March 8, 1965
THE rout on Pettus Bridge ignited a week of passionate struggle about fundamental and historic issues. Would the pent-up conflict about Negro voting rights be settled in the streets, the courts, the legislatures, or not at all, and would results favor the primacy or subordination of states? King’s swift appeal that Sunday night pushed the focus toward gathering drama rather than a finite sensation that was likely to fade. “He Reveals Plans to Lead a New March Tomorrow,” declared the front page of Monday’s New York Times, beneath headlines and a graphic picture from Selma. “King Calls for Another Try,” announced the Washington Post.
Surrounded by newspapers in his bed, President Johnson made his first call Monday morning for a briefing on hospital casualties and King’s intentions. Attorney General Katzenbach volunteered the awkward news of the FBI’s only active intervention during the charge of troopers and possemen: jailing three white men, including the serial attacker James Robinson, for assaulting an FBI agent. “I didn’t give the arrests any publicity last night,” said Katzenbach. “That didn’t look right, Mr. President, from a public viewpoint, you know—all the Negroes that were beat up and the people we arrested were the people who beat up the FBI agent.” Worse, the circumstances recalled FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s public accusation in November that Martin Luther King was “the most notorious liar in the country.” To justify his impulsive outburst, Hoover oddly had cited a complaint by King two years earlier that FBI agents too often were native Southerners who stood aloof while Negro demonstrators were brutalized. Now the three white attackers in Selma had mistaken FBI agent Dan Doyle of Little Rock for a reporter taking notes and pictures from the sidewalk—and had stolen his camera. The federal prosecution would be scuttled quietly to avoid attention to the FBI’s selective perception of duty, as Katzenbach, who considered Hoover to be actively senile, knew better than to suggest fault in the FBI’s hypersensitive founding Director. If public discussion of race was stilted, Hoover was taboo.
President Johnson simply tuned out FBI controversy as unproductive. “Do you know Wallace very well?” he asked, and the Attorney General said no one did. “The senators say they can’t get to Wallace at all,” he reported.
Johnson proposed former Tennessee governor Buford Ellington as a possible go-between with Wallace, based on personal history and chemistry. The President vowed to send Ellington, the newly installed head of federal disaster relief, over to Katzenbach’s office within the hour to begin figuring out how to prevent repeated violence against the next King march. “Just have to be mighty quiet,” he instructed.
Quiet was difficult to achieve. Picket lines sprang up outside the Justice Department before Ellington could get there. Katzenbach received a small delegation of preachers from the local chapter of King’s SCLC, and by the time their leader emerged to tell reporters that he deflected their request for protection by U.S. marshals, three SNCC students darted into Katzenbach’s office to sit in for the same objective. “It did not take the Attorney General long to get us policemen up here to throw us out,” shouted Frank Smith as he was being dragged down a corridor. “Why can’t he give us some protection in Alabama?” Katzenbach broke away to salvage one piece of the day’s regular schedule—his formal introduction to the U.S. Supreme Court, hurried and sheepish in a rented morning coat—and returned to find twenty SNCC students encamped outside his fifth-floor office at the Justice Department.
“Our basic difficulty is we have no communication with Wallace at all,” President Johnson complained that afternoon to Senator Lister Hill of Alabama. He confided that Buford Ellington had found Wallace to be vaguely interested in “a way out” but close-mouthed and opaque, determined not to appear weak before Negro protest. Discreetly, Johnson did not tell Senator Hill that Ellington also warned of a duplicitous streak to Wallace’s folksy manner (“You can’t trust him…you talk to him, you don’t know what he’s gonna say that you said…there’s an element of danger in talking with George”), but Hill made essentially the same point. “That damn little Wallace,” he warned Johnson, would find a theatrical way to magnify himself, just as he had stood in the schoolhouse door against integration “to show the people of Alabama that he fought to the bitter end.” Wallace would maneuver to make Johnson appear the instigator of federal tyranny and racial chaos, Hill predicted, so that “the people down home gotta think well, my God, he [Johnson] just moved in there and took over for this King.”
Hill offered Johnson sympathy but no advice. Johnson likened his razor’s choice to Vietnam. “I had to send the Marines in yesterday,” he said.
“It’s a helluva dilemma,” said Hill about Alabama. He bemoaned his home crisis as though the Asian conflict did not yet register for him.
Johnson disclosed reports already reaching the White House that the wave of protest against Wallace was strong. “This fella’s sent out wires all over the United States, King has, askin’ everybody to come in there for the march tomorrow,” he said. “And they’re fifty Protestant ministers from Washington, D.C., for instance, chartered an airplane, and they’re gettin’ ready to go, and they’re flying in and coming by bus and everything else from all over the country.”
THE WASHINGTON charter was the work of glacial church bureaucracies accelerated to lightning speed. One of King’s telegrams calling for a “ministers’ march to Montgomery”* scarcely arrived on Monday at the New York office of the National Council of Churches before ten church executives vowed to be in Selma by 8:30 the next morning. The board of the Council’s Commission on Religion and Race (CORR), which had been created after the breakthrough anti-segregation marches of 1963 by Birmingham’s Negro children, voted to buttress King’s appeal with its own press release and mass telegrams, and by midday, the council’s chapter in the greater Washington area chartered an airplane to accommodate the prominent clergy whose instant mobilization attracted notice from the White House staff.
Reporters bombarded the Washington archdiocese wanting to know whether Roman Catholics would be permitted to go on the charter flight, since the hierarchy had forbidden participation of priests and nuns in all previous demonstrations, including the 1963 March on Washington. In a frenzy of church politicking, amid rumors that fervent clergy might break church discipline if refused, Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle reluctantly granted an exception “just this once,” and astonished Catholics rushed to join Protestants at the airport. At least two of them, Monsignor George L. Gingras and Father Geno Baroni, either missed or evaded calls from Auxiliary Bishop John Spence trying to revoke their mission on the ground that the Bishop of Alabama was withholding the required consent. Once word flashed through the diocese that Vatican protocol was breached, a helpful secretary at one Baltimore parochial school buzzed the classroom intercom with a message for a sympathetic teacher: “Sister Cecilia, do you want to go to Selma?” She did.
National officers of the Episcopal Church responded to King’s telegram on Monday by voting to sidestep their ecclesiastical rules. Presiding Bishop John Hines notified Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter of Alabama that Tuesday’s march in Selma qualified as a “recognized ecumenical activity” in light of previous resolutions of support for the voting rights movement, and therefore needed no sanction by the local bishop. “By nightfall,” Hines reported to his executive council, “several hundred persons were on their way to Selma” over the heated objections of Bishop Carpenter, who formally protested the outside clergy as a threat to established church governance. Carpenter denounced the pending Selma march as “a foolish business and a sad waste of time.” Defying him, nine Episcopal priests crowded into one Selma motel room late Monday and made room on the floor for Harris Wofford, an assistant director of the Peace Corps and one of the few white people who had gone south to support the fledgling bus boycott in Montgomery nine years earlier.
Some religious leaders drew on prior experience to jettison ordinary life. Presbyterian ministers Metz Rollins and Robert Stone, who had coordinated a revolving picket line of outside clergy for six months in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, departed for Selma with their call lists. Theologian Robert McAfee Brown hastily arranged a cross-country flight after word of King’s telegram interrupted his class at Stanford University. One of Brown’s cellmates from a 1961 Freedom Ride in Florida, Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner, went on his own to Newark airport and ran into an AME Zion minister and two other clergy from previous journeys South. They rented a car from Atlanta that night and found themselves “scared witless” to be driving in an interracial group through rural Georgia and Alabama. Dresner, answering King’s appeals to shore up stalemated campaigns, had survived inspirational but harrowing incarcerations with handfuls of pioneer clergy in Albany, Georgia, and St. Augustine, Florida.
Scattered veterans of the movement joined a larger wave of newcomers who broke barriers of habit and inhibition. A Negro student named Jesse Jackson jumped on a cafeteria table at Chicago Theological Seminary shouting, “Pack your bags,” and preached on the gospel challenge beyond the classroom until seven white classmates piled into a van for the long drive to Alabama, with carloads of CTS students and faculty stretched behind. In Philadelphia, an Episcopal priest coordinating a radio appeal tried to discourage one volunteer by observing that women were neither safe nor welcome and that Jesus had no female disciples, but the Jewish caller said she heard that Christians also had no east or west, male or female, and soon said goodbye to her husband and five nonplussed children.
SENATOR LEVERETT Saltonstall urgently summoned Assistant FBI Director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach at noon on Monday, shaken by the eruption of support for King’s cause in his home state of Massachusetts. There were spontaneous rallies and petition drives in Boston, spurred by hourly television reports from Selma. More than a hundred Unitarian leaders from the reformed Puritan tradition of old Harvard were scrambling to reach Alabama. One pious and independent student at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge modified his prior interpretation that the rules of order required aspiring priests to defer to the Bishop of Alabama. First, he justified a personal donation to one seminarian’s wife who wanted to march, and later, during the day’s recital of the Magnificat prayer—“He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree…”—received as a “decisive, luminous, Spirit-filled epiphany” that even students should witness like the saints, with their bodies. He joined ten other Episcopal seminarians who juggled tests and papers, raced through Lawrence Hall dormitory to solicit travel money, dashed off notes to family, and then jammed aboard a flight with the Boston Unitarians in the chain reaction that rattled politicians. Senator Saltonstall privately told DeLoach that “pressure is mounting” in Boston for him to sponsor a testimonial dinner for King, and suggested that he felt misled by the FBI. In the year since he had helped block an honorary degree at Springfield College, by spreading the FBI’s clandestine allegations that King was a philandering, subversive fraud, Salstonstall noted pointedly to DeLoach that the target of scorn had received the Nobel Peace Prize and several invitations to meet privately with the President of the United States.
The senator’s complaint did not faze the FBI’s polished chief of political liaison and publicity. DeLoach replied that Saltonstall was overlooking the subtle fact that President Johnson never allowed himself to be alone with King. Although this was untrue, and in any case a minor point, Senator Saltonstall dared not seem naive in the face of the FBI’s command of political secrets, and he claimed instead to have wondered about that very detail. “I told Saltonstall there was no change in King,” DeLoach reported back to J. Edgar Hoover. “I told him that King was a phony through and through and that obviously he would never change.”
The animus at the top of the FBI’s political hierarchy was oblivious to law or the swells of public opinion. Professionally, Director Hoover cultivated King as the fearsome dark symbol of the latest twentieth-century threat to tranquillity on Main Street America—succeeding immigrants, Depression gangsters, Nazis, and Communists—but he also modified some of his strict bureaucratic regimen to vent a personal disparagement of King as a “burrhead.” Hoover revised internal communications about the latest threats to kill King if he marched on Tuesday in Selma—one via the Secret Service about two alleged gunmen out of Detroit, another about a killing squad from the Coushatta, Louisiana, Ku Klux Klan—and vetoed plans to give a routine warning to King. “No,” Hoover scrawled on one memo, and on another ordered agents “not to tell King anything.” He reminded top officials of a previous order to exclude King from the standard advisory to the targets of threats, and explicitly confined FBI notice to Sheriff Clark and other local authorities of dubious protective value. The exclusion order gained for Hoover the satisfaction of avoiding any contact with King that might suggest recognition or service to a fellow citizen on the part of the FBI. To offset the small risk of being challenged, he vacuumed up useful information about King from agents whose training and distance buffered them from political applications at FBI headquarters.
FBI AGENTS recorded that at 10:30 P.M. that same Monday, March 8, King entered Brown Chapel to address nearly a thousand people still gathered there in the nightly mass meeting. James Bevel was preaching again from the Book of Ruth about their unfinished quest to “go and see the king” George Wallace in Montgomery, insisting that yesterday’s blood vindicated the practice of nonviolence. “Any man who has the urge to hit a posseman or a State Trooper with a pop bottle is a fool,” cried Bevel. “That is just what they want you to do. Then they can call you a mob and beat you to death.” A sudden hush ran through the church to announce King’s unseen arrival, and Bevel stood aside in the pulpit for a five-minute ovation of welcome above a breakout rendition of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
King delivered a tribute to Sunday’s march. He mingled an apology for missing it with a reminder of the travails that buffeted him, too, quoting poet Langston Hughes (“Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”), and vowing that the threat of death could not stop them now. “If a man is 36 years old, as I happen to be,” he said, “and some great truth stands before the door of his life…and he refuses to stand up because he wants to live a little longer and he’s afraid that his home will get bombed or he’s afraid that he will lose his job, he’s afraid that he will get shot or beaten down by State Troopers, he may go on and live until he’s 80, but he’s just as dead at 36 as he would be at 80. And the state of breathing in his life is merely the announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.” King roused the crowd for the next day on Pettus Bridge. “We must let them know that if they beat one Negro they are going to have to beat a hundred,” he declared, “and if they beat a hundred, then they are going to have to beat a thousand.”
King recognized fresh hope in the first fifty traveling clergy who reached Selma and were ushered to seats in the front pews. One by one, he asked them to stand and introduce themselves. From the Washington charter flight, Methodist bishop John Wesley Lord expressed shock over the photographs from Pettus Bridge. “I hear that Dr. Martin Luther King was calling for white ministers to come and march,” he said. “And I am a white minister. You could say that I heard the Macedonian call.”
Toward midnight in Washington, President Johnson prodded one of his top assistants about frenzied efforts to prevent repetition of Sunday’s violence. “The Negroes are still meeting in the church in Selma with Martin Luther King,” Bill Moyers reported. He said Governor Wallace had just proposed covertly through the intermediary Buford Ellington that the President assume responsibility in Selma by federalizing the National Guard. However, since Wallace undoubtedly would denounce that very move as power-mad tyranny against his state, Moyers added that Attorney General Katzenbach was concentrating on the alternative of getting the Negroes to cancel Tuesday’s march. “The question is,” Moyers said crisply, “do you want to be informed when King calls back?”
“Yep,” said Johnson. “But I would take a much tougher line than we’re going to with him.” The President was disturbed by news footage of Katzenbach kneeling in shirtsleeves to plead with the young sit-ins to leave his office corridor after business hours, and by shots later that night of them telling the cameras that they would gladly desist if the U.S. marshals hauling them out of the Justice Department were dispatched instead to protect constitutional rights in Selma. Johnson attributed the protest to orchestration by King. “I think it’s outrageous what’s on TV,” he said. “It looks like that man’s in charge of the country and taking it over.” He told Moyers to remind King of Monday’s bargaining and “take a very firm line with him.”
FOR THE remainder of a long hard night, Johnson’s intermediaries wrestled earnestly with King over prospects for the voting rights movement. Each said the other could tip a precarious balance from disastrous collision just ahead to historic triumph. Johnson’s side demanded a peaceful respite to shore up national consensus, while King insisted he was “too deeply committed” to call off the march without tangible signs of support from Washington. The balance of nerves seesawed as they exchanged blandishments, professions of respect, and outright threats, but only hints of their struggle seeped outside private councils. About two o’clock Tuesday morning, agents notified FBI headquarters that King reportedly had agreed to confine any march that day to the city limits of Selma—thus avoiding another confrontation across Pettus Bridge. Lawyer Harry Wachtel suspected from parallel talks that Attorney General Katzenbach did not “have his heart” fully in the pressure he applied, but advisers told King by telephone conference that the tenderfoot church elders could not walk far toward Montgomery, anyway.
An hour later, agents gleaned from wiretapped conference calls that King seemed resolved to lead his columns back into the maw of Alabama troopers after all, in spite of Wallace, Johnson, or his own admitted fear of snipers, saying he must keep faith with the marchers. He knew a host of new ones were careening toward Selma through makeshift points of transit, oblivious to his second thoughts. The Episcopal seminarians were mostly too giddy to sleep before catching a bus from Atlanta, having risen Monday morning for classes in Massachusetts and next coming to rest in King’s own private office at SCLC, staring at his books and mementos, the males bedded down on the floor and Judith Upham of St. Louis on his leather couch. Some of the Boston Unitarians dozed in the Hertz rental office at the Atlanta airport until a connecting flight early Tuesday, March 9—Henry Hampton* on a chair, James Reeb on a divan, Orloff Miller on the floor.
President Johnson called Bill Moyers at home before breakfast. “What happened with Martin Luther King?” he asked. A baby cried in the background as Moyers explained that he had not awakened the President because he had heard from Attorney General Katzenbach only at four o’clock and again just now. He summarized the marathon negotiations by reporting that King was “very fearful for his life” and “really wanted” to cooperate, but “couldn’t get out of at least a token march.” So the administration still faced a double bind. “Any effort to put a federal presence in there will only likely cause Wallace to feel that he’s being pressured and confronted, and he might go in the wrong direction,” Moyers told the President. In case of renewed violence, however, the White House would face difficult questions about “how does it look if things go wrong and we’ve done nothing more” than on Sunday? Moyers described the situation as “very tenuous.” He said their intermediaries were working both sides to reduce the chances of conflagration—“Ellington is at this very moment talking to Wallace”—and “the best we can do now is hope.”
The President did not fulminate against King as he had done the night before. He had a politician’s respect for pressure, and very likely realized that the tide of reaction to Sunday’s march was beyond pushbutton control. Johnson had added political nuance to his “tougher line” on King by sending in former governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, the head of the new Community Relations Service created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Before dawn, Collins landed at Craig Air Force Base in one of the two-engine jets reserved for presidential use and proceeded to briefings from Assistant Attorney General John Doar, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, who since Sunday had pulled nearly all his staff lawyers into Selma. Collins and Doar drove that morning in a white military sedan to the home of Selma’s Negro dentist, Sullivan Jackson, and Jean Jackson knocked apologetically on the door of her front bedroom to tell King that “a man from the President” was there to see him.