CHAPTER 17

Ten Feet Tall

April 7–May 26, 1965

SCULPTRESS Jimilu Mason despaired of making her subject hold a pose. She tried to shape the bust while President Johnson, seated on a raised platform just outside the Oval Office, gesticulated for an hour to columnist Walter Lippmann about the secret draft of a speech on Vietnam. “I’m going to hold out that carrot you keep talking to me about,” he promised. When storms grounded White House helicopters on the evening of April 7, a substitute motorcade whisked Johnson to Baltimore for his nationally televised address from Johns Hopkins University. He welcomed “unconditional discussions” toward peace and offered a “billion dollar American investment” for postwar economic development of the region, including North Vietnam. “The vast Mekong River can provide food and water and power on a scale to dwarf even our own TVA,” he declared. “The wonders of modern medicine can be spread through villages where thousands die every year from lack of care. Schools can be established…”

All this “and more” would unfold for good once North Vietnam ceased its campaign of “total conquest” in South Vietnam, Johnson pledged. Until then, he presented his nation as a dutiful warrior on “this painful road,” standing ready to honor the cause of four hundred Americans who had ended their young lives already “on Vietnam’s steaming soil.” He announced passive yet steadfast resolve: “We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired.” Against unflinching preparations for “a war of unparalleled brutality,” he posed lyrical yearnings for peace. Six times Johnson mentioned a dream to end war itself. “It is a very old dream,” said the President. “But we have the power and now we have the opportunity to make that dream come true.” He struggled almost wistfully with the temptations of martial glory—saying, “the guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure”—then closed in the voice of Moses proclaiming his farewell summary of Israel’s covenant law: “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore, choose life.”

Critics hailed the threshold speech as a “master stroke.” Former President Dwight Eisenhower privately congratulated Johnson for “a very timely and fine move,” and welcomed the worldwide political initiative as recognition that an independent South Vietnam could not be maintained “just with bayonets” or “just with white nations.” Mail to the White House shifted overnight from 4–1 against U.S. policy in Vietnam to 5–1 in favor, but Johnson mulled over the hostile responses. He sought reassurance the next morning from Arthur “Tex” Goldschmidt, an old friend who served the United Nations as an expert on Mekong River development. Goldschmidt had collaborated with speechwriter Richard Goodwin, and was pleased that the Hopkins audience of sixty million nearly matched the seminal “We Shall Overcome” speech three weeks earlier. His boss, Secretary-General U Thant, already had confided that the message was “wonderful,” Goldschmidt told the President, and he had heard “terrific reactions” from lesser U.N. colleagues, “you know, that I talk to in the elevator.”

Johnson could not stop reading from his avalanche of telegrams: “Atlanta, Georgia, ‘People are sick and tired of your lies about Vietnam. Bring the troops home.’ Lubbock, Texas, ‘We will back down in Vietnam as we have everywhere else.’…Uh, ‘your speech tonight was pious nonsense.’…Uh, ‘Do you really believe that peace can be purchased for a billion?’ That’s Michigan…uh, California, ‘a weak-kneed buyout scheme…billion-dollar appeasement.’…Uh, ‘You listened to the wrong advisers. Please ready Encyclopedia America ’57….”

Goldschmidt laughed. He said Johnson was getting hit from both sides.

“I haven’t got a damn wire from anybody I know,” said the President. “Isn’t that odd? Not a one.” Political professionals hedged. While Johnson hoped that North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh would choose economic rewards over military punishment, he admitted to himself that he would never negotiate if the positions were reversed. Forlorn, he suggested that Goldschmidt’s wife must approve at least of his health legislation.

“She loves it,” said Goldschmidt. “We’re both happy. I mean if you had tried to make the Goldschmidts happy, you couldn’t have done better.” His wife, Elizabeth Wickenden, had been a social policy advocate since the New Deal, when she and Goldschmidt had introduced a youthful Lyndon Johnson to lifelong friends such as Abe Fortas. Now the President asked that he have her dictate a statement about the passage of Medicare tonight.

“Tonight?” exclaimed Goldschmidt.

“Yeah, we’re gonna pass it tonight in the House,” said Johnson, chortling over his surprise. “Tell her to give it a little thought and she can call up and dictate it to my secretary. I really want to say it’s the finest thing that ever happened to the world.”

Historic wonders and woes tumbled over each other. Medicare did pass the House by 110 votes before midnight on April 8. Both education and voting rights cleared Senate hurdles the next day, the centennial of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. In between, Johnson fielded reports through Thursday night about a single Air Force jet fighter that was missing and presumed shot down near the Chinese territory of Hainan Island. He postponed a scheduled trip to Houston, on tenterhooks about military confrontation with Communist China and political backbiting in the Senate, where he feared that the bellicose Thomas Dodd of Connecticut “gets up and says why in the hell did we run, and they knock down our plane and we don’t do anything?” Any normal activity would “look awful bad,” Johnson worried, “if we had another incident or they bombed or something.”

“I believe you can go, Mr. President,” said McGeorge Bundy, and Johnson reached “the world’s largest air-conditioned room” Friday night to witness the first Major League baseball game ever played indoors. Mickey Mantle’s exhibition home run to right-center field triggered the inaugural forty-five-second convulsion of a giant scoreboard that flashed from pinball whirls and rocket flares to electronic cowboys slinging lassos on longhorn steers. The New York Times likened the new Houston Astrodome to Roman Emperor Vespasian’s cloth-covered amphitheater from the year 70. Innovations included fifty-three luxury boxes with private bars and swivel chairs upholstered in velvet, plus groundskeepers called Earthmen who wore orange space suits. There were flaws to be addressed—the sun-starved death of Tifway Bermuda grass soon introduced plastic AstroTurf—but the domed extravaganza proved a bellwether of the regional economy. That same Friday, the Milwaukee Braves and Detroit Tigers played at a stadium hastily thrown up in Atlanta, according to Mayor Ivan Allen, “on ground we didn’t own, with money we didn’t have, for a team we hadn’t signed.” As the Deep South began to escape the commercial shackles of segregation, Allen courted the Braves and a new professional football team to help lift Atlanta into the fifth year of a nationwide boom economy.

Johnson stayed in Texas to dedicate a Job Corps center on Saturday with Sargent Shriver, director of the eight-month-old poverty program. The President confessed to the assembled young trainees that he himself had been a dropout for two years, and he made a teasing lesson of the platform dignitaries by recalling that several had been hungry apprentices in FDR’s National Youth Administration, “the job corps of that day”—Governor John Connally for $30 a month, Representative Jake Pickle for $25. “I am not a prophet, or the son of a prophet,” said Johnson, but he predicted an era of renewed potential for miracles. Meanwhile, couriers scrambled from Washington with the finished education bill, and on Palm Sunday, April 11, aides hung the presidential seal from a plank table in the yard of the one-room prairie schoolhouse where Johnson had completed eight grades from the age of four. “Come over here, Miss Katie,” he said, beckoning his first teacher, long since retired, to sit with him before the press corps.

The new law provided $1.3 billion, which covered only 6 percent of current costs for elementary and secondary schools. It circumvented a long stalemate over church-state issues by targeting the five million poorest students in all schools, whether public or religious, on Johnson’s pounded theme: “Poverty has many roots, but the taproot is ignorance.” Required local control meant that districts could and would divert funds to less needy students. Still, Johnson waxed euphoric over the breakthrough in federal support for education, ending legislative failures that dated back to 1870 and ran thick since 1946. He mingled at the ceremony with Tomás Coronado and Amanda García among returning admirers from his formative job at Cotulla in 1928. Teacher Johnson had bought a book to drill Coronado in English even though he was the adult janitor. García said Johnson once spanked another student for mimicking his awkward gringo gait, which had made them realize that he, too, was sensitive about humiliation. The President said he would never sign a more important law than the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Quoting Thomas Jefferson’s admonition to “establish and improve the law for educating the common people,” he urged his audience not to “delay in putting it to work.”

ON PALM Sunday in Selma, the chief usher at St. Paul’s Episcopal stopped a mixed group before 7:30 morning worship. “The bishop says we’ve got to let you into our church,” he advised, “but we don’t have to let you receive Communion.” Police arrived, and a standoff ensued until Rev. Frank Mathews emerged in robes to guide the ushers down the sidewalk for an intense private discussion. White seminarians Jonathan Daniels and Judith Upham waited with half a dozen charges in question—teenage girls from their host families in the Carver Homes apartments, who had been up since dawn to plait their hair, pull on dress gloves, and practice Communion etiquette. “I may lose my job because of this,” Mathews whispered upon his return, “but you can come to the service.” With a look that signaled an uneasy compromise with his ushers, he stipulated that they must sit in the back row and receive Communion last. Inside, some members held back from Communion with transparent disgust, as though the intruders had spoiled salvation. Others made a point of welcoming the visitors afterward, while one man made conversation on the steps until he could no longer contain himself. “You goddam scum,” he said, and spelled out the word with an intensity that left Upham shaking.

Upham and Daniels carved out their own witness on the fringe of a movement stunned in the afterglow of the great march to Montgomery. They drove to Mobile to buy clerical collars that identified them as seminarians. They spent whole days seeking out the few members of St. Paul’s who would exchange words with them. Judge Bernard Reynolds, the chief usher, received them in his chambers at the Dallas County courthouse and explained that they would be welcome in church whenever they did not bring their “nigger trash.” Daniels and Upham stifled their rage to discuss church doctrine. “There are still moments when I’d like to get a high-powered rifle and take to the woods,” Daniels wrote that week, “but more and more strongly I am beginning to feel that ultimately the revolution to which I am committed is the way of the Cross.”

Religious interpretation ran ahead of tactical savvy. The seminarians repeated the knowing buzz of insiders who said Viola Liuzzo had naively endangered herself by interracial travel, but they drove around Selma with half a dozen Negro youngsters stuffed in the Volkswagen. With an Episcopal priest from California and his entire family, including three small children, they ventured into remote Wilcox County and were embarrassed to ask local white people for directions to a voting rights demonstration. Daniels wound up suffering canister burns in the midst of a large crowd being tear-gassed in Camden, where his spirits revived upon personal revelation that hateful Southerners “didn’t know what else to do.” He conceived “a kind of grim affection” for them—“at least a love that was real and ‘existential’ rather than abstract.”

Young pianist Quentin Lane compounded the lesson before Easter Sunday. Daniels and Upham had met him when Lane’s Henry Hudson High School Choir performed at Brown Chapel to honor a classmate killed for participating in the Selma demonstrations. The concert was tenderly charged but hardened to adult reality, as the classmate had been shotgunned by a Negro stepfather enraged against the movement, and white authorities effectively ignored the crime. Lane asked to join the biracial witness at St. Paul’s Episcopal, which pitched the seminarians into conflict because they had forecast to Rev. Mathews a breather from the stress of integration. They debated past midnight, then painfully notified Mathews why they would seek worship after all with Lane and four other Negro teenagers. The rector fairly howled against the change as proof of bad faith. He said the Bishop of Alabama himself had relied upon their assurance of relief in a personal negotiation with the governing vestry. The seminarians denied trying to ruin his church. When an exasperated member asked what else their purpose could be, Daniels replied, “We are trying to live the Gospel.”

Early on Sunday, April 18, ushers isolated the party of seven on a side aisle of the back row, then confined them during Communion until all others were reseated in their pews. Quietly, with an edge of desperation, Judge Reynolds advised them not to return for the main Easter service at eleven o’clock, and was visibly relieved to hear they would attend the crosstown namesake instead. At St. Paul’s Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, Daniels delivered his first public sermon in Alabama, guided by Rev. T. R. Harris and only mildly distracted by encouraging cries of “Preach it, brother.” Afterward, he and Upham began a formal letter of inquiry to Episcopal Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter, then ventured into the Negro Elks Club Sunday night. Their month-long presence in Selma made them social novelties around the jukebox until they were eclipsed by the late arrival of SNCC workers from the hinterland. Fascinated, Daniels managed to talk philosophy with Stokely Carmichael.

THE POLITICAL leaders Upham and Daniels sought to emulate were largely inaccessible. King traveled—“I pray he doesn’t get bumped off,” wrote Daniels—and the scattered SNCC staff members withdrew three times within a month for a cumulative seven days of internal debate. The commandeered staff car emerged as a new symbol of SNCC disorganization bordering on anarchy. Project directors complained that fieldworkers blithely left rural posts to joyride in Atlanta. “How do you deal with people who tell you they’re going to shoot you if you take away their cars?” asked Muriel Tillinghast of Mississippi. Former SNCC chairman Marion Barry traced a loss of communal spirit to the reduction in direct action protest; he lamented that jail-going witness no longer weeded out frivolous politics. Carmichael argued that assorted free spirits—called “floaters”—were merely symptoms of SNCC’s lack of a signature program after Freedom Summer of 1964. Some bemoaned an acute leadership vacuum since Bob Moses had changed his name to Parris in his mysterious farewell ceremony two months earlier. Others objected that Moses and his wife, Dona, set a debilitating example by floating anonymously into Birmingham while still on the SNCC payroll. “I will not look for them,” announced a peeved Silas Norman. “They must contact me.”

Moses missed a three-day SNCC retreat to address the first major rally against the Vietnam War on April 17 in Washington. Colleagues left behind perceived his speech as yet another visionary leap of courage, but the shift of subject highlighted SNCC’s division in two respects. First, like the nascent antiwar movement itself, the Washington rally of twenty thousand was composed almost entirely of white people, which raised the hidden issue of racial tensions within a civil rights group that aspired to rise above them. Moses had presided over painful debates about internal hostility even before the Southern movement was flooded with white volunteers who stayed after Freedom Summer, and it was partly to escape the personal and political strain of integrated projects that some sixty SNCC staff members so readily left Mississippi for Selma. Second, the Vietnam speech hazarded a new protest in the arena of national politics, where young SNCC workers—especially Moses—felt beaten down, worn out, and betrayed. Many had come to regard the national government as a stifling enemy. “How many of us are willing to condemn LBJ’s voting bill?” urged Courtland Cox, the influential theorist out of Howard University. An analysis by SNCC’s research director, Jack Minnis, dismissed the proposed law as “completely fraudulent…because the whole racist structure of the enormously complex U.S. government provides those who govern with too many ‘outs.’”

SNCC activists broadly rejected the goal of federal action that had anchored the movement’s anguished appeals for racial justice. On the brink of history’s verdict, they asserted that the landmark civil rights laws would be empty pieces of paper, and their grievance ran deeper than predictions of failure and nonenforcement. Significantly, movement veterans turned sour on the inherent nature of national politics. “Lyndon and Hubert and their friends continue the confidence game that passes for government in the Great Society,” wrote Minnis in the April 15 edition of his investigative newsletter, Life with Lyndon. The freelance weekly had become a phenomenon within SNCC since January, based on its caustic portrayals of President Johnson as the tool of impersonal forces—chiefly profit and centralized power—behind an empty husk of liberalism. In a fateful irony, this approach mirrored language being crafted by George Wallace and others from the opposite political pole.

SNCC workers vented contradictions. Hard-liners shouted that purists were immorally withdrawn. Purists said hard-liners were immorally engaged. (“They say that since the power structure is so immoral, what we should do to get power is to be sneaky and underhanded ourselves.”) A forlorn team of Mississippi workers protested Forman’s blatantly inconsistent posture toward the Selma demonstrations—“What in the hell is going on?”—then resigned in frustration. “We destroy each other,” wrote one, “but mostly offer each other no comfort.” Silas Norman chastised Ivanhoe Donaldson for serving as marshal of the grand Montgomery march even though he opposed it. Mississippians pleaded for Donaldson to return to the grassroots survival projects he championed, only to be shocked when he turned up instead to say he was running SNCC communications director Julian Bond for a seat in the Georgia legislature.

“What will Julian do if he loses?” asked a bewildered staff member.

“I don’t know,” shrugged Donaldson. He solicited SNCC’s first campaign contribution with pragmatic flair, ignoring an ingrained consensus that neckties and electoral politics were paths to corruption. Voters from Atlanta’s new 136th district never had been consulted by a candidate, he said, and they deserved better than the nominee decreed by Negro preachers. Also, Bond’s name was an asset because of his prominent family and yet his face was unknown, which allowed Donaldson and SNCC co-worker Charlie Cobb to triple the personal reach of the campaign by passing themselves off as the candidate in door-to-door visits. Frank Soracco, who was white, confined his work mostly to headquarters in the back of a wig shop on Hunter Street.

Moses, answering to Parris, dropped by SNCC’s final April debate with a meditation on the growing pains of freedom. The movement was opening doors to millions, he said, but there could be no shortcut to institutionalize “the meaningful release of their energy.” This he called a central problem for the balance of the twentieth century. He drew sketches of organizational theory as colleagues sat spellbound or puzzled. “If the direction really comes from the bottom,” Moses patiently declared, “the people have to get together and hash out what they think are their problems.” Including SNCC’s problems. Without a deadline. No one called him a floater in person, and several tried to fathom the democratic gist of his message. “People get strength from each other,” said Stokely Carmichael.

Rancorous abstraction gave way to divided practice. White SNCC workers drifted away or took up support functions for Negro fieldworkers who ventured deep into isolated territory. The small team in Lowndes County found a freedom house that lacked indoor plumbing, donated by farmer Matthew Jackson of the newly born voting rights group, LCCMHR. From there, Carmichael and Bob Mants slowly canvassed the giant rural county on foot and on borrowed mules, at first claiming victory when frightened Negroes allowed them to come near. An old woman outside Calhoun politely turned them down. “I can’t do no registering,” she said. “My head done blossomed for the grave.” Later, in a small epiphany, an ancient invalid named “Aunt Ida” Bowie announced that she had been expecting them since “I seed y’all up there around Abraham Lincoln”—a reference taken to mean the 1963 March on Washington. She sent relatives to the tiny mass meetings.

Carmichael aimed to burrow deeply into Lowndes. To find others like Aunt Ida he recruited Scott B. Smith, a fieldworker he admired for proven ability to start alone from a roadside drop in a strange county without funds or transportation. Smith was a Chicago street hustler who had come south to volunteer after Bloody Sunday, but he cultivated a backwoods aura by wearing a necklace made of mysterious “haunted” bones—some said deer antlers—and discoursed knowledgeably on the subtle importance of black moonshiners to rural churches. He quickly predicted that the town of Fort Deposit would be the “powder keg” for Lowndes County, where the new project tried to forestall violence by working quietly out of sight. Whatever happened, Carmichael argued, SNCC workers would be foolish to begrudge popular affection for Martin Luther King. He had seen Alabama black people climb over each other just to touch him. “The people didn’t know what was SNCC,” Carmichael trenchantly observed. “They just said, ‘You one of Dr. King’s men?’” He urged his colleagues to answer, “Yes, ma’am,” and to forge bonds in daily service so that even King would have to “go through the SNCC workers” in the next crisis, making common cause of leadership from top and bottom.

KING FIRST tested Boston. Beneath giant murals on a theme chiseled into the frieze of the Common Court—“Milestones on the Road to Freedom in Massachusetts”—he addressed a joint session of the legislature on Thursday, April 22. “For one who has been barricaded from the seats of government,” he began, “and jailed so many times for attempting to petition legislatures and councils, I can assure you that this is a momentous occasion.” Standing galleries cheered his tribute to their slain native son, President Kennedy, for introducing the civil rights bill, and applauded his report that “many communities are now complying…with amazing good sense and calm reasonableness.” When King touched upon aspects of the “desperate question” that remained, however, observers noticed legislators edging forward, some on overflow camp stools packed in the aisles. “He never mentioned Boston or Massachusetts specifically, but he did stress ‘school imbalance’ [and] ‘de facto segregation,’” reported the Boston Globe. “Let me hasten to say,” King hedged in the Common Court, “that I come to Massachusetts not to condemn but to encourage. It was from these shores that the vision of a new nation conceived in liberty was born, and from these shores liberty must be preserved.”

The thunderous approval that had answered his call to Pettus Bridge still echoed along King’s motorcade route to Back Bay. At Temple Israel, for a thousand people on the last night of Passover, he recalled informally that landlords had offered rental lodging to the telephone voice of a new Boston University graduate student in 1951, “at place after place…until they found out I was a Negro.” By such constriction in real estate, concluded the 1965 Kiernan Report on Education for the commonwealth, 70 percent of all eighty thousand Massachusetts Negroes were cordoned inside the single Boston district of Roxbury, where decay advanced as from a girdled tree. King had toured Roxbury on his way to meet Governor John Volpe and the legislature—climbing into the dilapidated tenement apartment of Betty Jennings, a recent refugee from the segregated South, and speaking to parents through a bullhorn outside Campbell School, where students crowded up to fifty per class. His hardest task was often to prevent the swell of bitterness, he explained at Temple Israel, so as to develop constructive nonviolence. “Every Negro must prepare for ‘the Passover of the Future,’” he said.

“Boston is not the worst city in the United States,” King told reporters early Friday outside Roxbury’s Blue Hill Christian Center. He mentioned people of conscience who had served there, including James Reeb and Mary Peabody, mother of the previous governor, before her jail witness the previous spring in St. Augustine. Rev. Virgil Wood, the former SCLC coordinator in Virginia, presented a choir of recovering alcoholics who had returned from the Montgomery march and now scrubbed Roxbury streets for King’s visit. Then, behind closed doors, local leaders exhibited a weak case for a Boston movement. They were “horribly divided along class lines,” one conceded. Their nemesis, white school defender Louise Day Hicks, had mobilized more effectively. Some worried that Irish teenagers had stoned the NAACP float in the past two St. Patrick’s Day parades, while others discounted prestigious allies. They gave Lieutenant Governor Elliot Richardson a sporting nickname, “I Was With You In Selma,” based on a conversational refrain they said he used to finesse talk of race in Boston. King laughed, but he could not lightly risk the support of politicians like Richardson, who indeed went to Selma. The voting rights bill still faced crippling amendments under filibuster, and even settled law would be a fragile base for what King called “creative optimism.” Only Wednesday, approaching the eleventh anniversary of the unanimous Brown decision, he had told the New York City Bar Association that a mere 1.18 percent of Negro students in the South attended class with any white children.

King emerged two hours late for his first march about conditions in the North, covering three miles out of Roxbury with six hundred police guards and crowds estimated between twenty and fifty thousand. Cold rain drove some to shelter under store awnings along Tremont Street, but most raised umbrellas like King himself for the rally on Boston Common. Within sight of gravestones and monuments for storied heroes of democratic struggle—Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, Crispus Attucks, Robert Gould Shaw, William Lloyd Garrison—he exhorted Americans not to become “a nation of onlookers,” then parried questions from reporters in a subsequent rush to the airport. King denied picking on Boston, or worrying over Harry Truman’s latest public accusation that he was “a troublemaker,” or resenting a diversion of energy to peace issues. “I have no objection to civil rights leaders speaking against war as against segregation,” he said, in a comment generating a headline—“King’s New Tack: End The Viet War”—that circled back in thank-you telegrams from pacifist friends A. J. Muste and Benjamin Spock, urging him to join their war protests. Distractions from the altar crowded in the same day, as Southern Presbyterians debated a motion to rescind an invitation to King, and two leading churches, St. John’s Episcopal of Savannah and First Baptist of Houston, voted to deny admission to Negroes. King complained that his sleeping pills no longer worked and that his vacation felt more like a prison than rest. Aides discussed recommending to him a more drastic psychiatric approach for depression—“not using those words, of course.”

PRESIDENT JOHNSON, asking if he had somehow offended King, remarked toward the end of April that he was falling out of touch with civil rights leaders. “Normally they’re tellin’ you that you are either playin’ hell, or you’re doin’ a good job,” he grumbled to an aide, “and we just haven’t heard anything.” Johnson wanted help in particular to hire enforcement officials for the equal employment section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which took effect in July. Prospective candidates, mindful of their own careers, were shrinking from a task that figured to rankle major employers nationwide. “None of them want to do it,” groused Johnson. “I’ve got to get some good people.” He ordered more bundles of his Selma speech shipped to the leaders for distribution to potential recruits.

In downtown Birmingham, seminarian Judith Upham unwisely wore high heels to picket the Bishop of Alabama on Friday, April 30. She took off her shoes to finish four hours’ walking with Daniels and three Episcopal priests outside the stone headquarters of the diocese, carrying placards against segregation. Most pedestrians avoided them. One matron icily wished all their children to be born black, and a few stopped to read or discuss their leaflet of grievance against Bishop Carpenter. He had pressed for “the exact wording” of abusive incidents mentioned in their petition, writing, “I cannot imagine the good people of St. Paul’s Church, Selma, using obscene language in your presence.” When the seminarians reluctantly complied, saying in a private audience on Tuesday that insults were peripheral to the issue of segregated worship, Carpenter had maintained that they were the ones stuck on extraneous details. The rear pew and last Communion cup were trifles in themselves, he declared, to be embraced as tokens of Christian humility. He advised them to “go to church with eyes closed and just worship the Lord without looking for faults,” calling Upham “Old Girl” in a stream of jolly deflection, tinged with sarcasm, that bowled over the seminarians. They wrote him since with recovered grasp—“There is a difference between humility and humiliation…you remain in our prayers. Thank you for the good coffee yesterday!”—but Carpenter left them alone on the picket line. Back in Selma, they attended an integrated Catholic service with Jim Leatherer, whose conduct involuntarily repelled Upham as coarsely self-righteous, reminiscent of the bishop, in spite of her contrasting admiration for the one-legged marcher from Saginaw. She wrestled anew with the elusive discipline of brotherhood.

Also on April 30, FBI surveillance agents tracked the arrival of Clarence Jones at the Atlanta airport for the resumption of truce talks between King and SNCC leaders. Singer Harry Belafonte mediated after a ten-day break, and the two sides vented familiar disputes that had become “more dramatic,” Belafonte figured, because of attention from Selma. Their session wound up with a cooperative statement between King and Lewis, drafted by James Forman, and a public comment by Belafonte that “these things could not be allowed to fester.” Stokely Carmichael told SNCC colleagues that King confessed uncertainty about how to address economic issues ahead. “I think the cats are honest,” he said. “Bevel and Belafonte want the boycott. King doesn’t.” Back in Selma, Carmichael and Scott B. Smith ran into the seminarians again Sunday night at the Elks Club. Smith borrowed $10, and Carmichael said they could be useful in Lowndes County for registration day on May 3.

Daniels and Upham managed to find the domed white courthouse in front of the Hayneville water tower, surrounded by police cruisers and U.S. government sedans in a jam of parked vehicles. They instinctively avoided the local crowds milling about the square for the Monday start of the Viola Liuzzo murder trial, and gravitated to a line of Negroes outside the Old Jail two blocks away. There they met John Hulett, one of the only two Negroes to have passed the registration test, along with a garrulous, electrified version of Carmichael that was scarcely recognizable to the seminarians as the existentialist they knew for offbeat theories of John Brown and Jesus. He pranced about with encouragement in a Caribbean lilt, making light of fancy test words and special intimidations for Negroes, handing SNCC buttons blithely to deputies, but he told Daniels and Upham in a quiet aside that the area was unsafe for white movement workers. They left within an hour. Armed registrars processed sixty of 150 applicants who waited all day, and later accepted nine as a splash in the thimble of new black voters.

Not a single Negro braved attendance at the week-long trial in Hayneville. Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, sat next to defendant Collie LeRoy Wilkins at the defense table, and Inspector Joe Sullivan entered with a heavy protective guard for chief witness Gary Thomas Rowe, now revealed as an FBI informant. Sparrows flew through open windows for aerial chases around the high-ceilinged courtroom, sometimes perching on the triangular relic of a prisoners’ cage welded into one rear corner, but drama centered upon Klan Klonsel Matt Murphy, first cousin of Mississippi novelist Walker Percy. He bellowed, waved a pistol, and stomped on his hat. Skimming through a cursory defense case that lasted only twenty-one minutes, he pitched himself instead into lurid attacks on the prosecution. Murphy denounced victim Liuzzo as “a white nigger who turned her car over to a black nigger for the purpose of hauling niggers and communists back and forth.” He accused Leroy Moton on the stand of shooting Liuzzo himself after interracial sex “under the hypnotic spell of narcotics,” and, most heatedly, he impeached star witness Rowe as a liar—“treacherous as a rattlesnake…a traitor and a pimp and an agent of Castro and I don’t know what all”—for violating his membership oath to guard Klan secrets.

“No one, prosecutor or defense lawyer, had a kind word for the dead woman,” reported the New York Times. The lead prosecutor acknowledged widespread sentiment to excuse Liuzzo’s murder “on the grounds that this woman was riding in a car with a Negro man,” but warned against setting a legal precedent that might backfire against segregationist travelers including the jurors themselves. His closing argument—that a not-guilty vote would favor any potential bushwhacker who “sees you driving your Negro maid home, or sees your wife driving her cook home”—was regarded as a creative but futile stretch. With Attorney General Katzenbach privately braced to count even one prosecution vote as a moral victory, the jury made front-page news simply by extending deliberations overnight without reaching swift acquittal, and then on May 7 deadlocked 10–2 for conviction on a charge of manslaughter. Shocked prosecutors vowed to prepare for another trial.

Farmer Edmund Sallee said fellow jurors felt “insulted” by Murphy’s courtroom antics, including his vicious diatribes against the deceased victim. By failing so far to convict a Klan defendant, the twelve white males did fulfill expectations of avowed segregationists from Lowndes County, but the jury box already had pushed them past visceral images that prevailed elsewhere. The editors of Ladies’ Home Journal, surprised by poll results showing that 55.2 percent of American women believed Viola Liuzzo “should have stayed home,” convened a random sample of Northern women for a discussion forum that skittered tensely through misgivings—with participants objecting most commonly that Liuzzo forsook her children, or could not know enough about issues “outside her back yard,” or lacked “her husband’s permission,” or should have “canceled her newspaper subscription” as a less extreme protest, but also saying, after one woman confessed leaving her children once with a sitter for a three-day club trip, that no family could resent an absent husband shot for something important, like resisting the Nazis, or that Liuzzo “might have thought her cause was stronger than her husband going to war.” The independent embrace of risk by a middle-class mother was yet an unstable new concept, which foreclosed broad interest in Liuzzo as a martyr of human scale.

As for Gary Thomas Rowe, the Hayneville jury took a more informed view than observers on either side of the civil rights struggle. Several jurors said they could have won over the two holdouts against conviction—hard cases from Fort Deposit—if only Rowe had pleaded guilty to something for his part in the crime. Sophisticated Southerners missed such nuance out of fear and contempt. No lawyer in Alabama wanted to defend Rowe when Klonsel Murphy, vowing to flush him from hiding to face revenge, sued in mid-May for legal fees he claimed Rowe had incurred before defecting from the Klan. Through the American Bar Association, Attorney General Katzenbach prevailed upon Paul Johnston (Harvard ’30, Yale Law ’33) to represent Rowe, whereupon fellow partners, including his own father and brother, summarily expelled Johnston from his lifelong practice at the Birmingham firm of Cabaniss, Johnston, Gardner & Clark. (“You presently refuse to abide by the unanimous decision of the other members of the firm,” stated the letter of severance.) Nationally prominent lawyers and judges commiserated with Johnston from afar. Alabama peers ostracized him to advertise their professional distance from Rowe, who radiated compound controversy as a turncoat Klansman working a race murder for the feds.

Prosecutors seeking justice for Liuzzo stressed the positive side of their linchpin witness, and FBI officials gladly cooperated by concealing Rowe’s violent five-year career as a protected federal informant. Not until 1979 would a U.S. Justice Department task force discover that he lied repeatedly under oath about his role in sordid, faction-ridden Klan conspiracies,* and that FBI supervisors covered up all but the bare fact of his former employment. More than two decades later, Birmingham historian Diane McWhorter would examine the detailed mass of Rowe’s FBI record, including his reported claim to have killed a black man in 1963, and find it difficult in retrospect to sort out what was understated, condoned, exaggerated, or sanitized. Only one contemporary reporter addressed the Liuzzo trial’s glimpse of undercover work by Rowe. “What sorely troubles me, if we accept the prosecution’s account of the slaying,” wrote Inez Robb, “is the moral aspect of Rowe’s presence in the car…. Under what kind of secret orders did Rowe work?” Was he expected to join in crime, strictly observe, or try to prevent murder? “It is one woman’s opinion” she concluded, “that the FBI owes the nation an explanation of its action in the Liuzzo case.”

Robb’s May 17 column appeared in 132 newspapers and landed on J. Edgar Hoover’s desk with a report finding “no information of a derogatory nature” about Robb. Hoover remembered differently. “Back in the ’30s or ’40s,” he wrote, “she vilified the FBI and me personally when I was in Miami.” His note sent FBI officials scurrying a quarter-century back through their files to unearth yellowed confirmation of Hoover’s legendary antennae for criticism—a March 5, 1940, Robb column that scolded the top G-man of “the most wonderful brown eyes” for vacationing in mob-controlled spots along Florida’s casino Gold Coast while vowing to fight crime. Hoover’s deputies, chastened as always, came back with a steely recommendation that DeLoach contact Inez Robb to “set her straight” about Rowe.

“No,” Hoover scrawled, countermanding an order that might provoke further inquiry. “She is a ‘bitch’ & nothing would be gained.”

“BUNDY IS Unable to Appear Because of ‘Other Duties,’” headlined a skeptical New York Times story on the principal debater’s late scratch from the May 15 Vietnam National Teach-In. The Times reported that White House officials were “uncomfortable with the need for silence,” but “could not in any way discuss Mr. Bundy’s whereabouts.” (Bundy slipped away for secret truce negotiations in the Dominican Republic, where President Johnson on April 28 had dispatched U.S. troops to quell incipient civil war.) Substitutes took his place before a live audience of five thousand at Washington’s Sheraton Park Hotel, connected by patched radio feed to 100,000 listeners at 122 campus teach-ins over thirty-five states. Professor Eric Wolf of Michigan, speaking for the committee that had sprung up from the original teach-in seven weeks earlier, introduced the debate as a “life blood of democracy,” vitally needed to resolve contradictory claims that Vietnam policy was at once too complex for the average citizen and as simple as good versus evil. “We are here to serve notice that American citizens are not children,” he declared.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, speaking for the administration’s policy, warned that it would be foolish to ignore “the very sure and very terrible consequences of either enlargement or withdrawal” in Vietnam. Enlargement invited World War III, and withdrawal betrayed the students, professors, and intellectuals of Vietnam—“people like ourselves”—who opposed the Vietnamese Communists. Famously, he observed that “if we took the Marines now in the Dominican Republic and sent them to South Vietnam, we would be a good deal better off in both countries.” Reporters emphasized the intramural critique of Johnson by a partisan Kennedy Democrat, but the predominantly antiwar crowd booed Schlesinger’s overall support for the military commitment to Vietnam. He recommended supplementary moves toward a negotiated settlement that “doesn’t promise a perfect solution,” and paused to add, “But life is not very satisfactory.” Boos turned to silence, then scattered applause. “I welcome this existential endorsement,” Schlesinger said wryly.

Like most of the parallel campus debates, the showcase National Teach-In continued for some nine hours after the radio feed. The format limiting speakers to professors and government officials set a muted, academic tone for what columnist Peter Lisagor called a “battle of the eggheads.” Daniel Ellsberg, destined to become a historic dissenter in 1971, argued for the State Department that the war could and should be won, while professor Robert Scalapino of Berkeley, standing in for Bundy, proposed a complex program “from the standpoint of maximizing the fundamental interests which you and the non-Communist world hold together.”

Across the continent at Berkeley, a more raucous panoply of speakers held forth through intermittent rain the next weekend for nearly thirty-four continuous hours. Professor Scalapino boycotted the largest and longest teach-in as a “travesty” on his home campus that “should be repudiated by all true scholars irrespective of their views on Vietnam.” Staughton Lynd of Yale denounced Scalapino for cowardly elitism. Baby doctor Benjamin Spock and British philosopher Bertrand Russell expounded on the threat of nuclear annihilation. Maverick journalist I. F. Stone fielded questions about colonial interventions from the Napoleonic Wars to the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and confronted the fear of “irreversible” Communism—noting from the pattern of police states that “it takes a hell of a long time to get a thaw,” but trusting in democratic engagement and free thought (“Jefferson for me is an ultimate and a far greater figure than Lenin”) to thaw tyrannies “instead of trying to strangle them with blockades and with hatred.” Novelist Norman Mailer conjured up florid images of Lyndon Johnson as a cornpone emperor drawn to Vietnam “out of the pusillanimities of the madnesses of his secret sleep,” then swerved through contrarian rhetoric of an isolationist utopia to an “equally visionary” cry for virile combat without high-altitude bombers—“Fight like men! Go in man-to-man against the Vietcong!”—that discomfited some imaginations he had tickled into flight.

Dozens of the Berkeley speakers came grounded in the civil rights movement. Charlie Cobb, fresh from Julian Bond’s unheralded victory in the special Georgia primary, read a long poem he had written for a girlfriend about Selma and Vietnam:

So cry not just for Jackson and Reeb

Schwerner Goodman Chaney or Lee

Cry for all mothers

with shovels

digging at hovels

looking for their dead

Cry for all the blood spilled

Of all the people killed

In the standard procedure of the country

which is not ours…

Norman Thomas, the venerable six-time Socialist candidate for President, and a former Presbyterian minister, grieved over his bitter premonition that America’s white churches were falling from late conversion on civil rights back to excuse violence in “their familiar role of opposing all wars except the one they are in.” Movement comedian Dick Gregory paired the ill omen of Vietnam with California’s landslide approval for Proposition 14, which repealed the state’s new fair housing law starkly against the grain of the 1964 national election. “Which means,” Gregory shouted, “California ain’t nothing but Mississippi with palm trees!”

Near adjournment on Saturday night, May 22, Gregory introduced surprise speaker Bob Parris with mysterious, nonspecific praise as one “among the greatest human beings who have ever walked the earth.” Murmurs circulated that Parris had dropped the name Moses to shed the burdens of his four pioneer years for SNCC in Mississippi, and his few soft-spoken words were distinctive to others that knew nothing of him: “I saw a picture in an AP release. It said, ‘Marine Captures Communist Rebel.’ Now I looked at that picture, and what I saw was a little colored boy standing against a wire fence with a big huge white Marine with a gun in his back.” Moses implored the Berkeley crowd to approach the issue of political labels personally, first by writing letters—“a lot of you”—to Hazel Palmer, a former maid and future mayor in Mississippi. He gave an address on Farish Street in Jackson and a list of suggested questions: “What did you do? What do you do now? What makes you think that instead of being a cook in somebody’s kitchen you could help run a political party?” Through Palmer, he suggested, they could see the South “as a looking glass, not a lightning rod” for deflected troubles, and the peace movement could learn from faceless leaders at home how to gain a picture of Third World faces in Vietnam. “The people in this country believe that they’re in Vietnam fighting Communism as the manifestation of evil in the world,” said Moses. “That’s what they deeply believe. And that’s what they read all the time in their newspapers. You’ve got to be prepared to offer a different reality.”

Coverage of the incipient Vietnam protest stoutly resisted association with civil rights. Sunday’s San Francisco Examiner ignored the marathon Berkeley event altogether. The New York Times offered the most substantive account in the mainstream press—“33-Hour Teach-In Attracts 10,000”—leading with the image of “a bleary-eyed, bearded young man whose gray sweatshirt bore the inscription ‘Let’s Make Love, Not War,’ stretched out on the grass,” followed by a paragraph on a nearby “girl with straight black hair and bare feet,” who “plaintively asked her escort, ‘Don’t they ever run out of things to say?’”

Strains within the racial movement itself concealed signal lessons about projecting new witness into the prevailing political order, and it scarcely helped that the Berkeley Free Speech Movement had veered notoriously from the quickening battles to support nonviolent volunteers in Mississippi. In March, four days before the Selma Bloody Sunday, a lone fan of the beat comic Lenny Bruce had tested the hard-won political debate plaza with a sign bearing simply the word “FUCK.” His arrest energized naughty protest across the spectrum of campus affairs, with jailing soon for a due-process “Fuck Defense Fund,” a “Fuck Communism” parade by Cal Conservatives, and a public reading of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by English majors, also jailed. One leader of the Free Speech Movement convened defense rallies on principle. Some held back, and others tacked against the university for hypocritical indifference to the winning, wildly vulgar “Miss Pussy Galore” entry in a recent fraternity contest. Through April and May, as a statewide chorus of wags mocked the modified “Filthy Speech” Movement, student leaders debated whether the obscenity uproar polluted their cause. One faculty group called them “moral spastics,” too enamored of their own flamboyant display to gauge consequence in the world. A few days after the Vietnam teach-in, California Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh initiated a full investigation of both the “free speech” and “filthy speech” uprisings at Berkeley.

A BOMB threat evacuated the Americana Hotel in New York before Martin Luther King’s speech on May 20. He met privately with Vice President Hubert Humphrey, seeking assurance that the administration had the votes to break the Senate filibuster of the voting rights bill. Among King’s worries was the timing of the SCOPE project he had approved so uneasily, as delays in the anticipated law would ruin hopes for the first mass registration of Negroes that summer, forcing Hosea Williams either to withhold hundreds of new volunteers or fling them unprotected into the maw of Southern sheriffs. King prodded Wachtel to complete a committee “review” of Stanley Levison’s pending return to the circle of Northern advisers, and Wachtel stalled in collaboration with Bayard Rustin, believing Levison would regain unfair access to King’s ear from his unique personal bond that had encompassed long phone calls from King after midnight.

King was so vexed on a related front that he had prevailed upon Archibald Carey to fly from Chicago to FBI headquarters only the day before, seeking to forestall a press attack rumored for the last week in May. “I interrupted Dr. Carey at this point,” DeLoach wrote afterward, “and told him…the FBI had plenty to do without being responsible for a discrediting campaign against Reverend King.” DeLoach said he countered with a list of King’s “derelictions” in criticizing Hoover, then dismissed Carey with a reminder that “King and the other civil rights workers owed the FBI a debt of gratitude they would never be able to repay.” Resigned, Carey reported back to King that he should make more effort to praise Hoover. A prominent judge and minister of Daddy King’s close acquaintance, Carey had cured the subversive accusations in his own FBI file with single-minded applications of flattery, complete with letters gushing over handshakes and autographed photos with Hoover. He recommended that King confine himself to small talk in the Director’s presence. Hoover, for his part, bestowed a rare compliment on DeLoach—“well handled”—and promptly authorized the leak of confidential bug and wiretap information on King to UPI’s chief Southern correspondent.

In New York, King emerged at the Americana with a formal lecture on nonviolence for two thousand members of the American Jewish Committee. He tried to combat the popular impression that demonstrators claimed license to break laws in pursuit of “benefits exclusively for the Negro.” The civil rights movement came from a larger heritage stretching back through the suffragettes and the Boston Tea Party, he said, and had contributed new civic interactions of broad application, such as the teach-in. Distinguishing between nonviolence and classical civil disobedience, King argued that the former aimed not to defy but to fulfill the Constitution. He pictured democracy itself as a political form of nonviolence, merged and refined in history’s slow rise from primitive conquest toward the established vote. “It is an axiom of nonviolent action and democracy that when any group struggles properly and justly to achieve its own rights, it enlarges the rights of all,” King asserted. “This element is what makes both democracy and nonviolent action self-renewing and creative.”

These were difficult subjects. The speech left enigmatic notice on back pages in New York—“Dr. King Examines Rights and Laws: Says Negro Knows That He Is Part of ‘Larger Society’”—as he flew home to Atlanta. Beneath the wave of optimism set loose May 21, when Senator Philip Hart of Michigan filed a cloture petition on voting rights, he preached a haunted sermon on grief. “Disappointment is a hallmark of our mortal life,” King observed that Sunday, May 23. He communed with his Ebenezer congregation about wounds beyond reach, sketching the bleakness of people gone cold. “They are too detached to be selfish, and too lifeless to be unselfish,” he warned. “Their hands are even unresponsive to the touch of a charming baby.” He touched bottom, then cornered despair first by repeating his text from Jeremiah with special emphasis: “This is my grief, and I must bear it.” Never avoid shame or failure, he counseled, but “put it in the center of your mind and dare—stare daringly at it.” From there they could “turn this liability into an asset” by harnessing the energy of pain and reproach. “Never forget, my friends,” King told them, “almost anything that happens to us may be woven into the purposes of God.” His voice gathered rhythm and strength. As in another trademark sermon, on intractable evil, he listed treasured figures of history who bounced from suffering and penance to glory. “I’ve been to the mountaintop now,” he cried, in words he would repeat for posterity in Memphis. “God allowed me to live these years. It doesn’t matter now. Whatever happens now doesn’t matter, because I’ve seen the promised land.” He relived a decade in the movement, ending with his march into Montgomery from Selma “to stand right at the place where Jefferson Davis stood and say that the old cradle of the Confederacy is now rocking, and Dixie will one day have a heart, because we are moving now.”

On Tuesday, exactly two months after the speech King recalled, a cloture tally of 70–30 in the Senate formally ended the Southern blockade against consideration of the voting rights bill. That night, heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali knocked out favored Sonny Liston in the second minute of their rematch at an old hockey rink in Lewiston, Maine. Some in the meager crowd of three thousand had not yet taken their seats. Many others saw no blows and shouted, “Fake! Fake! Fake!” Stupefied sports journalists divided over a clash of iconic images that turned color and violence inside out—the glistening Ali waving a glove over the prostrate Liston, fallen from a “phantom punch,” while “strategy adviser” Stepin Fetchit rejoiced in Ali’s corner. Ringside delirium gave lunatic weight to the fabled actor’s prediction that Ali would become a national hero, certainly for reporters still blinking from his ambush of their pre-fight banter about “Uncle Tom” humor. “Uncle Tom was not an inferior Negro,” Fetchit had corrected, snapping from the “slow-witted darky” character of his Hollywood films since 1927. “He was a white man’s child. His real name was MacPherson and he lived near Harriet Beecher Stowe. Tom was the first of the Negro social reformers and integrationists. The inferior Negro was Sambo.”

National tempests blended on Wednesday, May 26. McGeorge Bundy returned from the Dominican Republic to Washington, where John Tower of Texas led an outcry for a federal investigation of the sporting “nadir” in Lewiston, charging that the “use of citizen-owned television airways keeps boxing alive in its present highly questionable form.” Tower cast one of only two Republican votes that day against final Senate passage of the voting rights bill. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, before casting the other, eulogized the Senate as the “final resting place of the Constitution and the rule of law, for it is here that they will have been buried with shovels of emotion under piles of expediency, in the year of our Lord, 1965.” Defeated Southern Democrats foresaw a “federal dictatorship” over the vote process to cement the economic impoverishment of “garden variety” white people that their leader, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, pronounced already inevitable from the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Ironically, Russell was one of the few national figures to speak publicly for Muhammad Ali after his conversion to a black Islamic sect, commending his “unpopular” stand against racial integration. The New York Times, on the other hand, crusaded for civil rights but disdained both the Lewiston fight and Ali himself* with two front-page stories marshaling disgust—“Clay-Liston Fight Arouses Wide Demand for Inquiry”—and a tart editorial hoping the “brief and gentle Clay-Liston encounter” would end “a sport as sick as this one.”

With Senate passage of the voting bill, President Johnson publicly gave thanks “on behalf of a heartened nation.” He urged swift concurrence in the House, and none doubted the power of his words. Johnson’s domestic program commanded “such wide appeal that powerful voices of criticism are virtually nonexistent,” and his mastery of political rumblings over Vietnam and the Dominican Republic “only makes Congress seem another pygmy at his feet,” Times correspondent Tom Wicker wrote that week in a summary essay. For an era of great change, with world stability and even political language in flux, Wicker portrayed Johnson as a colossus of national strength. “Lyndon Johnson, in fact, may be the best John Wayne part ever written,” he observed. “[He] seems 20 feet tall—when he really measures no more than 10.”