Pillar of Fire (76 page)

Cousin Oriole Bailey told them that in order to get her chores done back in the old days she had staked toddler Lyndon outside in the dusty yard, where he played to the end of the tether rope and pulled on it to go farther.

A
HANDFUL OF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENTS
proceeded directly from the crush of Atlantic City to the hot Snopesian stillness of Danielsville, Georgia (pop. 362), for the Lemuel Penn murder trial. Reporter Paul Good counted twenty-three Coca-Cola signs hanging from buildings around the courthouse lawn, where a historical marker noted the first use of surgical ether by local-born physician Crawford Long in 1842. An uncovered staircase rose along the exterior wall into an unlit courtroom balcony strictly segregated for Negroes, but the judge otherwise ran an informal trial to the point of praising from the bench the lunch dishes that the women's club had thrown together for the week's occasion.

When prosecutors presented a string of FBI witnesses on the conspicuous vigilante rampage by Klavern 244, a defense lawyer casually scoffed, “There's no crime in Georgia against intimidating colored people.” Garage owner Herbert Guest, whom the state grand jury had declined to indict, testified that he had lost all memory of his sworn statement. Loretta Lackey sat mute on the stand, refusing instruction to speak, but she could not endure testimony by a defense psychiatrist that impeached her husband's confession as the delusion of a subnormal “paranoid personality” who had turned against his friends, possibly out of anxiety over a misshapen head. In the hallway she cried out, “Doctor, does that mean my husband is crazy?”

The defense case, which consumed less than two hours on Friday, September 4, portrayed not only the defendants but the entire region as victims of big shots such as the bushwhacked Lieutenant Colonel Penn and his companions. “I wasn't no officer,” summarized the lead defense lawyer. “Officers have a pretty good deal, we all know that.” In a peroration—“my mind is boiling”—his co-counsel exhorted the jurors to stand against “the untold resources of the federal government” and its “howling mob” of preying carpetbaggers that had swarmed down from FBI headquarters under instructions, “Don't come back until you bring us white meat!” The jury recessed to a truck stop for Friday evening supper and then acquitted the defendants Cecil Myers and Howard Sims eighty-seven minutes later. Humiliated state authorities aborted the separate murder trial scheduled for Lackey. To a local judge who complained that the FBI's wasted prosecution “cost my good county several hundred dollars” and had brought down hostile suggestions that it be “wiped off the map” from as far away as Yokohama, Japan,
*
J. Edgar Hoover replied that the FBI had merely assisted a prosecution handled by Georgians.

FBI officials “telephonically advised” FBI headquarters of exact developments: 8:45
P.M.
, jury back from supper; 10:12
P.M.
, verdict returned. Director Hoover regularly ordered notices on the Penn trial sent to Walter Jenkins at the White House. Earlier on September 4—his first full day on the job following the resignation of Robert Kennedy—Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach wrote President Johnson that creation of a new federal grand jury in Mississippi was “certain to raise speculation” that the FBI had solved the Neshoba County triple murder. “This is not so,” Katzenbach emphatically warned. The grand jury was merely a tool for Inspector Joe Sullivan in his investigation into “a conspiracy on the part of law enforcement officials and others,” he wrote. The cautionary note was aimed at Johnson himself, because the eager President had publicly forecast imminent success in the Mississippi case.

In Atlanta that same Friday, Martin Luther King interrupted his glancing home life—and his campaign for a personal audience with Pope Paul VI two weeks hence—to take a phone call from the Miami training camp of heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali. It was Chauncey Eskridge, the urbane Chicago lawyer who, while working for King since the narrow escape of his Alabama income tax trial in 1960, had also represented Elijah Muhammad through several unpopular religious freedom cases, including the draft imprisonment of his son Wallace and a lawsuit for the right to buy Nation of Islam poster ads on Chicago public transit vehicles. Through Muhammad, Eskridge was working to dislodge and replace the syndicate of Louisville businessmen who had managed the career of the pre-Muslim Cassius Clay. When he introduced his two famous clients by telephone, King congratulated the young boxer on his recent marriage and Ali invited King to his rematch against Sonny Liston. By the FBI wiretap log, Ali then assured King that he “is keeping up with MLK, that MLK is his brother, and [Ali is] with him 100 but can't take any chances.” The buoyant Ali urged King to “take care of himself” and “watch out for them whities.”

Nearly five years later, from a Texas courtroom, this passing courtesy call opened a crack to vast chambers of subterranean history. With Ali then stripped of the heavyweight title for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War, and his appeals lawyers questioning whether FBI wiretaps might have tainted the government's criminal prosecution of Ali, FBI witness R. R. Nichols testified that the September 4 call had been captured on a wiretap that Nichols supervised on King himself. This marked the first official acknowledgment of FBI operations against King or the movement. Instantly, Hoover launched a crossfire of public denial. He branded columnist Carl Rowan a “racist” for writing truthfully that the Bureau bugged King's hotel rooms and “shadowed [him] right up to the time he was slain.” He blamed the late Robert Kennedy for initiating—and King for deserving—any unspecified surveillance, and banished Special Agent Nichols for his slip of candor to silence in the Oklahoma City FBI office. By these and other scattershot intimidations, the Director tamed public speculation on the sensational topic without further breach of secrecy. Not until 1975, three years after Hoover himself was dead, did congressional investigations begin to uncover in retrospect the outlines of the FBI's covert crusade.

 

I
N
A
TLANTA
, as King chatted with Muhammad Ali, members of the SNCC Executive Committee opened debate on a new course after Atlantic City. Young SNCC veterans saw the Democratic convention as a “watershed” or “end of innocence,” after which “things could never be the same.” Now that the Democrats had deflected the rare chance to align a major political party openly with the movement, Bob Moses forlornly predicted, national politics would submerge the race question into other issues—order, urban adjustment, world affairs—where its democratic clarity would recede. “Well, I'll give fifty years for this to work itself out,” he sighed. Some students expressed shock that Atlantic City had snuffed out their eager expectations—“it never occurred to us that our delegation would be turned down”—while others claimed to have known all along that the power brokers would undercut their cause. Nearly all leaders bristled against the Johnson compromise. Even the steadfast chairman John Lewis called it a blow to the movement's long-standing strategy of seeking redress from the federal government. Charles Sherrod of the southwest Georgia SNCC project railed against the constant pressure on the movement to curtail just claims in order to beat Goldwater, or comfort those who fretted about riots. “Who holds the power?” he wrote. “Let
them
be responsible…. We are a country of racists with the racist heritage, a racist economy, a racist language, a racist religion, a racist philosophy of living, and we need a naked confrontation with ourselves.”

This was the unifying passion of telescoped history. Having begun in 1960 as a campus-based clearinghouse for the sit-ins, with one paid staff member during its first year, SNCC had grown after the Freedom Rides to a cadre of sixteen ex-students through 1962, then from seventy by the end of 1963 to 144 far-flung field organizers by the end of Freedom Summer, all on subsistence wages. With expansion outrunning both the identity and structure of the original SNCC family, the September debates tested ideas of purity against ambition. Some wanted to hire professional fund-raisers to maintain a temporarily bountiful treasury—$165,000 in one New York account alone. Others, shunning “hired guns,” wanted to keep relying on the Friends of SNCC support groups that had sprung up in Northern cities. James Forman said the support groups could be rewarded with inside reports on SNCC operations, but Moses argued that “the problem is deeper than that.” Mindful of the philosophical split with Al Lowenstein over the summer project, he asked, “What is our responsibility to Friends of SNCC?” In return for the money and volunteers they sent south, did the support offices deserve representation in SNCC decisions? Could they mount their own SNCC demonstrations in, say, Los Angeles or Boston?

Divisions tended toward a Moses faction and a Forman faction. Each one advocated discipline against glamour. Moses wanted to step back from all that Atlantic City represented—press conferences, lobbying, clamoring for Washington's attention—to the “normal” movement work of Freedom Schools and registration drives in communities of hard-core oppression, where personal risk sorted out matters of control. Forman wanted to weed out self-starting romantics to forge SNCC in an unabashed quest for power. To organize around the experience of certain oppression, he would reject the untrustworthy alliances of Atlantic City along with proposals to give voting privileges within SNCC to new, “unproven” staff. There were pressing applications from more than a hundred summer volunteers who said staff wages would allow them to forgo college for the school year.

Ironically, the most immediate choice in Atlanta was glamorous to all sides: the selection of ten SNCC guests for the Belafonte trip to Africa. Forman announced tentatively that John Lewis was going, along with Julian Bond and Ruby Doris Smith of SNCC headquarters in Atlanta, plus Bob and Dona Moses of the Mississippi project, Don Harris of Georgia, Prathia Hall of Alabama, and perhaps Forman himself. Moses objected to the privilege but was overruled. Marion Barry proposed that Matthew Jones be added as a representative of the Freedom Singers; Bill Hansen of the Arkansas project was included to integrate the delegation by race.

When grumbles erupted against the choices, Forman explained that the idea was to choose a cross section of leadership. Some objected that list was weighted with sophisticates and French speakers suited to the language of Guinea, contradicting SNCC's vehement protests in Atlantic City over the arbitrary exclusion of unlettered sharecroppers like Fannie Lou Hamer. They hooted down the excuse that Hamer lived too far in the backwoods to obtain her yellow fever shots and travel documents on short notice, whereupon she was hustled into an extra spot. Caretakers stepped forward to manage a host of deferred issues—a South-wide summer program for 1965, troubled projects, missing staff cars, business options to buy a building, the fall election and the MFDP, how to get a fellow staff member named Randolph Battle out of the Albany jail. Despite the misgivings of Moses and others about leaving SNCC on the blade of change, the delegation of eleven flew to Guinea by way of Senegal on September 11.

Awed themselves by Mother Africa, her companions were fondly amused by Hamer's wide-eyed exclamations over the miraculous sightings of black-skinned people in positions of authority: a pilot, customs clerk, protocol officer, bank teller, television correspondent. The delegation was scarcely in sight of Villa Silla, an elegant seacoast compound that had belonged to French governors before independence in 1958, when invitations came to a dinner at the presidential palace, and Hamer had just withdrawn to her cottage when President Sékou Touré's car pulled up for an unannounced visit beforehand.

Moses, Forman, and Julie Belafonte conversed in French while Harry Belafonte rushed off to summon Hamer, who shouted through the door that he must be joking. “I'm having a bath!” cried Hamer. “I'm definitely not ready to meet no president.” Rattled for once, she dressed in time to limp into the welcoming arms of Touré's white African robes. She received his ritual kiss on each cheek, which amazed her more to see bestowed also upon men, and then broke happily into tears during conversation in another language. Imagine that, she told Belafonte. Having lived in Mississippi with no dream of meeting a president, then begged vainly to see one in Atlantic City, she was dumbstruck that this exotic head of state brought personal greetings before she could get out of the bathtub her first day in Africa.

All through September, the American guests received banquets of fish around a huge table overlooking the African side of the Atlantic Ocean, with Belafonte presiding like a king. Forman's executive side found the group unwieldy for political briefings—“I realized on this trip,” he wrote, “that three is the maximum number of people for a delegation that seeks to hold serious, intensive discussion”—but the others relaxed with fine wines and Scotch fetched by servants. Ruby Doris Smith alone consented to be braided in cornrows like Guinean women; Hamer refused the strange custom, being particular about her hair. On outings, they noticed grinding barefoot poverty as well as clothes and art forms of exuberant color, and one Guinean tempered their rhapsodies on ancestral brotherhood with a boastful claim that his great-grandfather “sold about three million of you.” Transformed, yet reminded how American they remained, all but two went home early because of telephoned alarms of impending rupture within SNCC.

Don Harris, who had relatives working for an American oil company in Ghana, stayed on another ten weeks to escort John Lewis on a SNCC-style tour, alternating between red-carpet press conferences and pallets on floors. Arriving in Lusaka “with 1 pound ($2.81) between us,” they witnessed the tumultuous independence ceremony of the new Zambia (“a woman broke from the stands, ran onto the field, and embraced Dr. Kaunda's knees…”), then managed from there to sample not only Ethiopia for the thirty-second annual coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie but also scattered hideouts of South African guerrillas or starry-eyed students—“debating the practicality of various kinds of daggers, learning where the best women on the continent were, and joking about the kind of white man that angered us most….” They trailed in every country the “fantastic impressions” left by Malcolm X over the past four months, and bumped into the Muslim exile himself at the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. Malcolm entranced them for nearly two days in a friendly fireworks of ideas and his electrifying sense of danger. “Always sit with your back against the wall,” he advised, “so you can look out and see who is watching you.” By way of Cairo and Paris, where Lewis visited the cabaret of Adam Clayton Powell's ex-wife, jazz pianist Hazel Scott, they reached Atlanta in November with a plan to create an international division within SNCC.