Pillar of Fire (46 page)

In Washington, during an unseasonably late snowstorm, CBS television news pledged that its correspondent Roger Mudd would report nightly for the duration of the Senate filibuster from an outdoor perch on the Capitol steps. Emissaries from Walter Cronkite, Mudd's colleague, guaranteed Mrs. Peabody an appearance on the nightly news if she would bail out in time to film a network interview at a Jacksonville studio. She declined, sending word that she preferred to stay in jail with her new friends.

 

A
MONG THOSE
most shocked by the news from St. Augustine was the church lawyer Jack Pratt, who as a seminary student had reported to the celebrity prisoner's husband, Bishop Malcolm Peabody. With the permission of his CORR employer Robert Spike, Pratt flew south the next morning, April 1, and reached the jail just as it bulged with eighty-eight new demonstrators, pushing the week's total to nearly three hundred. Aside from seventy marching teenagers, the new arrivals included Chaplain William Sloane Coffin and Yale professor Jacques Bossiere, who delivered to Mrs. Peabody a reading copy of
L'Etranger
by Albert Camus, in French. At a crowded cell block press conference, Peabody mortified Sheriff Davis and amused the reporters with the comment that she had enjoyed her breakfast of hominy grits even though obliged to eat with her fingers. Davis, who made a show of his hospitality toward Peabody, hastened to fetch proper utensils and offer an apology. Later, while Pratt advised his client to downplay her chipper camaraderie with Sheriff Davis, in view of his sharply contrasting treatment of Negro prisoners, a visitor introduced himself as another Peabody. “I understand you're representing my mother,” said Rev. George Peabody of New York. “What are your qualifications?”

Pratt himself felt the sheriff's meaner side. Well past midnight, on the concurring authority of local judge Charles Mathis, Sheriff Davis refused to release any civil rights prisoners without stiff cash bonds ranging from $200 to upward of $2,000. He thought the whites might as well stay in jail—“These bums will all be back here for holding hands with niggers,” he said coldly—and he avoided discussion of the Negroes altogether. Pratt, with fellow itinerant counsel William Kunstler, pointed out that these extreme bail restrictions would buttress their petition to remove all the cases from state to federal court. Civil rights lawyers had developed the removal petition as a standard tactic, relying on a Reconstruction statute designed to protect former slaves from the vengeance of ex-Confederate judges.

Impressed, Sheriff Davis relented to approve a few standard, discounted release bonds written by a surety company, but by the next morning—after Peabody's second night in jail, with five prisoners sleeping on the floor even in the white women's cell—Davis again blocked all releases. His deputies tried to confine the lawyers in order to forestall their protest in court, to the point of shoving Kunstler and Pratt headlong across the waiting room. With the help of an early-bird reporter who investigated the commotion, the lawyers talked their way out to attend the emergency removal hearing in Jacksonville.

U.S. District Court Judge Bryan Simpson, a tall, white-haired Truman appointee known for his laconic habit of whittling on the bench, rebuffed the argument that civil rights defendants could not obtain a fair trial in state courts. “Somebody goes and sticks their head in a noose and then complains that the rope burns their neck,” he told Kunstler and Pratt, “I don't see how they have a great deal to complain about, as long as fundamental due process is accorded in the trial procedures.” Simpson also brushed aside testimony about police dogs and crowded cells, saying he was not about to second-guess or restrict the performance of local officers. Yet he did display a protective interest during the testimony of the fifteen-year-old prisoner, Annie Ruth Evans, sternly admonishing lawyers for the State of Florida that they must abide by that week's new Supreme Court ruling, which required counsel to address Negro witnesses by courtesy titles instead of first names. The Florida lawyers stumbled so painfully over the words “Miss Evans,” that it seemed to awaken a cautionary balance in Judge Simpson. While he formally remanded all three hundred cases back to Judge Mathis in St. Augustine, Simpson extracted a promise that local prosecutors would delay trial and punishment at least until May, affording Kunstler and Pratt time to pursue removal to federal jurisdiction on appeal.

This glimmer of judicial sympathy was more than enough to sustain a small celebration back in the St. John's County jail. Mary Peabody bailed out to address a mass meeting that night at First Baptist, where she praised the courage of St. Augustine's movement. “I feel as if a wall were crumbling,” she said. Pratt accompanied her on the flight back to Boston the next morning, to be greeted by Governor Peabody, Bishop Peabody, Rev. Virgil Wood, Rev. James Breeden, a phalanx of reporters, and a full motorcade of Massachusetts law enforcement. Martin Luther King sent a public telegram to the governor—“I have been so deeply inspired by your mother's creative witness in Florida”—and “Grandmother Peabody,” as a fresh national celebrity, soon extolled the promise of St. Augustine on NBC's
Today
show.

 

A
DRENALINE SUBSIDED
from Elk's Rest as soon as Peabody and the spring break volunteers returned to New England, and press observers focused on the harsh fact that segregation still stood. “Protesters Fail in St. Augustine,” declared the front page of the
New York Times
. Rest and bail jitters preoccupied the fresh veterans, so much that a frustrated Hosea Williams could not coax new jail volunteers from the mass meetings. King withdrew him temporarily after Williams publicly scolded local Negroes for undermining their own movement.

Local whites rallied to the offensive through April, beginning with a forceful statement of personal belief by Mayor Shelley. “I consider myself a segregationist,” he told reporters. “God segregated the races, as far as I'm concerned, when he made them a different color.” Yet Shelley also insisted that because his city lacked official segregation ordinances, the trespassing demonstrators must have some malicious ulterior purpose. In a rebuttal appearance on the
Today
show, Shelley argued that his city had enjoyed racial harmony before it was targeted by outsiders. Florida newspapers embraced his defense in headlines: “Mrs. Peabody's Act Seen Harmful to All.”

A reelection drive by Sheriff L. O. Davis became the most visible campaign of the spring Democratic primary. He wore a gun openly for the first time in his long career, saying he intended to protect himself from the likes of Hosea Williams, and told friends the daily tensions were worse even than the grisly case of the mangled pieces from forty-odd bodies that had washed up on local beaches two decades earlier, which he had attributed in the wartime hush to Nazi submarine attacks on offshore merchant vessels. Davis campaigned aggressively to secure white support. He told Negro audiences in Lincolnville that he did not seek or want their votes, using the epithet “nigger” to drive home his meaning. A vote count well above 70 percent made Sheriff Davis a significant new political force after the May 5 primary. Bristling confidently against the threat of renewed demonstrations, he deputized a volunteer militia and gave known Klan leaders the run of his office.

A quieter state of emergency gripped St. Augustine's leading citizens, many of whom generally avoided the new white militiamen as uncouth drunkards and roughnecks. Answering his doorbell on a Sunday afternoon, the owner of the local Ford dealership was dumbstruck to face one of his lowliest employees, who had ventured into the prime neighborhood not to the back door—and not in a desperate quest to secure a salary advance—but to say with aplomb that he was there for a social visit, just to talk.

“Who do you want to visit?” asked the incredulous Ford dealer.

“You.”

Horrified, the dealer fired the man summarily, and soon thereafter also fired Negro foreman Bungum Roberson, the pioneer parent of local school integration, on the assumption that Roberson was helping Robert Hayling pump brotherhood fantasies of primitive religion into every tranquil corner of society.

At Trinity Episcopal Church, the Ford dealer followed the guidance of the most learned Sunday School teacher, Dr. Hardgrove Norris, who buttressed his conservative theological teachings with arcane tidbits from anti-Communist literature. Knowing the names of three elderly women who had once served as nominal owners of the Communist
Daily Worker
, for instance, Dr. Norris held that Mary Peabody fit an established pattern of old ladies as conspiratorial “catspaws” for the Communist party. With A. H. “Hoopie” Tebeault, editor of St. Augustine's newspaper, Norris in May pushed a resolution through the vestry to shut off church contributions to the Episcopal diocese until it withdrew from the National Council of Churches. He detected socialist tendencies in the sermons of Rev. Charles Seymour, Trinity's rector since 1949. Seymour, in a rare public hint of conflict within white churches, told a television interviewer that “any or all of us ministers may be leaving town soon at the request of our constituents.”

 

F
ROM HIS SPEECH-MAKING
tours, King sent a succession of scouts to evaluate prospects in St. Augustine. His traveling aide Bernard Lee reported that adult leaders were thin and badly organized. Another King representative recommended a grand campaign to achieve negotiations with white officials while rebuilding the movement by door-to-door canvass. The city rejected negotiations, however, and all but a few Negro adults shied away from Hayling's leadership. Some NAACP stalwarts, such as Fannie Fulwood, never missed a Hayling mass meeting but refrained from demonstration as unwise. Others feared Klan violence and job reprisal, or were swayed by whites who demonized Hayling, and a few succumbed to partisan rivalries. Internal NAACP reports speculated with transparent satisfaction that “King is now having to back down from his endorsement of Dr. Hayling in order to save face.”

The St. Augustine project faltered for lack of a sponsoring minister within King's councils. During their two-day annual meeting in mid-April, the SCLC board members scarcely mentioned even the high-profile alternatives for renewed demonstrations in Birmingham and Danville, or a march on the U.S. Capitol to break the Senate filibuster. James Bevel lobbied for his Alabama voting crusade—to achieve historic redress for the Birmingham church bombing, he reminded King—and also to repair the national image of nonviolence after a rash of wildcat “brinksmanship” protests, which were feeding a white backlash. Board members knew, however, that Bevel would get nowhere while feuding so intensely with SCLC's executive director, Wyatt Walker. They relegated his Alabama plan to hallway caucuses along with other touchy matters, such as SCLC's empty treasury and columnist Joseph Alsop's public charge that King was harboring Communists.

Gathered at the Bibleway Church of Washington, D.C., the SCLC board members conducted business sessions through the usual exchange of collegial sermons, in a kind of pulpit variation on the baronial customs of Congress. One preacher dramatically summoned King to undertake a public fast against the Senate filibuster. Another hailed the previous year as a vindication for SCLC's model of crossover leadership from churches into politics, and a third proposed an SCLC expansion drive targeted through the Baptist ministerial associations. Wyatt Walker closed his lengthy review of four years' service with final notice that he was quitting effective June 15. For nearly nine months, since his first resignation in September, Walker had postponed departure while he secured another job. Out of respect for King, he only hinted at grievances over what he saw as chronic forgiveness toward aimless or insubordinate free spirits, particularly James Bevel. Walker maintained with philosophical resignation that King was losing touch with practical standards to the point of appearing scruffy at the edges—no longer so fastidious about new suits and silk ties, even a trifle indifferent about a frayed collar. In a farewell address of fiery pulpit oratory, Walker recalled the triumph of Birmingham with such impact that Ralph Abernathy rose to declare that Walker was indispensable, and begged him to withdraw his resignation. Daddy King headed off a stampede of acclamation with booming declarations that Walker deserved to make up his own mind, and interceded with a prayer of adjournment that assigned Walker's fate to heaven.

In mid-May, Wyatt Walker agreed to reconnoiter St. Augustine as his last official task at SCLC. He sketched a battle plan remarkably similar to his original blueprint for Birmingham. While favoring action campaigns over barnstorming, Walker warned King that “our operation appears to be raggedy.” He saw no stabilizing base among the Negro preachers of St. Augustine, and Hayling's legions of teenagers triggered the same authoritarian anxiety about childish disorder that made Walker so resentful of SNCC students. “There is a danger that our demonstrations will keep or assume the character of a minstrel show,” he wrote. The only advantages he perceived in St. Augustine were the vulnerability of its tourist-based economy and the unique, symbolic potential of segregation in the nation's oldest city.

King, who recognized drawbacks to every option, also weighed reminders from the past about the distorting perspective of his traveling engagements. For all the daily excitement of large crowds and police escorts, often with a buzz over rumored threats or a newly broken color barrier, these occasions were no more than thimbles of conversion that evaporated in reality, while civil rights eruptions made hard news in dozens of cities. Yet again, he had to decide whether to tear himself from the inertia of sermons, and whether another leap toward suffering would fortify the nonviolent message or merely aggravate the opposition. Eight years after the Montgomery bus boycott, his familiar dilemma touched the rudder of national politics.