March 25–30, 1965
BROADCASTS faded from Montgomery with Ralph Abernathy leading tributes to King in the background. “Who is our leader?” he kept shouting over the loudspeakers. “God bless him!” He cultivated cheers of genuflection with a characteristic zeal that grated on SNCC activists, in part for Abernathy’s embrace of reflected praise. “I know of no other woman in America who has suffered as much as she has for freedom,” he declared with a closing nod to his wife, Juanita. “She is not a speaker very much, but she can kiss me!” Abernathy dismissed the crowd with reminders of their printed march instructions to disperse quietly and rapidly—“Stragglers must not remain”—so as to empty the city of potential targets before dark. “Within ten minutes,” reported an eyewitness with some exaggeration, “Dexter Avenue was cleared of all but the press and the troopers.”
In Washington, President Johnson ducked into the Cabinet Room to tease reporters reeling under a volley of announcements from top government officials: notice of a multibillion-dollar trade shift and a hundred-mayor summit meeting, an offer of massive economic aid to North Vietnam if violent conflict should cease, plus a statement that the Ranger space mission had found “two or three places” where astronauts might land on the moon. “God have mercy on your souls,” quipped Johnson, who had ordered a “heavy budget of news” to reclaim national attention after the march. Former governor Collins of Florida admitted to the assembled press that the federal agencies around Montgomery remained largely segregated, and pledged specific reform. This was a mild version of what Collins had just told the Cabinet secretaries in their closed meeting, with Johnson’s encouragement. Repeated intercession with local white ministers yielded only a few willing to preach “against rowdiness,” and none yet who would “go so far as to speak up for brotherhood,” Collins confessed, and his mediators encountered heavy resistance from white Alabama contacts “conditioned to think of the federal government and of the march leadership as forces of evil.” Collins told the reporters that he and Attorney General Katzenbach hoped for a “respite” from months of racial tension.
In Montgomery, seminarian Jonathan Daniels knelt quietly on the pavement among thinning crowds beneath the capitol. Having encountered one of his Boston professors among the hundreds of Episcopal clergy at the march, Daniels asked for and received a formal blessing to stay behind on what he conceived as a religious mission, forgoing the remainder of the school term. He and companion Judith Upham loaded Upham’s Volkswagen with teenagers returning to Selma for stored belongings. Two volunteer drivers, collecting others who needed rides, recognized Viola Liuzzo of Detroit among the sick and footsore nearby at a makeshift clinic in Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. When she asked about her Oldsmobile, which she had donated all week to the transportation committee, they advised candidly that the car had been reassigned more than once in all the confusion, and further that she should hasten to retrieve it because the current driver was rumored to have no license.
Liuzzo roused herself. By late afternoon, she spotted her Oldsmobile packed with departing marchers at the St. Jude staging area. She took the steering wheel from nineteen-year-old volunteer Leroy Moton, saying politely that she wanted to practice for the long journey back to Michigan. On the way to Selma, after they dropped a man from New York at the Montgomery airport, two cars tailgated them with bright headlights flashing. Liuzzo tried to calm her passengers with feisty comments about a lack of good sense in hostile white people, speeding up and slowing down evasively until the pursuers dropped away. She and Moton arrived safely at Brown Chapel with a Negro man from Selma and three white females from Pennsylvania. They rested, then started a final run to gather marchers stranded in Montgomery.
An “action team,” or “missionary squad,” of four Birmingham Klansmen suffered letdown instead of relief. They had harassed marchers along the route into Montgomery, and once came close to dragging off a Negro who ventured into a gasoline station, but real or imagined military patrols stymied them. Then, on their way to check for lapses of security in Selma, they had been stopped on Highway 80 by an Alabama trooper, and Klansman Eugene Thomas had been obliged to display a police auxiliary badge and two special deputy commissions to get off with a warning ticket about the glass-pack muffler on his car. At Selma’s Silver Moon Café, they were brooding over the collapse of a day they had built up among themselves as the biggest ever, when Elmer Cook, one of three men charged in the beating death of James Reeb on the sidewalk just outside the Silver Moon, dropped by to visit the out-of-towners whose presence caused a stir. “I did my job,” said Cook, patting them on the back. “Now you go and do yours.” While he asked nothing, and said no more, his encouragement helped the Birmingham team look for renewed opportunities after dark. They briefly targeted isolated pedestrians near Brown Chapel, only to break away at the sight of a National Guard jeep with a mounted machine gun. At a stoplight on Broad Street, noticing the occupants of a car with Michigan plates, one of them sharply remarked, “Well, I’ll be damned.” Energized, they speculated about lewd acts the racially mixed couple must have in mind, and Eugene Thomas said, “This looks like some of the brass.”
The Klansmen followed Liuzzo and Leroy Moton over Pettus Bridge back toward Montgomery. Thomas told his companions to conceal their number by ducking beneath the window line. Of the two Klansmen lying across the back seat, one promised the other a gift trophy of “the nigger’s sport coat” from the car ahead. “This is it,” they said, peeking to fathom painful delays once they cleared congestion east of Selma. They slowed down past Craig Air Force Base, where it appeared briefly that the Oldsmobile might turn off for shelter, then dropped back again when they passed the state trooper radar unit that had stopped them two hours earlier, its dome light twirling alongside another detained car on the two-lane portion of Highway 80. After that, with the quarry in flight well above the speed limit, the Klansmen did not overtake them for miles into the rural isolation of Lowndes County. Collie Wilkins shouted for Thomas not to bang the Oldsmobile off the road, lest their own car be identified by paint and chrome chips. Thomas handed him a pistol from the glove box. William Eaton and Tommy Rowe drew theirs. Over one hilly straightaway, jammed against rolled-down windows on the passenger side, they held on for a passing run with three guns poked into the howling wind.
Leroy Moton was absorbed with the radio dial, making an effort to accept Liuzzo’s hope that the pursuers might be “some of our own people,” when glass exploded over the front seat. Realizing that the car still hurtled along with Liuzzo slumped under the wheel, he grabbed from the side and steered blindly off the right shoulder over violent bumps to a tilted stop along the embankment of a fenced pasture. Moton managed to turn off the engine and headlights, blacked out for some time from the look of Liuzzo’s dead face, then ran toward Montgomery. Not for several miles of empty night did a truck come along driven by a Disciples of Christ minister from Richmond, California, Leon Riley, who backed up to investigate the frantically waving, blood-splattered young beanpole—nearly six feet four, less than 140 pounds. Pulled aboard the open flatbed, Moton screamed that the forty assorted marchers should lie low across each other and cover their heads. He collapsed on sight of the first headlights, saying they looked like the shooters’ car circling back again, and there was furious debate before they agreed to stop in Lowndes County even long enough to let two nieces of Napoleon Mays jump off for home, crying with fear.
President Johnson called Katzenbach within two hours about bulletins moving on the newswires. “The woman is from Michigan?” he asked.
“From Michigan, yeah,” said Katzenbach.
“Somebody out from the—out ambushed ’em or something?”
“Yes,” said Katzenbach, adding that he did not yet know the extent of the woman’s injuries or “any further details.”
“I didn’t wake you up, did I?” asked the President.
Katzenbach laughed. He said he had asked the FBI to have a full report to the White House before breakfast, but the President could not wait to do something. Even mediation, he told Katzenbach—sending Governor Collins back overnight—was “worth a damn in theory, to succeed military intervention.”
Just before one o’clock, President Johnson startled the overnight duty officer at FBI headquarters with a personal call for an update. Night supervisor Harold Swanson was rousted to give the President basic facts at 1:07, then again at 1:11 A.M. The Michigan victim was deceased, autopsy underway, bullet fragments and a clipboard headed “transportation committee” recovered from the car. Swanson emphasized that FBI inspector Joe Sullivan, in Selma for the Reeb case, commanded the investigation and already had secured the Liuzzo crime scene. Johnson admired Sullivan for his work on the murders of the three civil rights workers the previous summer in Mississippi, but he demanded news at any hour.
At 1:49 A.M., Diane Nash bulldozed a telephone call into FBI headquarters with notice that Leroy Moton had been jailed in Selma. Beyond the blatant injustice of it, she warned of the grave danger to the only known witness in the shooting, especially if Alabama authorities managed to get him transferred to the jurisdiction of the crime in Lowndes County. Supervisor Swanson refused Nash’s request to track down John Doar for her, but he did find out that Inspector Sullivan already knew about Moton. With Sullivan’s approval, Moton was being interviewed by FBI agents in the protective custody of Wilson Baker, safe from the Klan and Lowndes County, as well as from Sheriff Clark.
Swanson contacted Sullivan later with a terse announcement: “The president just called me and said you should work all night.”
LONG EXPERIENCE inside the FBI enabled Sullivan to sense something extraordinary before morning on Friday. The buzz of a high-profile investigation mysteriously shifted elsewhere. Colleagues undercut him instead of competing to help. High officials summoned to headquarters in the night were evasive, and only reluctantly did a friend confide that Birmingham agents had commandeered the FBI action on his case.
Director Hoover carefully emitted the bare minimum of his radioactive secret before breakfast, calling the White House residence to tell President Johnson that the case was nearly solved because the FBI had “one of our men in the car.” Inaccurately, Hoover said the insider “of course had no gun and did no shooting.” He continued in breathless staccato that the killers planned to “throw the guns into the blast furnace where they work, in those steel mills down there, and that’s what we’re laying for now, to uh, head off these individuals when they come to work this morning and shake ’em down…. We’ve got the informant in the office, and we’re talking to him, because uh, uh, he’s scared to death, naturally, because he fears for his life.” The Director assured President Johnson that Inspector Sullivan had taken charge of the investigation.
Johnson thanked Hoover—“As usual, you’re right on top of it”—and asked about the difference between an infiltrator and an informant. “You hire someone? And they join the Klan and keep—”
“We only go to someone who’s is, who is in the Klan,” Hoover replied, “and persuade him to work for the government. Uh, we pay him for it. Sometimes they demand a pretty high price, and sometimes they don’t. Now, for instance, in those three bodies we found in Mississippi, we had to pay thirty thousand dollars for that.” In Alabama, the informant was “not a regular agent of the Bureau,” but “fortunately he happened to be in on this thing last night,” said Hoover. “Otherwise, we’d be looking for a needle in a haystack.”
President Johnson hung up the telephone and looked blankly at his aides. “Do you know Hoover had a guy, an informer, in that car that shot her?” he asked.
Johnson immediately called Katzenbach to test his knowledge: “Looks like we’ll be pretty much on top of this one, doesn’t it?”
“I say, I haven’t heard a lot,” Katzenbach confessed. The entire Justice Department knew nothing of Hoover’s secret, like Inspector Sullivan himself, and would remain sealed from its background.
“They had an informant in the car,” the President announced. He said the FBI was waiting to pick up the killers.
“Oh, that’s good,” said Katzenbach. Asked whether the President should speak directly with Liuzzo’s widower, Anthony Liuzzo, in Detroit, he advised a careful test of the FBI’s negative recommendation. Johnson agreed. He tasked White House lawyer Lee White to make a preliminary call, with instructions loaded toward FBI warnings that Liuzzo was dangerously bitter. Minutes later, White reported with surprise that he found Liuzzo to be “much in control of himself, very relaxed, and sounded like a pretty fine fellow.” Liuzzo was grieving with five children, and “had a few unkind things to say about Wallace,” White told Johnson, but “he was in sort of a reflective mood and wanted to know where do we go from here now…. My judgment, sir, is that if you did call him, that he’s gonna be reasonable and not in any sense uncontrollable or wild.”
Hoover, meanwhile, called Attorney General Katzenbach to say “we have to move very rapidly” to break the Liuzzo case, and that Justice Department lawyers needed to draw up charges to hold the suspects. He accepted Katzenbach’s suggestion that only Doar was near enough to be mobilized instantly. Hoover tersely disclosed that there was an FBI informant. He explained with some exaggeration that President Johnson knew the substance ahead of the Attorney General only because he had called Hoover personally three or four times since midnight. For Katzenbach, the FBI Director added shocking arguments why the President should avoid the Liuzzo family, which Hoover promptly dictated to his top executives in a memo headed “9:32 A.M.”: “I stated the man himself doesn’t have too good a background and the woman had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope; that she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car; that it had the appearance of a necking party.” Katzenbach did not react to Hoover’s slanderous Klan fantasy dressed as evidence,* but neither did he ask a single question about the FBI’s surprise informant in the murder car. Naively, or protectively, he formed an impression that Rowe had only a casual relationship with the FBI until turning state’s evidence after the crime. Like President Johnson, Katzenbach wanted to believe that the FBI discovered a miraculous star witness, and Hoover zealously aimed suspicion at the victim Liuzzo instead.
President Johnson reached Hoover again minutes later, at 9:36, to say he was under heavy pressure to return Mr. Liuzzo’s phone call. The delay was making adverse news with an army of reporters camped in the Detroit home, waiting for reaction from the White House. Johnson wanted to know if Hoover knew “any reason why I shouldn’t, because in your file he’s a Teamster man.”
“Yes, he’s a Teamster man,” said Hoover. His voice tumbled through stops and starts: “I wouldn’t say bad character, but he’s uh, uh, well known out there as being one of the Teamsters’ strong arm there, and uh, this woman his wife, uh we found on they, on her body, uh numerous uh needle points indicating that she may have been taking dope.” Hoover said Johnson should delegate the call to an aide.
“White’s already talked to him,” said the President.
“Oh, he has?” said Hoover, taken aback. He promised quickly to send word on arrests in Alabama.
“Please do,” urged Johnson, “because they’re runnin’ me crazy over here.”
“All right, I’ll, I’ll get word down there right away,” said Hoover. He offered the President hurried images of the dragnet—multiple stakeouts, the killers’ red Impala under surveillance in a yard—along with jumbled observations about motive. The Klan conspiracy was “pretty well planned out” since the Reeb murder, Hoover told Johnson, but he mitigated the ambush as a product of circumstance: “They accidentally ran onto this car by reason of the fact that this colored man was, was snugglin’ up uh, uh, pretty close to the white woman who was driving.” He thought it would be safe to make a statement from the White House within the next hour.
The President instructed Hoover to grab the Attorney General when he was ready and “the two of you ride over and let the television cover you as you come in.” This, he added with understatement, “might be a little dramatic.”
“Well, I’ll, I’ll speed this thing up right away,” replied Hoover as Johnson signed off. The Director scrambled the FBI, but first he called Katzenbach to lobby one last time against Liuzzo. The President should “hold off until after the case is broken,” Hoover told Katzenbach, “and then he could consider whether he wants to call the man and extend condolences.”
Many years later, when documents and tape recordings of these transactions became available to scholars, Johnson would not be alive to say how consciously he was goading Hoover toward decisive commitment. The President had a recognized gift for subtle manipulation. He never acknowledged Hoover’s clear sensitivity about the Liuzzo call, nor his vulgarity. Among Hoover biographers, Richard Gid Powers would cite the Liuzzo comments in 1987 as evidence of Hoover’s core beliefs about civil rights: “paternalistic at best, mean-spiritedly racist at worst.” From a more complete record in 1998, Liuzzo biographer Mary Stanton would conclude that Hoover’s disparagement came also from a desperate need to minimize disclosure about his informant. If the first nationwide image of Liuzzo were a White House phone call with sympathetic relatives, stamping her as a martyred heroine, pressure to explain her death might unearth potentially ruinous secrets—beginning with the fact that the informant Gary Thomas Rowe had asked for and received prior FBI approval to ride with Thursday’s action squad, as he had been doing for nearly five years of unsolved crimes by the Birmingham Klan.
“Hoover panicked,” wrote Stanton. He clawed against Liuzzo to seize the hero’s mantle for his Bureau. Most certainly he did not disclose that Liuzzo, in unmailed letters recovered from her car, said she had been inspired to Selma by Johnson’s March 15 address to Congress. Johnson, for his part, recognized how hard it was for Hoover to expose FBI performance to outside accountability. The Director had not surrendered the informant’s name even to him, let alone the public, as would be required for any criminal trial. Johnson pushed Hoover to guarantee at least that much.
THE PRESIDENT initiated a record White House news day that preempted nationwide television three times before lunch. First, Johnson brought top congressional leaders from the Oval Office to thank them on camera for nearing passage of Medicare. He ambushed the bill’s chief remaining obstacle, Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, by asking whether such momentous legislation deserved at least a vote in committee. When Byrd conceded that nothing urgent stood in the way of consideration, Johnson pressed in a televised display of his full-bodied lobbying style: “So when the House acts and it is referred to the Senate Finance Committee, you will arrange for prompt hearings and thorough hearings?” Byrd lamely committed himself, and the President soon led the way outside to welcome a helicopter bearing Gemini 3 astronauts Virgil Grissom and John Young for a medal ceremony in the East Room.
Only NBC of the three networks stayed afterward to broadcast the astronauts’ parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. CBS executives were congratulating themselves for the choice not to bump Search for Tomorrow, their popular and lucrative regular show, when the White House issued yet another presidential news standby. White House press secretary George Reedy refused to confirm whether the alert involved the Liuzzo case. Reporters frantically gathered clues. Word came from Detroit that Johnson called the Liuzzo house at 12:30, unsuccessfully—Liuzzo had collapsed after a sleepless night and the family decided not to wake him—and from Washington that the Director’s limousine was sighted on White House grounds. Television screens were yanked back to the presidential seal just before the announced entrance at 12:40, and network executives knew they had guessed correctly when President Johnson emerged flanked by Katzenbach and Director Hoover himself. The President announced the four arrested suspects by name. He called for a national campaign against “the terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan,” and congratulated the FBI for breaking the case within twenty-four hours. “I cannot express myself too strongly in praising Mr. Hoover,” he said. These actions dwarfed other news, generating triple-tiered headlines and five separate photographs on the front page of the New York Times.
Inside the FBI, triumph gave way to renewed crisis when reporters questioned why Gary Thomas (Tommy) Rowe did not appear with the other three suspects Friday afternoon for arraignment. Rowe, the informant, had returned secretly to the crime scene with trusted FBI handlers, and was trying to remember where along Highway 80 they had thrown shell casings out the car windows. Terrified, Rowe procrastinated on a razor’s edge. The longer he remained separate from fellow Klansmen in jail, the more suspicion he invited upon himself as the government agent among them, but he did not want to leave his FBI protection. Finally, at 5:25 P.M., Rowe arrived handcuffed for arraignment in full Klan character, snarling at reporters and his FBI handlers alike. Attorney Matt Murphy, who identified himself by title as Klonsel for the Alabama Klan, secured the defendants’ immediate release on $50,000 bond and withdrew with a Grand Titan and an Exalted Cyclops to grill Rowe, who survived on his wits. Rowe said the FBI must have traced the action team through the warning ticket from the state trooper. He said with some truth that FBI agents had isolated him in custody all day, mixing threats and inducements to make him turn state’s evidence. Rowe claimed to be resisting gallantly. Klonsel Murphy said they could impeach any prosecution with evidence of tampering and “bribes.” Klan leaders reserved suspicion of Rowe, but let him go home.
The FBI’s secret survived also in news coverage, with only one remote item questioning “an unexplained four-hour delay” in Rowe’s arraignment. Teams of agents diligently collected forensic evidence, and actually did find the spent shell casings along Highway 80. Edicts from FBI headquarters spurred them on, balanced by internal warnings to suppress all hints of an informant. One memo from Hoover’s office bluntly instructed that “all agents must keep their mouths shut.” A top official told supervisors that the Bureau had “no need or reason to explain what we are doing and the less said the better.” Hoover added a handwritten order: “I want no comments nor amplifications made in Ala. or here, as President has made his statement & it ends there.”
Political work continued behind the bulwark of Johnson’s announcement. Granting an audience to a newly elected congressman from Oregon, who volunteered loyalty by denouncing all criticism of the FBI from either King or the Warren Commission, Hoover reviewed at length his decision to call King the nation’s most notorious liar. Also, on the Friday of the Liuzzo arrests, FBI intelligence agents secretly delivered to federal mediator LeRoy Collins a poisonously targeted report. From mountains of telephone intercepts, supervisors isolated one remark by Coretta King to her husband. She thought Collins, while marching briefly with them on Monday, had revealed himself to be “blinded by prejudice” in pushing King to accommodate white Montgomery’s desired limits on the final rally. FBI supervisors highlighted her comment as an insult to Collins, obtained from an unspecified reliable source. With Hoover’s approval, on assurance that Collins was “a long-time admirer of the Director and the Bureau,” they attached a compendium of the FBI’s top secret allegations against King as a philandering subversive. The package, in the guise of friendly caution against false allies, served notice to Collins that national security authorities intercepted his private communications with people branded unfit. This sour message complemented rude adjustments for the ex-governor back home in Florida, where a barber of long service refused to cut his hair because he was consorting with Negroes.
A final alarm rattled over the UPI national ticker at 2:26 P.M. on Saturday with a quotation from Sheriff Clark. “The FBI had that car under surveillance,” he said of the Birmingham Klan squad. To reporters badgering him about the latest Alabama civil rights murder, Clark guessed about how federal agents solved the case so quickly, then shifted blame to the FBI for failure to share information that might have averted the murder. This UPI item rocketed upward through FBI headquarters, and by 9:45 P.M. a public statement dismissed the Clark statement as “a malicious lie.” Accurately, the FBI official denied that agents had the Klan car under active surveillance on the day of the murder. The rebuttal, like Hoover’s subsequent report to Katzenbach—“I had to blast the story of the Sheriff down there as a lie…”—seized upon an error in Clark’s guesswork to obfuscate the FBI’s inside knowledge of the plot. Omitting prior communications, including the approval for Rowe to join the Klan mission, which would have raised thorny issues about why the car was not under surveillance, the headquarters spokesperson declared that the Bureau “promptly disseminated all information which came to its knowledge,” then solved the crime overnight. Only a “totalitarian” FBI could have done more, he said, and Director Hoover modestly refused such power.
The single FBI statement sufficed. DeLoach wisely advised colleagues to ignore any future attacks from Clark, who was at best a discredited segregationist, lest Hoover’s prestige kindle a “feud” story. The ever-vigilant Hoover took advantage of respite in the Liuzzo case to burnish the fabled discipline of his headquarters bureaucracy. He tasked inspectors to explain why it took seven hours to react on Saturday, which nearly had pushed the vital press reaction into another day’s news cycle. From time stamps on every document, inspectors made sure that intake scanners had met rigorous deadlines for culling out sensitive material, and that routers and messengers had met their deadlines for delivering flagged items to top officials—every seven minutes on workdays, every hour on weekends. Hoover’s own secretary insisted that she had pouched the Clark story to Hoover “immediately,” as her intake stamp of 4:16 P.M., less than two hours after it moved on the UPI wire, demonstrated. Executives defended every detail of their conduct, but the inspectors inevitably discovered correctable lapses. There were missing time stamps in DeLoach’s political shop, for instance, and one unfortunate assistant admitted leaving for home late Saturday without noticing Clark documents on his desk.
The FBI enjoyed a feast of glory in the news, which one of DeLoach’s assistants called “another vindication of the propriety of the Bureau’s press release procedures.” The New York Times saluted Hoover with a crowning profile as “an authentic American folk hero…the incorruptible idol of generations of American youngsters and the symbol of the ‘honest cop’ to millions of their elders.” The “spectacular feat” of the Liuzzo arrests was especially sweet for Hoover, said the Times, because it repaired “a few cracks…in the previously impenetrable armor of his public esteem.” Reviewing Hoover’s forty-eight continuous years at the Justice Department, the profile found that Hoover had demanded only two things since 1924 as the FBI’s first and only Director: absolute control, and freedom from politics. With no hint that these conditions might be incompatible, especially over time, or that they violated the most basic principles of constitutional self-government, the Times concluded that Hoover had used his iron hand to build “an impressive monument to efficiency and integrity.”
Martin Luther King sent Hoover a telegram of thanks. “Let me congratulate you and the FBI for this speedy arrest of the accused assassins of Mrs. Liuzzo,” he wrote. “The agents assigned to Alabama have done an outstanding job of containing the tremendous violence and savagery which runs rampant under this surface of Alabama life. There is still much work to be done.” The explicit reference to Alabama agents was a signal of conscious apology, as Hoover had justified his “notorious liar” outburst by King’s one publicized criticism of FBI performance in Alabama. Nevertheless, Hoover refused any reply to King—gloating, gracious, or pro forma. Even acknowledgment “would only help build up this character…tie us in with him, and put us under obligation to him,” wrote DeLoach for the executives. They decided not to confirm to reporters that the King telegram existed.
KING FLEW west to preach on Sunday, March 28, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, then drove to a local television station. Producers had agreed to film him from there in a special edition of Meet the Press if he promised to withhold from NBC’s competitors any newsworthy comments about a post-Selma boycott of Alabama products. King acceded. Experience taught him that the national news shows tended to provoke controversy from perspectives at odds with the movement, toward the extreme of treating him as a houseboy, and he knew better than to expect a discussion of Selma’s place in history. Still, the opening question sprang from deep ambush.
“First,” King replied on the air, “I would say that the march was not silly at all.”
Panelist Lawrence Spivak insisted that the evaluation—“this was his word”—came from Harry Truman, who believed the “silly” march could not accomplish “a darn thing” except make a big scene. The same former President who lionized President Johnson for his speech about Selma scorned the movement itself, personified by King.
Spivak next suggested that the Selma marches were superfluous to any voting rights bill. “Wouldn’t you have gotten it whether or not you marched?” he asked.
“The demonstration was certainly for the voting rights bill,” King carefully replied. He could not cite the engine force of the movement without risking losing the votes of those in Congress who needed to claim untainted judgment, free of pressure by minority groups. So he tied the Selma campaign to multiple goals. “There have been untold bombings of homes and churches,” he said. “Again, nothing has been done about this on the whole. We were marching there to protest these brutalities, these murders and all of the things that go along with them, as much as to gain the right to vote.”
Panelists doubted King’s personal commitment to nonviolence, and worried about disorders beyond his control: “How deeply do you fear the eruption of Negro violence?” One described the Highlander photograph “being plastered all over Alabama billboards,” and asked him to explain “whether that was a Communist training school and what you were doing there?” A question put suspicions bluntly, “Have Communists infiltrated the movement?” Others pressed for an end to demonstrations.
King held his own. He said that because people of goodwill had “abdicated responsibility,” the movement felt a “moral obligation to keep these issues before the public, before the American conscience, before the mainstream of our nation, that somebody will do something about it. And demonstrations have proved to be the best way to do this.”
Organs of mainstream culture divided over Selma. Even as the panelists on national television labored to diminish its unsettling impact, reporters gathered Sunday morning in Selma on advance word that Bishop Carpenter of Alabama had brokered a new policy to comply with Canon 16, Section 4 of Episcopal rules, governing admission for worship. Wilson Baker arrested an armed member of Sheriff Clark’s posse who shouted obscenities from the street, as the ushers at St. Paul’s Church dutifully seated on the front row a group of sixteen newcomers from Brown Chapel—mostly white clergy from Los Angeles, plus four Negroes, three of them from Selma. Rector Frank Mathews, having urged acceptance in two anguished pastoral letters that week, preached on reconciliation without mentioning the racial conflict. (“That was as bad as my senior sermon in seminary,” he said afterward, admitting frayed nerves.) Mathews and several parishioners warmly greeted the visitors, most of whom had been excluded at least once previously in March. Among them, Rev. John Morris hailed “the first breakthrough in Selma not induced by a court order,” and seminarian Jonathan Daniels felt a welcome epiphany from the transforming power of church doctrine. “Glory to God in the highest!” he wrote a friend. The New York Times covered the service on its front page, headlined “Selma Protestant Church Integrated for First Time,” predicting that change would spread from the example.
Morris complained that movement leaders had evacuated too swiftly, leaving hundreds of holdover clergy without direction in Selma. They joined daily demonstrations out of Brown Chapel. Some rallied to James Bevel’s call for follow-up action “now, while people are still in motion and before fear sets in.” SNCC staff members proposed to march again to Montgomery and lay siege this time to Wallace’s capital. Others followed new boldness along the march route to Mt. Gillard Church, where Jesse “Note” Favors spent Sunday afternoon stringing power cords to makeshift spotlights he hung around the perimeter. Sentries used them to keep watch that night over the first mass meeting in Lowndes County. Storekeeper William Cosby presided. Four Sundays after a Klan posse chased a preacher permanently out of the county for mentioning the vote, 170 people showed up to prepare for the legally prescribed odd-Monday registration day on the site opened specially for Negroes, next to the gallows. “Now I hope that tomorrow morning at eight o’clock we’ll have the same number at the Lowndes County jailhouse,” said Cosby.
The featured speaker at Mt. Gillard, Bernard Lafayette of SNCC, preached on miracles from small beginnings. Though only twenty-six, Lafayette already had served nearly seven years in the vanguard nonviolent movement out of Nashville, acquiring the nickname “Little Gandhi.” After incarceration in Mississippi as a Freedom Rider, Lafayette had ventured into Selma to establish the first movement outpost in 1962, when Selma had been nearly as forbidding as Lowndes County. It had required more than six months’ patient agitation before the first Negro church dared to host a mass meeting, and Lafayette’s work in Selma later informed his young colleagues from Nashville. John Lewis of SNCC scheduled early demonstrations for voting rights there; Bevel and Nash lobbied Martin Luther King to make Selma the base of their massive nonviolent plan to answer the Birmingham church bombing. At Bevel’s invitation, Lafayette often had visited the 1965 campaign from Chicago, where he was conducting nonviolent experiments to address de facto segregation. Privately, he warned of “too much leadership concentrated in one place.” Publicly, he exhorted the Mt. Gillard crowd to capture the lightning from Selma, which was spreading hope worldwide. Volunteers rose up for Tuesday. Exactly a week after the wondrous host of marchers appeared on Highway 80 with white friends and an armed escort of soldiers, local citizens would dare to gather unprotected where Viola Liuzzo’s death car came to rest. Preparations for the leap already made news. “An immediate result of Mrs. Liuzzo’s death,” reported one story, “will be to move the Alabama Negro movement publicly into Lowndes County.”
PRESIDENT JOHNSON startled his Attorney General by telephone on Monday, March 29. “Nick,” he said, “have I ever asked you or suggested to you that you tap a line?”
“No, Mr. President, you never have,” said Katzenbach.
“Don’t you have to authorize every one to be tapped?” Johnson demanded.
“I authorize every one that the FBI taps,” Katzenbach replied. He added that the Pentagon and IRS occasionally tapped phone lines on their own.
“Well, I want them brought to an irreducible minimum, and only in the gravest cases,” Johnson thundered. “And I want you to authorize them, and then, by God, I want to know about them. I’m against wiretapping, period.”
The catalyst for his outburst was another visit to the White House by syndicated columnist Joe Alsop, this time on Saturday with New York Times bureau chief James Reston. Both complained of government harassment by wiretap. Alsop in particular had ranted on the verge of delirium, charging that government agents were shutting off his news sources by spreading scurrilous information about his private life. Johnson told Katzenbach that Alsop was unstable—“just short of the asylum now”—to the point of embarrassing longtime friends in the Washington establishment.
Katzenbach agreed. “I’ve seen him a couple of times recently, Mr. President,” he said. “He is in bad shape. There’s no question about it.”
The President spoke obliquely of sensitive matters. “Now, I saw the Alsop file,” he said. “I don’t know how it got over here. I don’t know why it got over here. Uh, I saw Alsop’s file…” He said he had locked it under care of his most trusted secretary, Mildred Stegall—“been with me since ’37 or ’8”—along with material “in one of our, uh, friend’s cases, from what I have seen, that that must be where the evidence comes from, I mean, on Hawaii jaunts and some of those things, California, and uh, uh, with some of the women and that kind of stuff involved. You know who I’m talking about?”
“Yes,” said Katzenbach. This was the FBI dossier on King.
“But Joe Alsop’s having a change of life,” said Johnson. The secret heart of the file was that Soviet KGB agents had entrapped and recorded Alsop in a homosexual tryst in Moscow, after which Alsop, to avoid national security blackmail, had confessed his homosexual life to the CIA and FBI. This happened in 1957, near the Cold War’s peak fear of Communist conspiracy. Custom then inhibited reference even to conventional sex within marriage, banning the word “pregnant” through comedy actress Lucille Ball’s gestation on her hit television show, and homosexuality still remained taboo beyond mention. Newspapers found euphemisms to report the “lewd conduct” scandal that had banished chief of staff Walter Jenkins from Johnson’s White House late in 1964.
Katzenbach gingerly educated the President on the difference between wiretaps, which picked up only phone conversations, and microphone bugs, planted by burglary, which picked up all sounds in a targeted room. He was confident that he controlled the wiretaps, which the FBI called “technical surveillance,” or “tesur” for short, and that he had approved only legitimate targets—not including Alsop. “The furthest out one is the one that you referred to,” he said, meaning the King wiretap, “which my predecessor [Robert Kennedy] authorized, which I’ve been ambivalent about taking off.”
The Attorney General did not explain the tactical advantage of wiretaps for more intrusive spying—that by telephone interception of travel arrangements, for instance, FBI agents gained advance notice to plant bugs in hotel rooms before King arrived. Uncomfortably, Katzenbach did say he was far less confident of legal accountability for bugs, which the FBI called “microphone surveillance,” or “misur.” This illicit technique provided the most graphic pay dirt of undercover work. Katzenbach told Johnson that the FBI claimed independent authority “which neither I nor, or my predecessor knew until, oh, in the last couple or three months, there was authority for them occasionally to make a trespass and bug.” He said he wanted approval rights for bugs, too, even though gaining such control was a tall order for an Attorney General who had been confirmed only a month. “I’m going to work that out with Mr. Hoover, in writing,” vowed Katzenbach, “same as the wiretaps.”
President Johnson passed over the distinctions to rail against the secret pressures. “I don’t know what legislation you can ask for in that field,” he told Katzenbach, “but I’ve been against it all my life. And I’m a red hot, one million two percent civil liberties man.” He mentioned practical motives for respecting the fourth estate. “I don’t think we can afford to just let it go unnoticed,” said Johnson, “when, when Scotty [James] Reston comes in to plead with the White House.” Reston had heard vaguely at the Gridiron Club dinner of agents shadowing his son Richard to keep him off a story. Alsop, ironically, was both the conduit and the victim of much rougher tactics. Based on clandestine FBI allegations, he publicly attacked Martin Luther King as the dangerous, naive tool of Communist spies, in a national column entitled “An Unhappy Secret.” At the same time, Alsop blamed both the FBI and KGB for allowing his own secret to fester just beneath public notice. Thirty years later, Alsop biographer Edwin Yoder would unearth documents showing that Hoover periodically “spread the word” of Alsop’s homosexuality among high officials—especially those who resented Alsop’s journalism, Yoder concluded, as they were likely to appreciate the FBI for the top secret tip.
President Johnson kept telling Katzenbach that Alsop may be crazy, “but I like him, and I’m his friend” of thirty years. Now Alsop seemed deeply disturbed, with “the same look in his eye and the same attitude…that Phil Graham had the last time I saw him,” said the President. (Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, committed suicide.) He deplored the personal toll: “I resent this so deeply.” As much as he loved power, Johnson decried surveillance as underhanded intimidation—“We’ve had a revolution, I just don’t want it”—and repeatedly denounced secret police methods. “I guess you’ve got to have them in treason [cases] or something,” he told Katzenbach. “But I sure, I don’t trust anybody on that field. And if I’ve got to trust somebody in this government, I want to trust you.”
Johnson plotted in detail how to rein in domestic spies. The next day, March 30, Katzenbach formally ordered Director Hoover to stop existing microphone surveillance and submit future bugging requests for approval by the established legal practice on wiretaps. Only the President’s surprise initiative and clear mandate allowed him to act decisively. Even so, the order met resistance deep within a subterranean government devoted to secrecy and arbitrary authority, which helped generate disillusioning spy scandals for years to come.
MONDAY NIGHT in Detroit, before Tuesday’s televised funeral there for Viola Liuzzo, 1,500 people gave a standing ovation to James Leatherer. Wearing his orange marching vest, Leatherer told a memorial service that Liuzzo’s sacrifice sent an enduring message to uncertain Americans: “you have to get off the fence.” The crowd stood for Rosa Parks, and cheered a demand for the resignation of Episcopal Rt. Rev. C. C. J. Carpenter. “As Bishop of Alabama,” Rev. Carl Sayers accused, “you have been to the flock of Christ a wolf and not a shepherd.” Sayers spoke of being turned away from St. Paul’s Church on the public instruction of Carpenter. He announced that Suffragan Bishop Kim Myers, also rebuffed in Selma, blessed his demand as an act of religious conscience.
The Rt. Rev. Richard Emrich, Episcopal Bishop of Michigan, emphatically disapproved. He privately reproached both Myers and Sayers for attacking another bishop without his consent, and identified with the travail of Carpenter as a peer at the helm of an embattled institution. Sunday’s breakthrough at St. Paul’s had withered under siege. With Carpenter’s assistant consoling Rev. Mathews about “what a bitter pill it was to you to have to do business with John Morris,” the visiting Episcopal clergy, including Morris, returned eagerly to the church house for follow-up consultation (after resolving among themselves, in Judith Upham’s favor, a dispute about whether it was proper for a female to join negotiations over church policy). They were dismayed to learn from Mathews that many at St. Paul’s understood the mixed service as the one-time price of a bargain for their departure. On the other side, even moderates in the congregation were distressed that the visitors hoped to build continuing fellowship on the divided vote to admit Negroes. Prominent segregationists already resigned from the governing vestry. Church lawyers picked at Carpenter’s interpretation of the canon. Only bona fide Episcopalians were guaranteed worship, they said, and ushers were empowered to keep order as they saw fit.
Mathews reserved for his superiors the strength of internal rebellion. “Losing this family would be a terrific financial blow to the parish,” he confided to Carpenter’s assistant. “They pledge $3,000 a year, and in the past three years have put an additional $7,500 in my discretionary fund…but I’ll be damned if I’ll be bought.” He complained that the wife of another resigned vestryman, whose extended family “make up the greatest part of the congregation,” was “absolutely ‘sick’” with certainty that integrated worship was a Communist conspiracy to enslave white people. “If she is cured,” wrote Mathews, “it will be a greater healing miracle than any recorded in the Gospels.”
Bishop Carpenter curdled against the movement for overlooking the progressive side of his heritage. His great-grandfather had conducted a pioneer ministry among slaves through four decades, virtually alone among antebellum Southern clergy. Carpenter never had espoused segregation. He saw himself fostering a middle ground between George Wallace and Martin Luther King, only to be rebuked on both sides, and he had been galled to be the first-named addressee on King’s famed Letter from Birmingham Jail. As a founding member of the National Council of Churches, who defended the ecumenical body until it “urged the current invasion of Selma and Alabama,” Carpenter felt “in the position of having the limb cut out from under me.” He seized the victim’s perspective to bemoan extreme punishment for sins against Negroes, which he said were “attributed” to the white South by outsiders. “After the nail has been driven all the way in,” he wrote Bishop Myers of Michigan, “it is definitely not right to keep pounding on it simply to make the scars deeper.” Ever more preoccupied with rulebook decorum, Carpenter denounced Myers to his superior in Michigan for intrusions he found “rude and inexcusable…. I do not want him in the Diocese of Alabama until he has learned the rudiments of proper conduct.” He disdained the call for his resignation by Rev. Sayers: “I have not answered him at all and would not think of answering him…. He obviously is a little fellow who wanted to get some publicity.” On this point, Bishop Emrich of Michigan endorsed official hauteur as sound church governance. “When we answer somebody who is in a lower position than ourselves,” he wrote Carpenter, “we give him an honor which he does not deserve.”
LATE MONDAY night in Washington, President H. E. Maurice Yaméogo presented state gifts from his newly independent African country of Upper Volta, including a red leather saddle and a model village with dwellings that converted to custom-sized holders for American cigarettes. He received an authentic Cochiti Indian tribal drum and a framed painting of the White House viewed from Lafayette Park. As Yaméogo was answering his host’s toast of comity between their two nations, an usher crept in with a written note from the Situation Room. President Johnson handed it wordlessly to Secretary of State Rusk, who rushed out.
Minutes earlier, across the morning dateline in Saigon, a Citroën sedan stalled by the riverfront hotel that served as the American embassy. A Vietnamese policeman remonstrated with the driver to move on, then exchanged fatal gunfire when the driver fled instead on the back of a handily passing motorbike, just before an estimated 350 pounds of American-made C-4 plastique explosive—stolen or bought—detonated inside the car. The blast buckled buildings across the street, setting one ablaze, destroyed twenty vehicles, and sent a plume of smoke from the embassy three hundred feet high. Flying glass partially blinded CIA Station Chief Peer da Silva on the second floor, and lacerated Chargé d’Affaires Alexis Johnson on the fifth. Twenty Vietnamese employees were among the dead inside, with nearly two hundred wounded.
After midnight in Washington, President Johnson led a brief flashlight tour of the Lincoln Memorial for President Yaméogo, who praised Lincoln in a public statement that rejected the Cold War overtures to Upper Volta by Communist China. Johnson then returned to his office to monitor the bomb attack in Saigon. Not until daylight did the duty officer in the Situation Room spell out for him the names of the two American fatalities, Barbara Robbins, “R-O-B-B-I-N-S of Denver” (identified in wire stories as “a girl secretary”), and a Navy petty officer—“we’re not sure if it’s male or female…M-A-N-O-L-T-O Castillo, C-A-S-T-I-L-L-O.”
The President called Secretary McNamara, who found small consolation in the prior evacuation of vulnerable Americans—“it does look good that you pulled the dependents out.” McNamara proposed no immediate change in war policy. He reported that he had “cleared up the policy on taps and surveillance,” and had assured James Reston of the Times that his son was not a spy target. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy next told the President that the White House was preparing a statement of “firmness and shock” about the embassy bomb. He said that Henry Cabot Lodge, who was not yet announced as the next ambassador to South Vietnam, already had called that morning to urge construction of a new embassy compound in Saigon “with a high wall around it…and treat this as a, as a siege, which is what it is for working purposes.”
Johnson switched abruptly to worries about Bundy’s family friend and fellow New England aristocrat. “Joe Alsop is, in my judgment, must be going crazy,” he said. “Do you think he is or not?”
“I think he’s actually at the moment in better shape than he was,” Bundy replied, but he lamented the latest outburst at the White House about wiretapping and persecution. “I knew he was going to do this,” said Bundy. “I told him to shut up about it.”
SOLEMNLY BEFORE noon on Tuesday, timed to coincide with the high requiem mass in Detroit, a caravan left Selma consisting of an ambulance, a truck, twenty-six cars, and three hearses, headlights on, rolling east from the Pettus Bridge for twenty-five miles. Less than half the crowd of five hundred squeezed inside the tiny hillside church, Wright’s Chapel AME Zion, a few hundred yards above the Liuzzo death site on Highway 80. Honorary pallbearers entered with ten empty caskets, each bearing the name of a movement victim killed in Alabama over the past two years, so far with scant sign of interest from state officials—seven during the Birmingham upheavals of 1963,* plus Jackson, Reeb, and Liuzzo from the voting rights campaign.
No local leader or famous orator spoke to the daylight assembly in Lowndes County, and most of the scattered organizers had come lately to steady witness. The children’s demonstrations in Birmingham had transformed James Orange from hulking high school drifter to precocious minister of nonviolence. Willie Bolden, the main speaker, had worked as a longshoreman and hotel bellhop until the drama of solo demonstrations by Hosea Williams in Savannah pulled him to join Orange on King’s SCLC staff. Rev. L. L. Anderson, who offered the benediction, had defied his own deacons to open Tabernacle Baptist to Bernard Lafayette for the first mass meeting in Selma. “Oh, God,” Anderson prayed at Wright’s Chapel, “hasten the day when every man—even this hued, flung-down race of mine—can go from one side of this country to the other without being killed.”
With Silas Norman of SNCC, James Orange mobilized help to reload the caskets while local citizens, many of whom had heard Lafayette’s Sunday sermon about small movement beginnings, refused to say goodbye to some two dozen SNCC workers. Some overheard debates—amid predictions that Mt. Gillard Church would be ashes before May—about assigning Lowndes among new trial projects across the Black Belt of Alabama. They gathered especially around Stokely Carmichael, who was marked locally for speaking “upright” to a state trooper before the great march, and pressed him not to abandon Lowndes for more promising hard cases. “Don’t go to Greene County,” said Mattie Lee Moorer. “Some of y’all got to stay here.” Carmichael took soundings about where he might safely spend the night in the vast rural area of Lowndes County, to gain a foothold. Bob Mants joined him.
The caravan continued into Montgomery. Golden Frinks of North Carolina, at whose home Bevel and Nash had composed their blueprint for the Alabama voting rights campaign, led a brief procession to the capitol on foot. Blocked by guards, pallbearers laid the empty caskets on the marble steps. Bevel, saying, “I pay traffic fines here all the time,” talked his way around Governor Wallace’s public ban on nonresident “outside agitators” to join the delegation of sixteen Alabamians—fifteen Negro men, plus Rev. Joseph Ellwanger from Selma’s “white march” of March 6—who presented an anticlimactic freedom petition to the governor in person. Fifty women conducted a vigil on the steps outside, until black state employees in white servants’ jackets hauled away the caskets.