Pillar of Fire (78 page)

At the heart of his message—aside from SCLC program descriptions and budget figures—King interpreted three signal events from a year of spreading upheaval: the triple murder in Mississippi, the riots in Northern cities, and the ongoing presidential campaign. He saw in the dramatic publicity about Freedom Summer a national recognition that political inequality went much deeper than segregated schools and lunch counters, to mortal issues of voting by color. “Our next campaign was to have been in Alabama,” he said, “[where] it would take 135 years to register ten thousand Negroes under the existing voting regulation.” He sketched the Bevel-Nash plan for large-scale nonviolent war to gain the franchise, which had grown out of Birmingham, then frankly confessed distractions. Saying he had dispatched Bevel and other SCLC staff to test nonviolent methods in Rochester, Philadelphia, and other riot-torn Northern cities—“The results were spectacular”—King told the Savannah convention that SCLC was wrestling with an imperative to expand nationwide. The stakes were high, the consequences far-reaching but unknown. Such a move risked intensified petty rivalry with the NAACP. On a larger scale, it threatened to turn Northern economic support into opposition, and invited reappraisal of an issue known almost entirely by association with the South.

King contemplated the riots together with the new War on Poverty as a second storm of the floodtide year. “The struggle for rights is at bottom a struggle for opportunities,” he said. “…The Negro is not seeking charity. He does not want to languish on welfare rolls any more than the next man.” Endorsing Johnson's crusade, King said the plan was sound politically—roughly 80 percent of its beneficiaries would be white—and relatively modest in cost, with an annual budget ($927 million) little more than half the after-tax profits ($1.7 billion) just announced for the first six months of 1964 by the three leading car companies alone. Before Congress gave Shriver the first dollar, however, King warned the Savannah convention of a subliminal national politics already at work to obscure such facts. “By appealing to deep-rooted prejudice,” he said, “it suggests that the War on Poverty is solely to aid the colored poor, that it is just part of the civil rights issue….

“We understand what motivates this mischief,” King added. He addressed the implications of a message begun by George Wallace that translated racial politics into expressions of contempt for government itself. To King, the underlying change in presidential politics was primary among the forces he saw crowding into the great year of realization in civil rights—more important even than the voting questions raised by Freedom Summer or the nationalization of race by the economics of urban riots. He analyzed the presidential year without a single mention of Johnson, the tragedy of Dallas, or any Kennedy, and made no reference to the Atlantic City convention or Mississippi's Freedom Democrats. Instead, he concentrated entirely on the meaning of the Republican convention in San Francisco. “The Republican Party took a giant stride away from its Lincoln tradition,” King said. He worried not so much about Goldwater the candidate, whom he described as merely a “best man” at the marriage of white racial appeal with conservative economic values. “A cold fear touched the hearts of twenty million Negroes,” he said, alarmed at what he called the capture of a national party built on civil rights—against the peak strength of bipartisan unity for civil rights—by “the counter forces to Negro liberation.”

King urged his Savannah audience not to panic. “We are on the move, and the burning of our churches will not deter us,” he cried. “The bombing of our homes will not dissuade us. The beating and killing of our young people will not divert us. The wanton release of their known murderers will not discourage us. We are on the move now….” He preached a full rhythmic litany on marching that paused near ancient Jericho for a word of caution. There were “no broad highways” or “quick solutions” ahead, and “it would be irresponsible” to say there were. “Instead, the course we must follow lies through a maze of interrelated demands and counter demands, hopes and aspirations, fears and hatreds,” King said. “But difficult and painful as it is, such a course must be charted.” He resumed his oratorical march with a reminiscence on “the wondrous signs of our time,” calling out names and fond descriptions from the movement's “nonviolent army” since the Montgomery bus boycott. “The patter of their feet as they walked through Jim Crow barriers in the great stride toward freedom is the thunder of the marching men of Joshua,” he concluded. “And the world rocks beneath their tread. My people, my people, listen, listen, the battle is in our hands.”

T
HE
J
OHNSON
-G
OLDWATER CAMPAIGN
marked an era of transition in classical grand style. The Hollywood spectacle
Cleopatra
ended a first run of sixty-three weeks, giving way to relatively restrained epic movies such as
Becket
and
Dr. Strangelove
. Americans embraced two new Italian films starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, the zany British comedy of Peter Sellers, and an offbeat Beatles picture called
A Hard Day's Night
. The Beatles themselves—gently dismissed by
The New Yorker
as “a benign infection, perhaps incurable”—started their first American concert tour in the San Francisco Cow Palace a month after the Goldwater convention, and caused adoring youth riots eastward into September. In New York, the Russian-born French master Marc Chagall installed stained-glass peace figures at the United Nations. In San Diego, the McDonald's Corporation prepared a public stock offering to market fifteen-cent hamburgers to mobile baby boomers. Air Force safety experts completed tests on a new “steerable parachute” that opened up the future sport of skydiving, and Detroit engineers secretly designed a front-wheel-drive model to eliminate the “bothersome hump” along the floorboard of American cars.

The presidential race never wavered from preview handicapping as an epochal mismatch. On the night of Labor Day, for the holiday start of the fall campaign, the Johnson forces premiered to an estimated fifty million network viewers a stark thirty-second drama of a girl counting the petals on a daisy, one by one to ten, then holding the visual as her angelic voice transformed into the ominous, virile announcer of the nuclear countdown, backward down from ten. At zero, her picture dissolved into the thermonuclear mushroom cloud, out of which came a pronouncement by Lyndon Johnson: “These are the stakes—to make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.” The screen went black to a tag line, “Vote for President Johnson on November 3,” then back to the “Monday Night at the Movies” presentation of
David and Bathsheba
, starring Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward.

The “daisy girl” ad transformed political speech. Far beyond Nixon's celebrated stubble in the debates of 1960, which revealed a magnified effect of pictures over synchronized words, this commercial demonstrated the vast potential of crafted celluloid to shape image apart from language. Campaign debate would evolve swiftly into a specialized branch of advertising, its nature and cost driven by the thirty-second television spot. Agitated callers instantly lit up telephone switchboards over the daisy spot. Broadcasters freely exhibited the footage as news, marveling at its power to evoke doomsday menace around Goldwater without so much as mentioning his name. Johnson's managers instinctively canceled all further bookings as “overkill,” a word borrowed from the creation of real atomic bombs.

Goldwater would spend 40 percent more than Johnson on television—often in long “position paper” addresses that only reinforced the impression he tried to combat. In a paid, half-hour broadcast, Goldwater dismayed some of his own strategists by using grim phrases such as “nuclear destruction” and “holocaust” almost once per minute, suggesting preoccupation, and his dull assurances of respect for atomic weapons never matched the spicy swagger of comments about “lobbing one into the men's room at the Kremlin.” Newspapers lined up with solemn editorials—“The President and the Bomb”—pronouncing Goldwater more eager than trustworthy.

Goldwater treated some subjects with far greater public ease than critics and admirers alike. He relished tales of his grandfather “Big Mike” Goldwasser of Konin, who had fled Poland during the Revolution of 1848 to build a pioneer Jewish family on the Western frontier, of growing up bicultural in the home of his bar-mitzvahed father, Baron, and his poker-playing Episcopalian mother, Josephine. Nevertheless, his status as the first presidential candidate of direct Jewish ancestry remained almost universally unmentionable on any account—whether as a proud outpost for the American Dream, beyond Kennedy's much-discussed Catholicism, or pundit's quarry for signs of overcompensation (as in his praise for the Wehrmacht), or even as an item of note.

Senator Goldwater and his press coverage shared a more equal discomfort about race, the year's uncorked well. From Springfield, Illinois, rubbing the nose of Lincoln's bust in the Republican nominee's traditional supplication for good luck, he accused Democrats of fostering disorder and predatory crime, but confined his racial message to innuendo: “Every wife and mother, yes every woman and girl, knows what I mean, knows what I'm talking about.” He endorsed the segregationist charge that the new civil rights law was a cause rather than a cure for injustice—“…the more the federal government has attempted to legislate morality, the more it actually has incited hatred and violence”—but he forthrightly renounced segregation as a personal creed. On a September tour of the South, Goldwater praised states' rights and Southern accents while attacking every facet of “the central government”: Supreme Court “dictates,” imposed Social Security numbers, new proposals “to tell you what to print on the front of your cigarette pack.” Yet he came off as stiff, cheerful, and academic, emphasizing constitutional concepts rather than harangue, which took the edge off his all-white crowds heading into South Carolina.

From the White House, planning a whistle-stop train tour to hold the South against Goldwater, Lady Bird Johnson applied the experience of three decades to canvass the Democratic leaders, but politics strained old ties. When she specified a request that Senator Byrd of Virginia meet her train in public support, her diary recorded, “an invisible silken curtain fell across his voice.” Of the many like Byrd who avoided the Johnsons through campaign season, the First Lady noted that Richard Russell, “the dearest of them all,” said nothing of civil rights differences or anything else unpleasant, and in fact discreetly sent aides to guide the tour through Georgia. South Carolina's senior senator and governor bravely volunteered to ride the whole way, bringing “two daughters who were mighty good hard-working Democrats,” but junior senator Strom Thurmond regretted that he faced “a really basic decision.”

Thurmond was at once a bellwether and maverick of Southern Democratic politics. Six years older than President Johnson, he had been born to the only state where Negroes ever constituted a voting majority, in the year 1902, when South Carolina rejected its last Republican officeholders by a purge of Negro voters. His life mirrored the century—childhood when the region enacted Jim Crow laws so comprehensive as to outlaw fraternal orders whose bylaws in theory might compel interracial members to address one another as “brother”; an elected career from the late 1920s, just before Democratic hegemony produced 98 percent of the South Carolina vote for FDR; governor in time to volunteer as the 1948 Dixiecrat nominee in protest of World War II's integrationist effects on the Democratic White House; to Washington by historic write-in campaign in the year of the
Brown
decision. Thurmond was a gifted and attentive politician—reputed to have dispensed a political kindness to nearly every constituent family—with a knack for distinguishing clarity on the race issue. In his plea against final passage of the civil rights bill in June, he told Senate colleagues that it “will make a Czar of the President of the United States and a Rasputin of the Attorney General.”

Barry Goldwater had courted Thurmond secretly since then, not merely to endorse him for president across partisan lines but to “go all the way and change parties.” On September 16, Thurmond accomplished the switch in a statewide television address of slashing boldness. “The Democratic Party has abandoned the people…,” he declared in the first of twenty-two bullet-like paragraphs on his former party as consummate evil: “The Democratic Party has invaded the private lives of people…has succored and assisted our Communist enemies…worships at the throne of power and materialism…has protected the Supreme Court in a reign of judicial tyranny.” Thurmond proclaimed the November election a fulcrum of the ages: “The party of our fathers is dead. Those who took its name are engaged in another Reconstruction….” Should Democrats prevail, he warned, “freedom as we have known it in this country is doomed.”

Thurmond welcomed the Republican nominee the next day wearing a distinctive new lapel pin—a GOP gold elephant sporting tiny, Goldwater-style horned-rim glasses—hosted a Goldwater rally with Louisiana segregationist Leander Perez, and pledged to campaign actively through the fall. South Carolina Democrats stammered in shock. Although most fellow officeholders shared Thurmond's opposition to Lyndon Johnson as a turncoat semi-Southerner, none followed his leap from established identity and power to a minority Republican party that remained a dirty word at home, and a voting bloc for civil rights in Washington. Publicly silent, Mendel Rivers and other Democratic chairmen privately marveled that Thurmond left no room for retreat in case Goldwater turned out to be a fluke. The
New York Times
minimized the switch as a desperate union of two discredited species, Dixiecrats and “lily white” Republicans, and the South Carolina Democratic chairman questioned Thurmond's “moral right” to keep a Senate seat granted by Democratic voters in a Democratic primary. Incorrectly, the chairman said Goldwater could not win a state that even Eisenhower had failed to carry, and predicted that the “violence” of Thurmond's attack on their heritage would reunite South Carolina Democrats.

 

I
N
H
OLMES
C
OUNTY
, M
ISSISSIPPI
, Hollis Watkins claimed that discipline pulled his area through the summer project relatively unscathed. Having first rebuffed Stokely Carmichael's plan to appoint a “greenhorn” college Negro above him as county director, Watkins had laid down strict rules to his twenty-three summer volunteers on the night of their arrival: no drinking, no dating of locals, no bravado experiments or interracial street appearances, no displays of argumentative skill to rebut local segregationists. He promptly shipped out one volunteer who insisted on her right to hold hands in public, and constantly emphasized his prior experience in Greenwood—where only a year earlier he had been snatched off the streets to hang from the bars of the Parchman death house—and before that in his native Pike County.

All summer, especially after specially trained volunteers opened a Pike County project in early July, Watkins passed along stories of chronic Klan violence around McComb. When three Freedom School churches were burned there in a single week, his personal knowledge of the victims made vivid object lessons for volunteers who considered schoolwork too tame. Watkins confined his Holmes County volunteers in seven fledgling Freedom Schools until he could tell which ones respected unseen dangers. Of these he approved a few for the hazards of outdoor registration canvass, including Mario Savio, a philosophy student who conquered a pronounced stutter and a tendency to overthink.

Savio returned to the University of California for the fall term. Other California students stayed on in Mississippi for the extension projects financed by the Belafonte rescue, and those in McComb suffered an undiminished vigilante rampage. The home of a COFO supporter was bombed at the end of August; McComb police, finding that the handyman victim had been repairing a volunteer's car in the yard, arrested him for unlicensed commerce. On September 2, Klansmen publicly beat a registration volunteer in the streets of McComb. On September 5, Stanford volunteer Dennis Sweeney presided as the distraught Red Heffner family told the local press they were surrendering their home to relentless persecution. Bombs struck three Negro sites in McComb on September 7 and a preacher's home two days later. That night, project director Jesse Harris wrote a pleading letter to Burke Marshall at the Justice Department: “…our situation has become critical….”

In Berkeley, California, Mario Savio highlighted emergency news from McComb at a line of outdoor information tables, among students holding forth on parallel causes. A year earlier, shortly after the Berkeley Jaycees canceled the annual Festival of Football Queens to block the first Negro student among the parade escorts, Malcolm X had delivered a biting speech on the limits of precocious activists who saw the race problem as existing only in far-off Mississippi. Since then, students had mobilized against Proposition 14, the pending ballot initiative to repeal California's new fair housing law, while allied groups protested the racial agenda of Goldwater delegates at the Republican convention in nearby San Francisco, and still others in September picketed the
Oakland Tribune
. Owned by former U.S. senator William Knowland, state chairman of the Goldwater campaign and leading supporter of Proposition 14, the
Tribune
portrayed the student pickets as nettlesome, immature, and very likely infiltrated by Communists. Investigators from the
Tribune
notified university administrators of property records showing that the area reserved for student information tables—a twenty-six-foot-wide brick strip between the sidewalk and a campus gate on Bancroft Way—was owned by the university, not the city, and the administrators claimed the power and duty to banish the tables effective September 21.