Pillar of Fire (7 page)

As proof that human beings could engage the most deadening crises without falling into either of the classic polar traps—nihilism or blandness—Heschel held up the ideal of the Hebrew prophets. While facing, even welcoming, the destruction of themselves and their own people, the prophets remained suffused with redemptive purpose. Far from soaring off into saccharine self-persuasion, however, they made biting symbols out of daily pains and predicaments. “Moralists of all ages have been eloquent in singing the praises of virtue,” wrote Heschel. “The distinction of the prophets was in their remorseless unveiling of injustice and oppression….” Heschel's seminal study of the prophets had just been published in the United States, translated from the original German, and it gained the eager devotion of King and his fellow pastors because they had grown up with Moses and Isaiah in their pulpits. The distinctly molded personality of the Negro preacher, as recognized by W. E. B. Du Bois and memorialized by James Weldon Johnson in
God's Trombones
, was a cousin to the blazing psychic originals such as Jeremiah and Daniel—marked by passion, vivid images of slavery and deliverance, and arresting combinations of the earthy and sublime. To King and Heschel alike, the prophetic tradition came naturally as a grounding language.

At Chicago, they raised strikingly similar cries. “May the problem of race in America soon make hearts burn,” said King, “so that prophets will rise up…and cry out as Amos did, ‘Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.'” Heschel quoted the same passage from Amos, which he used in his book to illustrate the emotive force in the prophetic conception of justice as contrasted with the arid rationality of the Greek ideal. They both quoted theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Heschel's personal friend in New York and one of King's primary influences as a seminary student. When King declared that the durable sins of race stressed “the need for prophecy,” he did not mean the popular notion of foretelling but the prophecy described by Heschel as “the voice that God has lent to the silent agony,” through prophets able and willing to draw upon themselves the excess poison in the world. Their communion on this rich subject was a pleasant surprise to both men, who vowed to see more of each other, and for once King encountered an orator who reached for notes in his register. “Let there be a grain of prophet in every man!” Heschel exclaimed.

After generous applause, the Chicago delegates reacted cautiously to the summons for prophetic witness. Observers wryly noted that the only resolution they approved, an “Appeal to the Conscience of the American People,” called for no binding action by any of the participating religious bodies. No doubt many of the clergy had hoped to treat race with an insightful malediction, and were surprised to have the challenge shoved under their own collars. Reports of a contemporary scandal filtered in from a prosperous Chicago suburb, where civic groups blocked the local symphony's invitation to its first Negro performer, a violinist. “We just thought we were not the organization to crusade and pioneer in a controversial subject in the community,” said Geneva Palmer, president of the symphony association. “Nothing is integrated in Oak Park, you know.” Local ministers intervened, citing the mandate of the national religious conference, only to stimulate round-robin evasion on collateral issues, including a charge that the symphony conductor had pressed the integration because he was Jewish.
Time
magazine ridiculed the entire Chicago conference as another exercise of “doleful hand wringing” by theologians, who “proved themselves still unable to offer much wisdom.”

Undaunted, volunteer clergy resolved to continue the mission of the four-day conference by forming permanent local commissions across the country. A groping awkwardness persisted in their work. Intramural differences kept popping up even among the subdivisions of the major white groups, especially Protestants and Jews, and hostile archbishops all but shackled Catholics in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. A Catholic leader of the organizing coalition reported that no city began with even a communicating familiarity between the white and Negro clergy. Approaching such gaps in city after city, he found the bravest of recruits wanting to perceive the task not as a step into the unknown but as a restoration of an imagined past that somehow might “bring sanity back” into race relations. By fits and starts, those chastened and inspired by the Chicago conference placed the issue on the agendas of most of the upcoming church and synagogue conventions. Fledgling local commissions were meeting in thirty states by April, when King sent his first Birmingham volunteers to jail.

N
O ONE COULD GUESS
what bumps lay just ahead—certainly not the Vice President of the United States on a ceremonial visit to prepare for the four hundredth birthday of the nation's oldest city. In the false quiet before the first lasting reverberations rolled in and out of obscure places like St. Augustine, Florida, transforming people of every station, it remained possible to muffle the conflict over legal segregation with a few exertions on behalf of accommodation, and politicians of stature still managed to leave such details to the staff. On March 11 in St. Augustine, Lyndon Johnson waved expansively from the balcony of a restored Spanish mansion to a festive crowd that appreciated what the rare visit of a sitting Vice President meant to a small tourist town of fifteen thousand people. There were no Negro picket signs to mar the occasion—an invisible success Johnson took for granted. While his aide George Reedy broke away to make sure that the other parts of the racial truce were holding up, Johnson's motorcade rolled off to a shrine marking the first permanent outpost of European culture on North American soil.

At Mission Nombre de Dios, the Vice President slipped away briefly from his entourage during a private tour of the chapel. In one darkened alcove, a nervous priest showed him the small wooden casket of the Spanish explorer and
adelantado
Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who had named his new settlement St. Augustine—for the great African Bishop of Hippo, brooding genius of early Christianity, architect of its lasting accord with temporal governance in Rome—whose feast date, marking Augustine's death on August 28 in the year 430, Menéndez was celebrating aboard ship when the Florida coastline at long last appeared.

The
adelantado's
fleet chaplain said outdoor mass a few days later on September 8, 1565, planting a continuous Christian presence at Nombre de Dios, and Menéndez promptly marched up the coast to exterminate an explorer's colony of French Huguenots, thus renewing the religious wars of the Counter-Reformation on the western side of the Atlantic. From King Philip II of Spain, Menéndez had royal permission to bring five hundred African slaves into the New World, and while no proof survives that Menéndez himself used this license, entries in the mission registry about the Spaniards who stayed on in St. Augustine contain the earliest documentary slave records on the continent—dating more than fifty years before 1619, the commonly accepted beginning of African slavery in the future United States.
*

Nearly two centuries after Menéndez, the Spaniards tweaked their British enemies to the north by chartering Fort Mose, the first armed, independent settlement of free blacks in North America, just outside St. Augustine. (Enraged Protestant colonists in South Carolina prescribed, and more than once carried out, the penalty of castration against slaves who tried to escape to refuge in Spanish St. Augustine, and James Oglethorpe, the original governor of colonial Georgia, personally led prolonged, bloody expeditions against Fort Mose as an archevil haven for insurrectionary runaways and papists.) Soon after the British first gained control of Florida in 1763, causing the entire population of Fort Mose to evacuate with the Spaniards to Cuba, an enterprising Scotsman named Andrew Turnbull tried an experiment in the area by importing the largest mass of
white
indentured servants ever assembled in North America, “Turnbull's niggers” as they were called—Greeks, Italians, and some three hundred families from the island of Minorca off the coast of Spain. Before his indigo plantation succumbed to disease and disaster, large numbers of these laborers stole away to asylum in nearby St. Augustine. Their Minorcan descendants were among those on hand to greet Vice President Johnson.

Fortune hid many exotic layers of American antiquity in Florida, which in modern times came to specialize in the sale of dredged swamplands and sunshine dreams. For generations, established St. Augustine families had held or traded franchises on proven tourist attractions. Purists on the city's historical commission struggled valiantly to put disclaimers on the more egregious frauds, such as the Oldest House and the working site of Ponce de León's Fountain of Youth, but facts fell lame before imagination. The Alligator Farm relied upon the sheer atmosphere of the Ancient City, and some historical amusements—most notably Ripley's Believe It Or Not—shook loose to offer daredevil exhibits of tabloid wonder, such as the Calf With Two Heads. In the 1930s, some polls showed Robert Ripley to be the most admired man in America, just ahead of FBI Director Hoover and far above FDR.

Since then, St. Augustine guarded a share of Florida's migrations by promoting buncombe exaggerations on the free enterprise side of tourism, balanced by a rigid uniformity against public controversy. Typically, Archbishop Joseph Hurley preached with genuine horror against the reforms submitted to the new Vatican Council in Rome, especially the proposal that the clergy turn their faces instead of their backs to the congregation during mass. To Hurley, this gesture invited needless popular doubt about the clergy's claim to sovereign, lineal authority direct from Jesus. He and city leaders treated racial matters as unmentionables, whether historical or current, except for the colonnaded downtown square known as the Old Slave Market. As breezily described by buggy drivers, the site fascinated tourists as the relic of a storied past.

The priest who guided Vice President Johnson through the old mission was a historian, in charge of Catholic preparations for the four hundredth birthday of the nation's oldest city, upcoming in 1965. President Kennedy had appointed a federal commission to plan for the Quadricentennial—Johnson was there to swear in its members—and the priest seized his private opportunity to communicate some quieter aspects of a heritage he thought worth reflection: the true dates, the neglected Spanish history in America, the religious toll of seesaw colonial wars, the sacredness of local ground not only to the Vatican but also to the Orthodox Church, which had built a shrine to the first Greek settlement in the Western Hemisphere. To the priest's discomfort, however, Johnson remained silent for a long time before speaking his first words of the tour. “Fifty-five,” he said. Somewhat unnerved, the priest noticed that the Vice President was staring at a sign beneath the wooden coffin. He explained that indeed Menéndez the Conqueror had died at that age in 1574, and that some 350 years later Spain had donated the coffin back to the mission he had founded in St. Augustine.

“Fifty-five,” Johnson repeated. From his own line of work, the priest recognized a mortality reverie without knowing that Johnson was approaching his own fifty-fifth birthday that August, still haunted by a three-pack-a-day smoking habit and a massive heart attack eight years earlier. Once outside, Johnson snapped back to full energy before an honor guard of Catholic schoolchildren. Instead of waving to them, he insisted on shaking each one's hand, picked up several for hugs and chitchats and ear-pulls, to squeals of delight, and then, just as suddenly tired again, he announced that he was heading to the hotel for a massage and a nap.

 

I
N THE
N
EGRO
neighborhood called Lincolnville, George Reedy spent a day of intense mediation at the home of Mrs. Fannie Fulwood, president of the local NAACP. Threats and chaos were normal to him, but to Fulwood—the humbly upright daughter of a railroad worker, who in her forties kept up an arduous schedule as housemaid for the commanding general at the National Guard armory—excitement had grown almost unbearable since the marathon creation of her letter asking Johnson not to give his approval for $350,000 in federal assistance to celebrate the four hundredth birthday of a city that still excluded Negro citizens by legal segregation. There had been three formal readings of her draft at a board meeting, plus a consultation with a Negro college president to make sure the language was presentable, and when Johnson replied only days ago that “no event in which I will participate in St. Augustine will be segregated,” a jolt of hope dissolved into panicky questions. Did Johnson mean that the Fairchild defense plant would have to integrate its workforce before he would visit, or merely that Negroes might accompany him to the plant? Was a visit to a segregated company by private invitation not itself a segregated event? Did the pledge mean that at least one Negro would be added to President Kennedy's all-white Quadricentennial Commission? Was the commission an “event”? What about the “white only” signs downtown—did they make it a segregated event for the Vice President to stroll near the Slave Market?

The implications of Johnson's pledge burned so hotly through the wires that the chief aide to Florida Senator George Smathers soon turned up on Fannie Fulwood's doorstep. Later came George Reedy, a silver-haired ex-socialist from Chicago, long in the service of the ex-segregationist Vice President from Texas. Both talked long hours to please the NAACP delegation, but it seemed that every time either one called contacts in Washington or white St. Augustine, who in turn were checking with other contacts, new semantic obstacles arose. Word once came back that any Negroes who did attend the big banquet for the Vice President must do so as “guests” rather than as paying ticket holders, which raised new questions about whether a social exception broke segregation. Whose guests would they be? What if the Negroes preferred to pay on an equal footing? Negotiations dragged on so long that Fulwood had to duck out to catch up on her cleaning.

These talks themselves marked a drastic leap for the local NAACP, which had stood aloof from the two previous blips of racial protest in town. In 1960, a mob had punished and dispersed a spontaneous student sit-in at Woolworth's that was inspired by the publicity out of Greensboro, North Carolina. Some months later, to dispel the mood of abject failure he found back home on returning from school, a gifted local student named Henry Thomas decided to apply some of the more precise nonviolent techniques he had observed as a freshman at Howard University in Washington. With recruited friends, he synchronized watches for a convergent movement on McCrory's, but Thomas alone showed up at the lunch counter. Worse for him, the manager was amiably puzzled about what this familiar local Negro thought he was doing, then amused when Thomas advised him to call the police. Everyone laughed when Thomas stretched forth his hands to be handcuffed, and the officer, whom he knew, merely waved him along to straighten things out. Finally in jail, Thomas endured a look of mortal disappointment from his mother as she apologized to the desk sergeant, a neighbor, for the inexplicable lapse of decency that had come over the first Thomas ever to reach college. After an extended jailhouse sanity interview by the white family doctor of his childhood, Thomas was released to enduring ridicule from both races.

Since then Dr. Joseph Shelley, the makeshift sanity examiner, had been elected mayor of St. Augustine, and Henry Thomas had become a battered, unsung hero of the 1961 Freedom Rides—other than John Lewis, the only one of the original fourteen Riders to survive both the Alabama ambushes and the medieval privations of Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary. Left behind in the sticky local fears of Negro St. Augustine, the adults agitated and goaded themselves over their paralysis until one night the pastor of First Baptist Church froze up inside while presiding over an NAACP chapter meeting—remaining dysfunctional, as though struck dumb—and when none of the usual professionals came forward, Roscoe Halyard “volunteered” Fannie Fulwood into the chair. Her credentials were lifelong service and a strong belief in memorials for redress, but Dr. Robert Hayling, as youth adviser of her NAACP chapter, pushed aggressively from behind in keeping with a lesson from Henry Thomas: that it was difficult for confrontation to be taken seriously amid old hometown ties, and that the spark of extraordinary personal challenge was more likely to ignite among strangers. As the new Negro dentist in St. Augustine, Hayling did not see a life's story behind most faces in town. He thought a few picket lines were just the thing to shake these people out of their first-name illusions.

The threat of pickets stirred up the negotiations at Fannie Fulwood's house, opening to Johnson's aide Reedy some of the internal politics on both sides. From New York, Roy Wilkins called to remind his St. Augustine branch that no picketing proposals had been cleared through NAACP channels, which were nearly as centralized and formal as the FBI's, and that pickets could cause an “international incident” owing to the presence of the Spanish ambassador. Loyalists spoke up for Wilkins and the tested chain of command, but Hayling's supporters grumbled about how the NAACP “national boys” were always telling them what to do, posing as the pilots of a finely tuned national policy machine even though the only telephone in their statewide Florida NAACP office had been disconnected many months ago for failure to pay a $159 phone bill. Pickets were simple. All they needed were a handful of brave people, some cardboard, and unobjectionable American messages. What could be wrong with that?

For Reedy, the scandalous threat of Negro pickets actually gained leverage on the white side of town to secure Johnson's most visible pledge of an integrated banquet. When the whites also agreed to hold a special City Commission meeting the very next day on the more lasting segregation issues beyond the banquet, such as the “colored” signs and the all-white city library, Reedy leaned on the NAACP members to give up the pickets for the deal. Almost immediately, he had to shift direction again to offset a wave of trepidation that ran through some of Fulwood's colleagues. Exactly who would be willing to go now that the banquet was more than a bargaining issue? A lack of suitable clothing and other deferential excuses welled up, along with the fear of lost jobs. Some told Reedy of receiving phone threats already. They knew there could be no more sensitive breach of segregation than a banquet at the Ponce de León Hotel, the double-towered Moorish castle built almost on the scale of the Alhambra by Henry Flagler—partner of the original John D. Rockefeller and pioneer tycoon of Florida fantasy. The first Negroes to present themselves there as guests instead of doormen would make themselves as conspicuous as the Ponce itself.