters. Then he talked his way into the Washington office of Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, who assured him that the federal government was monitoring St. Augustine. Hayling complained that no one made inquiries at his home since the shooting—not the police nor the FBI—and that the only individuals who had been punished for the September Klan beatings were the victims. He called the White House to remind the President of the promises he made in St. Augustine the previous spring, and got through to an aide who was familiar with the NAACP correspondence about the Quadricentennial, but not with any promises made by the former Vice President. Everywhere, Hayling lamented, he ran into double talk. “This is my last swing,” he told a reporter for the Negro weekly,
Jet
, pronouncing himself on the verge of giving up the search for allies.

Although none of these appeals reached the President, a bizarre coincidence drew Johnson's attention to the threat of violence in St. Augustine. On the night of February 25, the President convened his security advisers in the White House family quarters to address intelligence warnings that Cuban kamikaze pilots planned to assassinate him two days later in Florida, by crashing small airplanes into
Air Force One
or his transport helicopter. FBI Director Hoover counseled the utmost caution, especially in light of swirling rumors that Cuban agents may have been involved in the murder of President Kennedy three months earlier. Secretary of State Rusk and other Cabinet officers debated how to protect Johnson without jeopardizing intelligence sources or letting on that the government was rattled. General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, developed plans for Air Force fighters to scramble from the Florida bases where the President would land and take off. After the meeting, Johnson fussed privately to Defense Secretary McNamara that “cops and robbers” excesses could consume the whole budget, and that the ever-growing Air Force protection squadrons, which were bound to be noticed, would be “indefensible politically.”
*
McNamara conspired with him to hide the squadrons at extremely high altitudes, saying he did not think jet escorts would be “worth a damn” against propeller-driven kamikazes, anyway.

On February 27, President Johnson flew into a compounded security crisis near Jacksonville, Florida. With military and civilian units primed for air attack on his life, one dynamite explosion derailed thirty-two railroad cars in St. Augustine, and a second blast struck fifteen miles to the west—halfway between St. Augustine and Johnson's helicopter destination at Palatka, where he dedicated excavations for the ill-fated Cross-Florida Canal. The two bombs severed rail lines along the coast, blowing freight cars across highway arteries and snarling automobile traffic. Presidential guards dreaded a third bomb that never came.

That night, President Johnson angrily pounded the lectern at a Democratic fund-raiser in the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach. “This criminal action must stop now!” he shouted, and announced that he had ordered J. Edgar Hoover by telephone to send “one of the greatest inspectors” into St. Augustine. His outburst startled the assembled guests and reporters, who, unaware of the kamikaze threats, frowned at what seemed an extreme, unpresidential reaction to yet another bombing in the year-old labor strike against the Florida East Coast Railway. By then, Hoover already had dispatched FBI inspector Joseph Sullivan with a team of thirty FBI agents to lead a massive federal-state investigation of the ongoing war between the railroad unions—angry over company refusal to pay a ten-cent-per-hour wage increase prescribed by arbitration—and the combative, eccentric railroad president, Edward Ball of St. Augustine, a DuPont heir known for his nightly toast over a glass of bourbon: “Confusion to the enemy.” Within three weeks, Sullivan's team would arrest union sympathizers on sabotage charges.

Hayling, for his part, watched federal agents swarm over St. Augustine just as he had hoped, but could only regret that they had no mandate to investigate the violent defense of segregation. On March 6, he led a small caravan from St. Augustine to Orlando for the Florida meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, only to find that King had canceled his appointment with them to join a freedom march of ten thousand at the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort. In his place, they met with the SCLC director of affiliates, Rev. C. T. Vivian, a pioneer of the Freedom Rides who had served with James Lawson as a mentor to the Nashville student movement. Vivian promptly visited St. Augustine himself, but he further disappointed the Hayling delegation with word that SCLC would not adopt a group with so little local support. The Negro pastors of their city were passive and afraid, he said, and much of the NAACP leadership seemed to agree with segregationists that Hayling was too abrasive. Until they could build up their own movement, Vivian could offer only what he had provided Golden Frinks of North Carolina the previous fall: an appeal to King's friends in the New England clergy. He offered to help recruit seminarians for demonstrations over spring break.

For Hayling, the prospect of student pilgrims was an enormous letdown from dreams of rescue by Dr. King, let alone from his hopes for FBI protection. He derided the scheme as futile, but his NAACP remnant asked Vivian to recognize them as a new SCLC chapter. On March 11, before they could get their SCLC stationery printed, Hayling composed a letter to King's only affiliate in the North. “Spring Vacation is a time when college students from all over the nation head south to the sunny beaches of Florida,” he began, then exhorted students to stop short of Daytona Beach at the end of March and join the “struggle for human rights in St. Augustine.”

Hayling's letter and a host of phone calls placed the plight of St. Augustine before the small network of clergy and theologians running the Massachusetts SCLC chapter. Its president, Rev. Virgil Wood, had served until recently on the SCLC board from his home church in Lynchburg, Virginia. Of all his campaigns, the violent police repressions in Danville the previous June still haunted Wood, who had survived one terrifying march when nearly fifty of his cohorts were hospitalized, he believed, only by maintaining a desperate contact with his captor. (“I got his eyes and wouldn't let his eyes go,” he told movement veterans.) Shortly afterward, Wood had proposed that he relocate his family to establish new SCLC chapters in the North. He sensed in his colleagues a suspicion that he was shell-shocked and battle-weary, deserting them for self-preservation, which he knew to be partly true, and therefore he was supremely grateful to Daddy King for declaring gruffly that he thought Wood's Northern expansion was a fine move for SCLC, whether it offended Roy Wilkins or not.

Wood had obtained employment as director of the Blue Hill Christian Center, an experimental parish in the Negro slums of Boston sponsored by his former seminary, the prestigious Andover-Newton. Blue Hill ran a tutoring center, a shelter, a “mothers' club” nursery for working parents, and a street ministry featuring a radio worship hour at noon on Saturdays. After the March on Washington, Wood and former classmates had recruited fifteen Boston clergy to go south in the first of several waves supporting Golden Frinks and his Spontaneous Movement Youth Choir in Williamston, North Carolina. Now, three weeks before Easter, the staff and volunteers of Massachusetts SCLC solicited a second line of recruits for Hayling in St. Augustine. “
This is not a vacation
,” they stressed in the application form mailed to seminaries and college chaplains in New England. “…Students should previously secure a source of bail….” Professor Harvey Cox of Andover-Newton wrote a capsule history of the struggle to end segregation in St. Augustine before its Quadricentennial.

With James Breeden, Paul Chapman, and other core clergy from Wood's SCLC chapter, Cox approached three prominent Episcopal bishops about escorting the student demonstrators to Florida. The bishops declined to go when they could not coax a courtesy invitation from their counterpart bishop in Florida. Their deference to church protocol produced grumbling within their own households, and the wives of the SCLC clergy obtained substitute commitments from the wives of all three bishops. “If you never see me again, look out for your father,” said Esther Burgess, wife of the first elected Negro bishop in the history of mainstream American churches, to her children. One of her companions, Mary Peabody—a Boston Brahmin of highest pedigree, daughter-in-law of the founder of Groton School, wife of Bishop Malcolm Peabody, mother of Massachusetts Governor Endicott Peabody—caused a small stir from the moment she made her way down to the Blue Hill Christian storefront for hurry-up training as a nonviolent witness.

 

A
S IN
F
LORIDA
, white vigilantes of Mississippi mobilized in shadows cast by their political leaders. To preserve a unified white vote, Governor Paul Johnson sponsored bills to bar electoral machinery and political opportunity from the negligible Republican party of Mississippi. The legislature authorized two hundred new state troopers with special powers to control racial disturbance, and in February, seeking to deter any summer “invasion” by Northern students, Jackson's Mayor Allen Thompson gathered his heavily reinforced police battalion—including a riot squad in gas masks, with a fresh arsenal of two hundred shotguns and a new, custom-built armored wagon called “Thompson's Tank”—to pose in parade-ground formation for news cameras. “There will be no unlawful marching and peaceful picketing,” he told
Newsweek
as he described the city's emergency preparations to hold as many as 25,000 prisoners.

Almost simultaneously, on February 15, two hundred men met secretly in Brookhaven to create the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan as a more disciplined, commando-style splinter group from the parent Klan. With theological language that protested earthly corruption (“Selfishness is the festive queen among humankind, and multitudes forget honor, justice, love and Almighty God, and every Christian principle in order to do homage to her”), Samuel Bowers of Laurel summoned Klan converts to a purifying war against Satanism as manifested in the Communist yoke of civil rights. “We are men who humbly submit to the Will of Almighty God, and who beseech Him for Guidance in our works,” each new member pledged at initiation, “but who will not under any circumstances see the Nation and its Constitution destroyed without violent, Physical resistance….”