July 2–August 2, 1965
ON July 2, the last of the Mississippi demonstrators obtained bonded release from the makeshift jail at the Jackson fairgrounds. As King passed through Virginia that day, FBI officials were scrambling to fashion a more productive line of attack on him than disappointing wire service profiles in June. These stories had listed King’s accomplishments alongside a litany of charges based on FBI leaks, striking a balance that disgusted Director Hoover. (“A ‘whitewash’ if there ever was one,” Hoover scrawled on a widely published UPI release.) To impeach one conclusion reported by the Associated Press—that King lived modestly, whatever his faults, and worked from a small office with “dingy green walls and a bare floor”—headquarters ordered overseas agents to search for wealth King might have concealed in Swiss bank accounts, but this perennial suspicion was proving groundless when Assistant Director DeLoach grasped a different approach. FBI agents retrieved three separate recordings of Ralph Abernathy’s Atlanta press conference on otherwise commonplace incidents—a SCOPE volunteer and seven Negroes beaten inside Antioch Baptist Church in Wilcox County, Alabama, two SCOPE volunteers cut by flying glass in Americus, Georgia—to verify the reply to one question about how King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference screened associates for Communist ties. “We will check with FBI men and they will tell us if they have a Communist background,” Abernathy exaggerated grandly. “We don’t want anything that is pink, much less anything that is red.”
A transcript rocketed to Washington within hours, fueled by predatory outrage within the FBI over Abernathy’s careless claim to a cooperative relationship. Hoover scribbled a precautionary note that “if I find anyone furnishing information to SCLC he will be dismissed,” and DeLoach orchestrated an aggressive campaign to brand Abernathy’s statement “absolutely untrue” behind the official stance that all FBI files were strictly confidential. His office distributed sharp, contemptuous statements to press contacts, DeLoach reported to colleagues, “so as to give the lie to Martin Luther King and his ilk.” On Hoover’s orders, top FBI officials received notice of the media offensive by the close of business on July 2.
These attacks trailed King into Chicago on the night of July 6. A few outlets printed them (“Fast Refutation by FBI”), but most had trouble fashioning news out of a disputed aside by the little-known Abernathy. One Illinois paper conflated the FBI rebuke with a fresh outburst from Mayor Daley, who, exasperated by nineteen days of local civil rights demonstrations, issued his own public charge of subversion on July 2: “We know Communists infiltrate all these organizations.” For King, such controversy registered as familiar background nuisance. Flight delays pushed his arrival too late for a scheduled meeting with Al Raby at the Palmer House Hotel, and he was whisked into the ballroom to address the General Synod of the United Church of Christ. He saluted the mass witness of religious Americans over the past two years as an inspirational start. “The actual work to redeem the soul of America is before us,” declared King, hinting at constructive tasks across broken barriers of race nationwide. “Not only are millions deprived of formal education and proper health facilities, but our most fundamental social unit—the family—is tortured, corrupted, and weakened by economic injustice,” he said. “The church cannot look with indifference upon these glaring evils.”
From the crush of a reception among church delegates, King appeared briefly at a press conference. Reporters wanted to know whether he planned to “take over” the upstart civil rights campaign in Chicago, and, strangely, they pressed for his reaction to reports of internecine strife since the previous day’s national CORE convention in Durham, North Carolina. King parried both questions, then withdrew for consultations late into the night with his Chicago lawyer Chauncey Eskridge, Al Raby, and local CORE leader Willie Blue. Raby had just filed a complaint with U.S. Education Commissioner Francis Keppel, based on studies since the 1958 Crisis report, arguing that Chicago’s effectively segregated schools should be “deprived of any and all Federal assistance” pursuant to Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This novel petition—the first aimed at a Northern school district—was certain to magnify the stakes of local protest.
As King’s staff debated the chances for a Chicago movement, Blue interjected theories about why the national CORE delegates had passed a Vietnam resolution calling for “an immediate withdrawal of all American troops,” only to reconsider and table the same measure within hours on a personal appeal from James Farmer. There were grumblings implicating King’s speech days earlier at all-Negro Virginia State College. A local reporter had picked up comments on Vietnam—“There is no reason why there cannot be peace rallies like we have freedom rallies…. We are not going to defeat Communism with bombs and guns and gases…. We must work this out in the framework of our democracy”—which moved over newswires to back pages in several newspapers. Gossip attributed the CORE reversal to hidden maneuvers and rivalries, which drew the press to whiffs of fresh controversy, but an incoming emergency call from Ralph Abernathy—intercepted by the Chicago police “Red Squad”—intervened after midnight with sickening word that Wilson Baker had arrested Rev. F. D. Reese for alleged embezzlement of the donations that had poured into Selma since the marches over Pettus Bridge. Press images of thieving Negro leaders loomed over a voting rights bill that was still stuck between the two houses of Congress.
J. Edgar Hoover was alerted to sensitivities over Vietnam that same evening of July 6. A solicitous call from Attorney General Katzenbach informed him that President Johnson and Secretary Rusk wanted an FBI investigation of the emerging King position on Vietnam, including possible Communist influences. Katzenbach confided that King’s most prominent civil rights colleagues, Roy Wilkins and James Farmer, already had disparaged King for Vietnam comments they called wrongheaded and disloyal. For Hoover, the Katzenbach request landed as a welcome reversal by a nominal boss who had resisted his penchant for political intelligence to the point of barely civil relations. Far more important, it signaled a shift by the President, who had ignored scurrilous FBI reports on King since the day he entered the White House. Prior efforts to brand King subversive, which had bounced off Johnson’s kindred domestic agenda, acquired sudden new promise across the trenches of the impending foreign war, and Hoover ordered overnight research on the obscure Asian country that might rescue FBI propaganda from flailing jabs at Ralph Abernathy. He delivered the next day a sanctioned, classified paper on “King’s injection into the Vietnam situation.”
KING ANNOUNCED that morning at the Palmer House that he had agreed “to spend some time in Chicago, beginning July 24.” To skeptical questions about the point of demonstrations in a city without segregation laws, he replied that many “persons of good will” did not yet understand the breadth of the nonviolent movement, and that there was “a great job of interpretation to be done” before his first major campaign in the North. “During entire press conference,” FBI observers cabled headquarters, “King was not questioned nor did he mention Viet Nam, or make any reference whatsoever to United States foreign policy.” Leaving Andrew Young with Bevel to prepare his Chicago canvass, King flew to New York for an afternoon engagement and promptly canceled his evening flight to Los Angeles. There were too many ominous signs radiating over telephone lines, seeping into news—and too many historic changes teetering—for him to be content with guesses about the single most crucial vector in democracy. When an incoming call rang through on July 7 at 8:05 P.M., the White House log recorded Lyndon Johnson’s first phone conversation initiated by King.
The President came on the line distant and cold. He grunted without recognition until King confirmed his name: “This is Martin King.”
“Yes.”
“How do you do, sir?”
“Fine.”
“Fine,” said King. “Glad to hear your voice.”
“Thank you.”
Johnson’s clipped monosyllables hung until King abandoned pleasantry to ask about the voting rights bill. “I want to get your advice on this,” he concluded.
Deference thawed the President. “I’ll be glad to,” he said, cranking into political calculations of such sustained acceleration that King would speak only one word (“very”) over the next ten minutes. Johnson saw the opposing coalition of Republicans and crafty Southerners becoming more potent since Goldwater began to influence Republican leaders in Congress. “They’re gonna quit the nigras,” he said. “They will not let a nigra vote for them.” Their current ploy was “to get a big fight started over which way to repeal the poll tax,” he summarized, telling King that the Senate very nearly passed an amendment to abolish poll taxes as a form of racial discrimination, but the administration detected a mousetrap. Vermont had a dormant poll tax law, and Katzenbach warned that segregationists would welcome the amendment as an opening to challenge the overall bill from a state with virtually no Negroes. “They’ll bring the case on Vermont,” the President told King. “And that’ll be the case that they’ll take to the Court, and they will not hold that it is discriminatory in Vermont because it is not.” Having originally instructed Katzenbach “to get rid of the poll tax any way in the world he could without nullifying the whole law,” Johnson said Katzenbach’s legal strategy was good politics. He vowed to keep the bill clean, and move separately to speed one of the pending Southern cases by which the Supreme Court was expected to void all poll taxes.
Johnson complained that House liberals could not resist temptation to add a poll tax amendment anyway. “[Speaker John] McCormack was afraid that somebody would be stronger for the Negro than he was,” he fumed, “so he came out red hot for complete repeal.” The imminent vote could be fatal, he told King, because any slight change in the Senate-passed bill would require a conference committee of both houses of Congress to reconcile differences. “So they get in an argument, and that delays it,” he said. “And maybe nothing comes out.” Any modified bill must repeat the legislative process in at least one chamber of Congress, and either hurdle a filibuster again in the Senate or “you got to go back to Judge [Howard] Smith” in the House. “You got to get a rule from him, and he won’t give you a rule. He, he, he,” Johnson sputtered, on the pitfalls of recircumventing the implacable Rules Committee chairman from Virginia. “So you got to file a [discharge] petition and take another twenty-one days…and they want to get out of here Labor Day. And they’re playin’ for that time. Now they been doin’ that for thirty-five years that I been here, and I been watchin’ ’em do it.”
More than once Johnson reminded King of “my practical political problem” with the two Kennedy senators, both of whom supported poll tax repeal. He portrayed himself as a lonely President embattled on a dozen fronts while his civil rights allies were “all off celebratin’”—Wilkins at his convention, labor leaders George Meany and Walter Reuther on vacation, “and you’re somewhere else.” The opposition was “playin’ us,” said Johnson, “and we are not parliamentary smart enough, if you want to be honest—now you asked advice, I’m just tellin’ you.” He worked up a lather of shrewdness, rage, and self-pity that tickled King in spite of himself. “They want your wife to go one direction and you to go the other,” said the President.
“Yes,” said King, chuckling.
“Then the kids don’t know which one to follow,” added Johnson.
King laughed as the President rounded through his tactical blueprint. “Well, I certainly appreciate this, Mr. President,” he said, adding softly that he was confident in Katzenbach on “this whole voting bill,” and that always he had tried to make the movement helpful “as I was telling you when we started in Alabama.”
“You sure have and—” said Johnson. He checked himself, then responded more earnestly to King’s personal reminder. “Well, you helped, I think, to dramatize and bring it to a point where I could go before the Congress in that night session, and I think that was one of the most effective things that ever happened,” he declared. “But uh, you had worked for months to help create the sentiment that supported it.”
“Yes,” said King.
“Now the trouble is that fire has gone out,” added Johnson, not lingering on sentiment. “We got a few coals on it,” he said, then reviewed his plan to stoke the embers with cedar and “a little coal oil” by full-scale civil rights lobby for a unified bill in the House.
“Yes, well, this has been very sound,” King replied, quickly interjecting “one other point that I wanted to mention to you, because it has begun to concern me a great deal, in the last uh, few days, in making my speeches, in making a speech in Virginia, where I made a statement concerning, uh, the Vietnam situation, and there have been some press statements about it.” The President kept silent through King’s nervous monologue denying that he was “engaged in destructive criticism…that we should unilaterally withdraw troops from Vietnam, which I know is unreasonable.” He had been “speaking really as a minister of the gospel,” King said, and wanted to be clear. “It was merely a statement that all citizens of good will ought to be concerned about the problem that faces our world, the problem of war,” he added carefully, “and that, although uncomfortable, they ought to debate on this issue.” King coughed. “I just wanted to say that to you,” he said, “because I felt eventually that it would come to your attention—”
“Well—”
“—and I know the terrible burden and awesome responsibility and decisions that you make, and I know it’s complicated,” King rushed on, “and I didn’t want to add to the burdens because I know they’re very difficult.”
Johnson paused. “Well, you, you, you’re very, uh, uh, helpful, and I appreciate it,” he said, stumbling. Then he recovered: “I did see it. I was distressed. I do want to talk to you.” He exposed to King his confessional tone about Vietnam, saying he had stalled and hoped to the point that “unless I bomb, they run me out right quick,” and stressed the constant toll of war pressure—“well, the Republican leader had a press conference this afternoon, [Gerald] Ford, demanded I bomb Hanoi”—over his twenty months in office. “I’ve lost about two hundred and sixty—our lives up to now,” he told King, “and I could lose two hundred and sixty-five thousand mighty easy, and I’m trying to keep those zeroes down.”
The President admitted that he was “not all wise” in matters of foreign policy. “I don’t want to be a warmonger,” he assured King, but neither could he abide defeat in a Cold War conflict. “Now I don’t want to pull down the flag and come home runnin’ with my tail between my legs,” he said, “particularly if it’s going to create more problems than I got out there—and it would, according to our best judges.” Johnson urged King to explore the alternatives at length with Rusk, McNamara, and himself—“I’ll give you all I know”—and thanked him for constructive purpose always “in our dealings together.” King in turn thanked Johnson for true leadership, and especially—“I don’t think I’ve had a chance”—for his speech after Selma. They parted with pledges of joint zeal to finish the quest for universal suffrage.
At their fleeting, crucial moment of contact on Vietnam, Johnson had minimized his war motive to the point of apology, just as King circumscribed his criticism. Each one said he yearned to find another way, but shied from nonviolent strategies in the glare of the military challenge.
THE SEMINARIAN Jonathan Daniels reached Selma for a third stay on July 8, this time alone, having completed the semester at Cambridge by submitting overdue papers steeped in religious epiphany. Stark memories had become tools for reflection. He recalled first erasing the hostile stares of Southern strangers simply by switching from Massachusetts to Alabama license tags, with the “Heart of Dixie” state slogan, only to become flushed under the wary looks of Negroes, then mortified by the impression Upham’s car advertised along roadways back north through his native New Hampshire. “I wanted to shout to them, ‘No, no! I’m not an Alabama white,” Daniels wrote. Yet he identified with white Southerners in turmoil against him, to the point of defending them from showers of condescension at the seminary. Regretting the “self-righteous insanities” of his early weeks in the Alabama Black Belt, he expressed gratitude to his pastoral mentor in Selma, Father Maurice Ouellet of St. Elizabeth’s Edmundite mission among Negroes, for making clear exactly how “he had finally stopped hating” fellow white clergy after twelve years of ostracism and injustice. Daniels carried a secret intention to pursue conversion under Ouellet toward the Catholic rather than Episcopal priesthood. He found comfort in the formal liturgy and structured hierarchy of the Roman Church, which had anchored centuries of cerebral meditation from St. Augustine to Thomas Merton. From his own inner voyage in Alabama, treated variously as a “white nigger,” “redneck,” and oddball savior, Daniels stretched for an empathy that could reach all human wounds. “It meant absorbing their guilt as well,” he wrote of the segregationists, “and suffering the cost which they might not yet even know was there to be paid.” He professed new baptism to a living theology beyond fear—“that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God.”
Lonzy and Alice West drove Daniels from the Montgomery airport to apartment 313E at the Carver Homes in Selma, adjacent to Brown Chapel. Many of the ten West children at home squealed with delight over the return of their favorite family guest, even though they had to bunch more tightly on beds and sofas to vacate his old room. Daniels retained an open bond with them, particularly the younger ones. He had the wit to join in their fun about the novelty of himself as a white man in Carver Homes. He recognized them as participants in a fearful movement, but employed playful nonsense—bouncing them on his knee, twirling them in the air, asking, “Now are you afraid?”—to dispel hardships from the grown-up world.
Local powers were reasserting authority in the wake of Selma’s great marches. Archbishop Thomas Toolen of Alabama had just banished Father Ouellet to Vermont by edict that made national news, depriving Daniels of personal counsel and the Wests of their family priest. (Lonzy West had converted from the Negro Baptist church a decade earlier, after a stint as Ouellet’s parish janitor.) The Dallas County school superintendent aborted a tense first meeting with Negroes on freedom-of-choice integration by announcing that he would receive only written questions for later study, then refusing to address the Negro parents by courtesy titles rather than first names. In declining also to shake their hands, the superintendent stood curtly on the abstract principle of his free choice, but apologists said he could not survive the political stigma of breaking racial custom. Meanwhile, Mayor Joseph Smitherman stalled the downtown boycott of segregated merchants until it dwindled for lack of result.
Inside a fatigued Selma movement, there were complaints, about self-promotional leadership well before the July 6 embezzlement arrest of Rev. F. D. Reese. A close observer of the emergency perceived him as an amateur trapped between persecutors and opportunists. Ralph Abernathy flew in with an earthy appeal to unite behind Reese even if he was guilty. He ridiculed the idea that white officials, who arrested them for trying to vote, suddenly became trustworthy guardians of the movement’s private collections. “I didn’t see Mr. Baker put anything in the plate!” he cried. By exercising command of the pulpit—calling for treasured hymns, extolling preachers as inheritors of biblical leadership—Abernathy held off the criticism that bubbled in the pews. “The SNCC people here come on with their taunts about SCLC exploitation and abandonment,” one of King’s staff members wrote, “and I know it isn’t true, but I can’t answer them.”
Beneath the leadership skirmishes, Daniels pitched himself into experimental projects such as the Selma Free College. Volunteers unpacked books from collection drives organized by spring marchers on their return to home cities—13,000 in the first shipment from students at San Francisco State University, 1,600 from Antioch College, small truckloads from Yale and Brown. To avoid repercussions in white Selma, officials of all-Negro Selma University fearfully declined to accept donations tainted by civil rights (sadly so, as the campus library held fewer than four thousand volumes), whereupon a dozen volunteers catalogued a full lending library for their own improvised summer curriculum. They scrounged a piano for music and folk dance, turned a derelict house into an art gallery, and held large swimming classes in a pond. They nailed wire mesh over windows to control vandalism by the “Green Street Gang” of young Negro boys, who stole supplies and killed mealworms meant to feed the lizards in a nature display assembled by science teacher Mary Alice McQuaid of Colorado State. More pleasantly, the Selma Free College managed overflow attendance in Gloria Larry’s class. Students idolized her poised, movie-star looks, but Larry—a graduate student in comparative literature at Berkeley, who had made her way south with trepidation more than a year after hearing a Bob Moses talk—was nonplussed by the clamor for French lessons instead of demonstrations. Nine-year-old Rachel West eagerly joined her freedom class every morning. West’s housemate Daniels, rejoicing to learn that the new teacher was a lifelong Negro Episcopalian, told Larry she had impeccable credentials to renew the campaign for integrated worship at St. Paul’s Church.
Daniels resumed his awkward, daily overtures to St. Paul’s members at their offices and homes. With members of Silas Norman’s local SNCC staff, he also canvassed the poorest sections of East Selma. Households lacked basic nutrition and potable water, as was obvious from surveys taken in the Free College health class, but direct exposure to conditions in see-through shacks often shocked the volunteers. One woman, asked why no male supported her destitute family, placed her hand on the heads of eleven offspring as she recalled absentee fathers out loud. To a numb suggestion that she stop seeing such men in order to qualify for social services, the mother pleaded that children were more precious than a welfare check. Volunteers figured out how to pacify another mother who was too fearful of a doctor, or too distressed by the idea of venturing into white Selma, to accompany Daniels and her two small children to Good Samaritan for emergency treatment of malnutrition and intestinal worms by Dr. Isabel Dumont, a German refugee who had preceded and survived Father Ouellet at the Catholic mission.
Ouellet had feared that Daniels was too naive for such work. From their spring conversations after mass, he thought the seminarian believed too strongly in the power of ideas to reform character—that he could change Rev. Frank Mathews of St. Paul’s by dialogue on Christian duty and theology, for instance, whereas Ouellet perceived Mathews to be governed by his coveted social post at Selma’s most prestigious church. Now Daniels himself was becoming a relative veteran. He could laugh over poignant absurdities of race while expounding on the difference between foolishness and a childlike tenacity of faith. After one fresh volunteer from California tried to assure strangers that some Negro girls in question were all right because they were under his supervision, only to be chased from the white side of the laundromat by a woman beating him with her shoe, it was Daniels who helped turn the volunteer’s fright to relieved hilarity, then to lessons on cultural provocation and risk. He became mentor also to a middle-aged couple who arrived from Long Island for a month’s stay. He found them lodging with a nurse in Carver Homes, arranged for them to help teach a geography class, and took them to mass meetings at Brown Chapel, where Rabbi Harold Saperstein twice was asked to speak as a visiting dignitary. From his parallel experience, Daniels tempered disappointment when the Sapersteins were implored by uncomfortable local Jews not to attend services at the temple on Broad Street. He took them into East Selma. He coached them on everyday subtleties such as visits to the post office—how not to stand out more as civil rights workers by trying to hide—and rewarded their progress with an odd announcement: “I think it’s all right for you to meet Stokely.”
Asked to wait outside a remote, primitive cabin, the Sapersteins first saw Carmichael step from the doorway behind Daniels with a roasted leg of small game. Marcia Saperstein guessed it was possum, her husband thought rabbit, but they were too disoriented to ask. Still rattled from the long drive out of Selma at speeds above eighty—“Never let a car pass you,” said Daniels, citing one of Carmichael’s paradoxical safety rules—they were absorbing what Daniels told them of the rural SNCC outpost that had lasted four months in Lowndes County without electricity, money, running water, or protection from the Klan.
Maddening hope had seized the Freedom House cabin since July 6, when a Justice Department lawyer stunned Carmichael with notice that local officials agreed to add registration dates and to terminate literacy tests for prospective voters. Was there a trick, or perhaps some deal to mitigate future enforcement of federal law? After spirited debate, the Lowndes County movement resolved to gamble in trust. They appealed to five hundred pioneer applicants since March 1—nearly all of whom had been rejected—to brave another try at the Old Jail in Hayneville. Lillian McGill quit her federal job at the Agriculture Department to canvass nearly around the clock, often with John Hulett, the church deacon who had founded the Lowndes County voting rights movement since rescuing his pastor from the Klan in February. SNCC workers mobilized outside reinforcements including Gloria Larry, who, after morning classes in Selma, ventured out through Big Swamp to help shepherd registration caravans. (When the prim Larry first asked to use the Freedom House bathroom, she endured guffaws as Carmichael merrily pointed her toward the small outhouse in the woods behind.) There had been serious division also about Daniels. Most project workers opposed the extra dangers and headaches posed by a radioactive white presence in Lowndes, but Carmichael prevailed with the Bob Moses argument that a freedom movement could not throw up barriers of race. He assured Bob Mants, Willie Vaughn, and other SNCC workers that white volunteers would not overrun them as in Mississippi Summer. Carefully, after Daniels, the wonder of a rabbi and wife soon appeared behind knocks on sharecropper doors, wearing business dress in July heat, radiating with news that the trick questions were banished.
Registration lines lurched forward without the literacy exams. “We’ve fought for the removal of this test for so long it’s hard to believe it’s really gone,” Stokely Carmichael declared in a SNCC press release. Mass meetings at Mt. Gillard Baptist ratcheted up from weekly to nightly for the push, and Carmichael, though far from conventionally religious, preached to high-spirited crowds in the language of the Bible. He imagined from the visionary text of Ezekiel how black folks of Lowndes would rise up dancing like “dry bones” in the valley of Israel, the sinews of life restored.
Hulett presented a separate breakthrough to Mt. Gillard: posted notices that Lowndes County was taking applications for “freedom of choice” assignment to high school. Some argued from the floor that a second front was unwise, but families of nearly fifty children answered the agreed policy of volunteers. Daniels accompanied several to the courthouse for the required forms, which turned out to be nonexistent until Superintendent Hulda Coleman typed her own version. Staff members preserved details of swift, widespread reaction, punctuated by nearby Klan rallies on July 10 and 16, in sworn affidavits collected for the Justice Department. “Buster Haigler sent for me to his house,” Cato Lee said of the county’s largest private financier. “He took his book out of his pocket, and asked me did I have any children enrolled to go to Hayneville High School.” Eli Logan said a white teacher twice advised that “the Ku Klux Klan would be through here next Tuesday” unless Logan took young Stephen’s name off the list for twelfth grade. Martha Johnson affirmed that the teacher’s son—“the same man who measured my land last year”—said she would “be in a squeeze” if her daughter tried to switch schools. Jordan Gully told how a creditor for farming loans warned that white people were fed up over his daughter’s application. “Then he said, ‘We didn’t bother y’all about registerin’. We didn’t bother y’all about goin’ to mass meetings,’” recalled Gully. “He told me, ‘I’ll be goddam if this shit is going over this time…. We going to stop it. Don’t you ask me for no damn help for nothing.’”
PRESIDENT JOHNSON frantically avoided inertia toward war from the moment in July when he announced the nomination of Henry Cabot Lodge to return as U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. He moved Bill Moyers to White House press secretary simultaneously, the better to present foreign upheavals ahead, and Moyers dazzled reporters by calling the President right in front of them to resolve a question. To drive the domestic agenda in place of Moyers, Johnson added to his staff Joseph Califano from the Pentagon and Harry McPherson from State. He ordered a verbatim transcript of Califano’s first encounters with education officials over the running daily count of delinquent school systems, and then, unsatisfied that Califano was lashing them forward vigorously enough, sprang upon them without warning. “Get ’em! Get ’em!” the President shouted at Commissioner Keppel. “Get the last ones!” Keppel had approved desegregation plans for less than a quarter of three thousand Southern districts, with Lowndes County among a majority of pending new submissions, but Johnson cared most about the four hundred holdouts by late July. He was possessed to break the psychological barrier by inveigling every last district to give up segregation in its own words—almost any words. While this one priority nearly crushed the emergency teams at Temporary S (“We were going absolutely nuts,” Keppel recalled), Johnson yanked aides to other tasks. The second time Califano momentarily missed a presidential buzz, an abashed secretary knocked to alert him that Signal Corps technicians were there with orders to install a telephone in the bathroom of his new office.
Johnson shocked former NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall with an offer to become Solicitor General of the United States. That same day, the first for Moyers as press secretary, he tried to answer Senator William Fulbright’s complaint that the intended nominee to replace Harry McPherson would mean too many senior Negroes at the State Department. “They won’t have any if I don’t name this fella,” countered the President. Fulbright narrowed his objection to the particular job, which included managerial control of the prestigious Fulbright scholar exchange program in foreign countries. “It never occurred to me that they were outstanding in the cultural field,” he told Johnson. “I mean, after all, they’re not. The big universities are not predominantly colored.” Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that participating universities more than governments would recoil if his namesake endeavor were administered by a Negro. “I wouldn’t object at all if you made him Secretary of State, for that matter,” he stressed in a quavering voice, “because I have a rather personal interest in this program.”
Fulbright managed to block Johnson’s choice for the assistant secretary post, but a bigger appointment commanded public attention upon the sudden death in London of U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson. Within hours of an emotional eulogy at Washington Cathedral, the President called Abe Fortas for drinks on the Truman balcony, where he passed along a novel suggestion that Justice Arthur Goldberg might be enticed to leave the Supreme Court for a chance to catalyze a Vietnam settlement at the United Nations. Johnson completed one phase of maneuvers by July 20, the day after Stevenson’s burial in Illinois. He announced Goldberg’s U.N. appointment in the morning, then called to thank Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith for the idea. Ebullient, Johnson said Goldberg was the perfect choice to shatter a political taboo that no Jew could represent the United States at the world body, and he told Galbraith flatly that he would name Thurgood Marshall to a future vacancy on the Supreme Court “after he’s Solicitor for a year or two.” By then Marshall would have added to the twenty-nine tough cases he had won in the highest court as an NAACP attorney, the President observed, which would make him more than eminently qualified to become the first Negro Justice. “I think we’ll break through there like we’re breaking through on so many of these things,” he said.
KING TESTED another potential northern site on Saturday, July 24. “If you want a movement to move, you’ve got to have the preachers behind you,” he told an Interfaith Breakfast of 220 clergy in Chicago. Among sixty whites present for the kickoff event were Jews gathered before sabbath services, including the national president of the conservative synagogue association, Rabbi Jacob Weinstein of Temple KAM, who had just returned from an interfaith mission in Saigon with Vietnamese peace petitions directed to King. The Negroes featured a minority of local Baptists thus far willing to defy Rev. J. H. Jackson of Olivet Baptist, the “Negro pope” who in 1961 had branded King an apostate, driving him with two thousand pro–civil rights pastors from the National Baptist Convention. To those familiar with the hidden world of pulpit politics, Rev. Jackson in Chicago loomed a daunting obstacle for his proven exercise of machinelike powers in tandem with Mayor Daley.
King exhorted the religious leaders to “sacrifice body and soul” for the cause astir, then rushed an hour behind schedule into a three-car motorcade bound for Carver Park in far Southside Chicago, with a police escort and a fleet of trailing reporters. The approach of sirens soon released the team of advance SCLC speakers—Abernathy, Bevel, citizenship teacher Dorothy Cotton, Fred Shuttlesworth—toward the rally ahead, where they in turn released the warmup Freedom Singers. King followed with a twenty-minute address on the challenge of de facto segregation. “The Negro is not free anywhere in the United States,” he said from the back of a flatbed truck. Al Raby brought a neighborhood leader to brief King on the Robert Taylor Homes project en route to a brick-strewn field at 48th and State Streets, where a second crowd of five hundred was gathered. Uniformed Cub Scouts waited to pass collection buckets.
On through eight speech stops in the lead car, covering 186 miles of city streets before dark, King had the rare extended company of his adviser Bayard Rustin. Always entertaining, sifting rascals and tactical conundrums in his high-spirited Caribbean accent, Rustin addressed King’s confluent pressures from experience. He had practiced nonviolence in Northern cities for more than two decades. He knew well the raw methods that Harlem Representative Adam Clayton Powell was using to hamstring competition from King on urban turf, having been driven off King’s advisory staff himself in 1960 by Powell’s blackmail threats over his homosexuality. From prior work on four continents, Rustin also helped interpret nonviolence in a context of pell-mell slide to distant war. Less than a month before, King had supported the interfaith mission to Vietnam: “Let me commend you…. America must be willing to negotiate with all parties…. Our guns and our bombs do not prove that we love democracy but that we still believe that might makes right.” More than this cablegram, or the stature of Pastor Martin Niemoeller of Wiesbaden, president of the World Council of Churches, Rabbi Weinstein reported that King’s nonviolent instructor James Lawson, the only black person among the fourteen delegates, “gave us great prestige and opened many doors to us.” Chief among their discoveries in Vietnam was the monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who had sent King a letter on the meaning of self-immolation. The sensational fires were not acts of despair, suicide, or even violence, he argued. Mahayana Buddhism, while abhorring self-destruction, teaches that life is immortal. Candidate monks burn small spots on their bodies at ordination to signify devotion, and immolation expresses merely the extreme degree of constructive hope for a people’s salvation above the nihilism of war. “To say something while experiencing this kind of pain,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “is to say it with the utmost courage, frankness, determination, and sincerity.”
This communication taxed even Rustin’s nimble mind for adapting nonviolence across cultures. Witness by flame was “difficult for the Western Christian conscience to understand,” the monk’s letter conceded, and the interfaith delegation found realistically that the two Vietnamese governments themselves were locked into opposing rationales for conventional terror. Still, from his study of the nonviolent movement against caste in Alabama, Thich Nhat Hanh challenged Americans to reciprocate in Vietnam by applying parallel Buddhist belief that war from any quarter is a greater evil than Communism, capitalism, or colonialism. They should “not allow American political and economic doctrines to be deprived of their spiritual element,” he wrote King, quoting a Christian theologian in his personal plea: “You cannot be silent since you have already been in action, and you are in action, because, in you, God is in action, too—to use Karl Barth’s expression.”
The nonstop Chicago relay ended late Saturday at Friendship Baptist, the former grand Russian synagogue of Anshe Kneseth Israel in Lawndale. When King complained of exhaustion after preaching at two churches Sunday morning, the Freedom Singers improvised an extra hour to cover a breather before motorcades rolled toward six afternoon stops. At a shopping center in Chatham, then in Calumet Park, he urged large middle-class crowds to remember those behind them in the struggle from desperate poverty. “Dives didn’t go to hell because he was a millionaire,” King explained from the parable in Luke. “He went to hell because he passed Lazarus by.” Until dusk, outside Scatchell’s BBQ on Pulaski Avenue, King pleaded with listeners to march with him in numbers. “Take a day off on Monday,” he cried. “You know, we don’t make much money anyhow.” Leaving behind most of the entourage to scatter in recruitment, hoping to silence press jibes that recent downtown protests had mustered fewer than a thousand, King ventured seventeen miles north along Lake Michigan to one of the country’s wealthiest suburbs. Brown-shirt Nazis were picketing the village green of Winnetka, and police guards had thrown up protective fencing after a bomb threat. Few at the night rally of ten thousand people knew any freedom songs, but Rev. C. T. Vivian, SCLC’s director of affiliate chapters, had been holding them with preacher riffs and choruses of “America the Beautiful.” King spoke for nearly an hour on the moral imperative to overcome fearful hatred at home and abroad. From dead collapse, he startled Vivian on the way back into Chicago. “You don’t think I know what I’m doing when I talk about Vietnam, do you?” King asked.
Vivian muttered questions to stall, then smiled, realizing that King was reading his staff again for unguarded reaction, the way he sampled crowds and cities. King let it go, and Vivian changed the subject. “I just heard that Vernon Johns died,” he said.
King sagged. “Johns died?” he asked. “You sure of that?”
Vivian said he was. Like much about the vagabond scholar who had preceded King at Dexter Avenue Baptist in Montgomery, his demise weeks earlier was passing from rumor through fact to legend. It was said that the old man had appeared from somewhere at storied Rankin Chapel of Howard University, without laces in his shoes, to deliver without notes a last sermon entitled “The Romance of Death,” then wandered off again to be discovered prostrate by strangers weeks later. A recording survived. “I’m almost afraid to say this, but I can prove to you in less than a second that it’s true,” Johns had growled to end his lyrical reflections. “Unless a person comes to the place where he wants to die, he has been licked by life.”* Vivian knew King had modeled his thematic speech on Lazarus and Dives after the mischievously profound Johns sermon of 1949, “Segregation After Death.” From common association, they shared in the car a flood of memorial stories on Johns the peddler and irascible prophet, who once announced a watermelon sale as the chastening benediction for a wedding ceremony that joined two of Dexter’s proudest families.
Chicago reporters confronted King after a canceled event early Monday as he emerged pasty and feverish from a doctor’s office, diagnosed with bronchitis. “I need to rest,” he told them, then lagged two hours behind. At lakefront Buckingham Fountain, King climbed a blue truck to address roaring, restless marchers numbered at some twenty thousand. “We sang Going to Chicago until there were as many of our people in Chicago as Mississippi,” he cried, reviewing the half-century of exodus. “Now we see the results. Chicago did not turn out to be a New Jerusalem…but a city in dire need of redemption and reform.” With Al Raby, Dick Gregory, and John McDermott of the Catholic Interracial Council, King led a walking mass the full width of Balbo Drive that stretched forward an hour to State Street, Madison, and up LaSalle to City Hall. He offered there a formal prayer for “a greater vision of our task,” vowed to be back when needed, and flew to his next trial movement in Cleveland. Mayor Daley, reappearing in Chicago from a hasty trip, adroitly minimized differences with King. “There can be no disagreement that we must root out poverty,” Daley announced, “rid the community of slums, eliminate discrimination and segregation wherever they exist, and improve the quality of education.”
PRESS SECRETARY Moyers whispered to President Johnson for permission to release simply the names of the men gathered in the Cabinet Room on Monday, July 26. Johnson vetoed it, growling that reporters would only press them more doggedly for clues. Hair-trigger tensions of superpower conflict had intruded upon the serial Vietnam meetings in their sixth consecutive day. Although the North Vietnamese had shot down fifty-five U.S. planes earlier during the Rolling Thunder bombardment, military intelligence officials believed the weekend loss of an American F-4 jet was the first casualty from new surface-to-air missile (SAM) defenses operated by Soviet technicians, some forty miles northeast of Hanoi. “Are you sure they’re Russians?” President Johnson asked. Rusk conceded that “killing the first Russians” in Vietnam would be dangerous, but joined McNamara and military commanders in recommending air strikes on the SAM sites themselves. “You cannot order pilots to bomb without helping them get back,” he said.
The President declared a recess, admonishing everyone again to absolute secrecy, and called his friend Richard Russell. “We think that the Russians are manning them,” he said. “We don’t want to say that. We don’t want anybody to know that.” The new SAM sites were mobile and harder to hit, but to bomb the permanent sites near Hanoi would drive the feuding Chinese and Soviet governments toward unified support of North Vietnam. “You’ll have them all in the war in fifteen minutes in my judgment when you go to bombing in Hanoi,” said Johnson, wary of North Vietnamese strategy. “I think they’re trying to trap us into doing it.”
Russell confronted the immediate choice on the mobile sites instead. “Well, I’d say yes, get them tonight if we could,” he advised, “but I’d hate like hell to try to get them and miss them.” He renewed commiseration with Johnson on the overall war, especially his premonition that “these damn Vietnamese” allies would skulk to the rear and leave the fighting to Americans. “God, that just scared the hell out of me,” Russell confessed.
The President reconvened the group in the Cabinet Room late Monday. Arthur Goldberg, hours after being sworn in as U.N. ambassador, asked for assurance that no spasm by hostile superpowers would spoil the chance of diplomatic settlement. CIA Director Raborn reported that Soviet leaders were “expecting us to come” with bombs to counter their missiles, and were likely to remain reserved. Clark Clifford, who had argued the George Ball position to President Johnson at Camp David, urging withdrawal to avoid “catastrophe for my country,” reversed counsel in an atmosphere of command decisions under fire. “We are not going to be pushed out of South Vietnam,” he said. “We show the enemy our determination by taking out number 6 and number 7.” McNamara said the suspect SAM sites designated by these numbers were only “semi-mobile,” raising the odds of success. “Take them out,” ordered the President. He called the Pentagon Situation Room through the night—at one o’clock, 3:30, and 7:35 Tuesday morning—for mission reports that flattened his hopes. Ground missiles shot down six of the forty-four attacking U.S. aircraft, all F-105s. From postmortem reconnaissance indicating that number 6 was a dummy site, and number 7 vacant, Bundy concluded that the mobile SAMs sighted “may have been a DRV trap,” referring to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, that is, North Vietnam.
Between Tuesday’s three secret deliberations, beginning at 8:40 A.M., the President posed for photographs with the Sons of Italy, new HEW Secretary John Gardner, and with a Boy Scout who had bicycled from Idaho on a fitness project, among others, and approved a reply to Martin Luther King’s thanks for the appointment of Thurgood Marshall. (“I am convinced that God has sent you to lead us out of this difficult and agonizing wilderness at such a time as this,” said King, in a letter dictated from the road.*) Johnson also called Harry Truman, met for two hours with Abe Fortas, and signed into law the Cigarette Labeling Act of 1965, which placed a specified health warning on every pack sold. Despite the mandated labels, consumption would rise toward a record 520 billion cigarettes in 1966, while research sponsored by the American Medical Association, underwritten with nearly $20 million from tobacco sources, corroborated none of the government’s alleged ill effects. On the contrary, one newly publicized study team led by a Nobel laureate found that regular smoking fostered higher intelligence. “Let it be clear that we do not intend to create geniuses,” microbiologist Daniele Bovet told the Times, “but only put the less-endowed individual in a position to reach a satisfactory mental and intellectual development.”
On Wednesday, July 28, the President ordered his staff to rustle up cushioning news to surround the Vietnam announcement at noon. Twelve minutes beforehand, Johnson himself called Abe Fortas. “How is your blood pressure?” he asked coyly.
Decades later, Vietnam War historian Stanley Karnow wrote that President Johnson “could not conceal his decision, but he could muffle it.” This explained why, agreed biographer Robert Dallek, he “announced the expansion of the war at a press conference rather than in a speech to a joint session of Congress,” disclosing only 50,000 of the 100,000 new troops ordered to Vietnam, saying more were likely soon. Still, anticipation made for an electric, somber moment in the packed East Room. No great distance or mitigating hope, the President declared, should “mask the central fact that this is really war.” Surveys recorded a daytime television audience of 28 million, with only 4 percent of sets tuned elsewhere. “Once the Communists know, as we know, that a violent solution is impossible,” said Johnson, “then a peaceful solution is inevitable.” Reporters noted that Lady Bird Johnson covered her face, near tears, as he reprised from his Selma speech—“Let me add now a personal note…as I have said before”—a defining purpose since boyhood that he resolved not to see “drowned in the wasteful ravages of cruel wars…. But I also know, as a realistic public servant, that as long as there are men who hate and destroy, we must have the courage to resist or we’ll see it all—all that we have built, all that we hope to build, all our dreams for freedom—all, all, will be swept away on the flood of conquest. So, too, this shall not happen. We will stand in Vietnam.”
Defying undertow, President Johnson rose buoyantly to other matters. He introduced his newly appointed director for the Voice of America, NBC News correspondent John Chancellor, “whose face and whose mind is known to this country and to most of the entire world,” and presented as a startling surprise, even to himself, the soon-to-be-appointed Justice Fortas.
Not waiting for Johnson to finish questions from the press, Vice President Humphrey called the Oval Office from “a room full of senators over here at the Capitol” to dictate a message of unanimous enthusiasm. “I just couldn’t be happier if they’d had Christmas every day,” he added, “and every dream I’d ever wanted came true.” The President himself rushed back to more congenial tasks with energized relief, pushing Katzenbach at the last hurdle for voting rights, and concurrent victories lifted him to euphoria. “We repealed 14-B today,” he crowed to Arthur Goldberg that night, saying he forgave the veteran labor lawyer for telling him once that the anti-union section of the Taft-Hartley Act was forever impregnable. “I put it in the message, and then I backed it up with votes,” boasted Johnson. “And we got Social Security passed today.”
Thursday’s New York Times spread war news across three giant tiers, “JOHNSON ORDERS 50,000 MORE MEN/TO VIETNAM AND DOUBLES DRAFT/AGAIN URGES U.N. TO SEEK PEACE.” Surrounding front-page stories headlined restraint—“Most in Congress Relieved,” said one, alongside “Economic Impact Is Called Slight.” The Times editorial rested on his “vital” point that the war must be “held down to the absolute minimum necessary to prove to Hanoi and Peking that military aggression is not worthwhile,” and the principal news dispatch, “NO RESERVE CALL,” recognized that the President avoided congressional scrutiny of a disruptive, costly deployment by declining to activate Reserve forces. He called instead for an extra 18,000 draftees per month.
Draftees would supply politically convenient soldiers only for the moment, as Johnson well knew, but his overriding worry was that candid mobilization would touch off hawkish alarms for unfettered war. “Don’t pay any attention to what the little shits on the campuses do,” he told George Ball. “The great beast is the reactionary elements in this country.” At the same time, Johnson railed that realistic disclosures would backfire to the aid of dovish critics. Public exchanges “just put water on Mansfield’s and on Morse’s paddle,” he fretted to Eisenhower, longing for acquiescence on all sides. “If we could get Morse and Ford to quit talking,” he opined, “it would be a lot better.” To minimize debate, and the need for concurrence, he assumed the burden of war on his own claim of authority. An elastic conscription law allowed him to commandeer manpower for Vietnam by quiet executive decree, at the price of inevitable protest that no such autocratic power should compel young Americans to kill or be killed in the name of free government.
WHEN EVEN the legendary White House telephone operators failed to locate Martin Luther King, the Attorney General called the FBI at 9:15 that same Wednesday night, July 28. In doing so, Assistant Director DeLoach noted with satisfaction, Katzenbach swallowed his distaste for FBI surveillance methods to the point of admitting he “desperately” needed help to find King about the “damned bill” on voting rights. From tracking agents, DeLoach guided him to call Suite 9-B at the Sheraton after a rally in Cleveland’s civic arena, and negotiations went late over the wording of a King statement about the poll tax. The voting rights bill was likely to remain stuck unless key representatives on the House-Senate conference—chiefly Harold Donohue of Massachusetts and Peter Rodino of New Jersey—accepted assurance that civil rights supporters could retreat honorably from a poll tax amendment the House had added July 9 over the Johnson administration’s opposition. Katzenbach agreed to substitute an express declaration by Congress that the poll tax abridged the right to vote, plus a directive that the Justice Department “institute forthwith” lawsuits to void the practice, and King agreed before morning that Katzenbach could quote his exact appraisal of the compromise, ending: “I am confident that the poll tax provision of the bill—with vigorous action by the Attorney General—will operate finally to bury this iniquitous device.” He agreed also that Katzenbach could call final enactment of the voting rights law his “overriding goal.”
Word of the midnight intercession leaked in Washington, where Southerners professed shock that an Attorney General would quote such a person in the official business of the United States, “taking orders” from King. The indignant refrain changed few votes, however, and did not erupt until Katzenbach steered the compromise through Thursday’s conference to the floor of the House and Senate.
King, for his part, returned to troubles on the Northern tour. His bronchitis had worsened since Chicago to a fever of 102 degrees. He canceled a New York stop after two warning phone calls from Adam Clayton Powell, and used a day’s break to work on several festering issues that menaced the upcoming SCLC convention in Birmingham. He authorized his attorney Chauncey Eskridge to seek collection from a Negro bondsman of misappropriated interest on nearly $400,000 of bail bonds that SCLC had posted in 1963 with borrowed money—the bonds being held at risk because Birmingham still refused to drop more than a thousand criminal cases against young people arrested for protesting segregation. Meanwhile, King mediated a complex pulpit dispute that blocked access to the historic seat of the Birmingham movement at 16th Street Baptist Church. There were fears expressed that the church would be bombed again if he returned, along with quarrels over the allocation of repair funds collected worldwide, plus lingering resentment of high-handed conduct by King’s colleague Fred Shuttlesworth. Abernathy had just inflamed the latter situation with a letter banning the celebrated movement choir director at 16th Street Baptist, Carlton Reese, from SCLC events until he apologized satisfactorily for having “disrespected” Shuttlesworth, stressing to Reese that “you and your group must not repent for these acts of insubordination just for the convention, but it must be a move to get right with the movement permanently.”
Adam Clayton Powell could not resist tweaking King about why he should stay out of Harlem. “I told him to go to cities where they had no real Negro leadership,” he announced to reporters, “like Chicago, Cleveland, and Washington.” Powell’s colorful disparagement attracted press notice, baiting Negroes who cooperated with King, and the NAACP chapter president in Philadelphia sent up a temperamental flare before the movement tour reached his city. “Moore Assails Two-Day Visit Here of Dr. King,” headlined the July 30 Philadelphia Inquirer, reporting that Cecil B. Moore denounced King as “an unwitting tool” of manipulations by “appeasers, social climbers, and the egghead white power structure” to degrade what Moore called “my stature in the Negro community.” The friction instantly generated a sympathetic FBI report on Moore’s confidential plans to harass King as unwelcome. King, still stalled and sick in Cleveland, sent word that he did not want to impose on Philadelphia, which touched off protests against Moore.
With two planeloads of legislators, President Johnson soared over the heartland into Kansas City, Missouri, on Friday afternoon, July 30, then proceeded by motorcade to Independence. Crowds lined the streets. At a ceremony in the auditorium of the Truman Library, the former President spoke only briefly. “I’m glad to have lived this long, and to witness today the signing of the Medicare bill,” said Harry Truman, now growing feeble at eighty-one. He first had proposed national health coverage for older Americans in 1945, three months after the end of World War II, and Johnson praised him for inspiring the uphill battle ever since. The new law made 19 million Americans instantly eligible for medical benefits as a supplement to Social Security, which promised over time to lift old age itself above a primordial curse as the most impoverished stage of life. “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine,” said Johnson. “No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime…. No longer will young families see their own income and their own hopes eaten away simply because they are carrying out their deep moral obligations to their parents and to their uncles and their aunts.”
Johnson gave Bess Truman the first pen he used to sign into law the amendment to Social Security known as Medicare. He gave a second to Truman and a third to Vice President Humphrey, who had crafted a number of the arcane provisions necessary to win passage. (A religious exemption excluded the Old Order Amish, who believed health insurance impugned trust in providence.) He gave a fourth pen to Representative Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, who had presided over the graveyard of health legislation until his Ways and Means Committee first broke the lobbying power of organized medicine that spring, during the march from Selma to Montgomery. Doctors would reconcile their duty to the new national commitment, Johnson foresaw, so that in Independence “and a thousand other towns like it, there are men and women in pain who will now find ease.” Beaming, grasping hands in jubilation, he said he hoped for no sweeter struggle in public life, “nor any act of leadership that gives greater satisfaction than this.”
CONTINUING VIOLENCE attracted press attention to Americus, Georgia, on Sunday, August 1. Bottles thrown from a car had hospitalized two Negro boys aged three and six, and rumors circulated that Martin Luther King would detour from the North. National newspapers published a front-page photograph of church elders lined across the top step of First Methodist before morning worship, their arms crossed to block an integrated, kneeling group of six led by SCLC worker Willie Bolden, and fire chief H. K. Henderson barred a dozen outside First Baptist of Americus, saying, “You are wasting your time and mine.” No reporters gathered in Selma, Alabama, but an unobserved silence gripped St. Paul’s Episcopal from the moment Jonathan Daniels arrived with Gloria Larry. One of the volunteer ushers trained for integration incidents went home seething instead, along with several families who left during the hushed prelude. Larry and Daniels took seats near the middle of the stone sanctuary. When they stood with the fourth row beckoned for first-Sunday Communion, all around them stayed seated or sat back down again in staggered unanimity, and they went forward to the altar alone.
Rev. Frank Mathews hastened from the service to compose a report for his bishops, headed “12:30 PM.” “This is the first time a Negro has attended 11:00 HC [Holy Communion],” he wrote, “so it was definitely a ‘crisis situation.’” He would postpone the monthly session of the governing vestry for two weeks to let time “quieten the souls of distraught men,” Mathews confided. He added that the church budget was “beginning to feel the pinch of withheld payment of pledges.” Separately, a member of St. Paul’s rushed to the diocese his own description of the service. Having arrived late, he had noticed heaviness in the air before he saw “this white man in his near Clerical clothes escorting a negro woman, standing aside for her to be seated, then sitting down by her and they both knelt to pray,” wrote Garnett Cassell. “It was then that I knew what was upsetting the congregation enough for me to feel it.” Cassell said Daniels could keep importing Negroes indefinitely. “All of his many months of activity here in Selma, Ala. has been paid for at the Spiritual Expense to the Congregation of St. Paul’s,” he wrote. “Therefore, the time has come when he must be stopped.” From Birmingham, diocesan officials soon prepared replies upholding both the canonical right to integrated worship and the hope that forbearance would wear out the “very distasteful” practice. “If he [Daniels] is hanging around causing trouble,” Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter wrote Mathews, “I think I will just have to write his bishop and tell him to take him on back to Seminary.”
Larry and Daniels continued work in Lowndes County on Monday, a regular registration day at the old Hayneville jail. Daniels broke away to accompany a group of parents on the short walk up to the courthouse square, seeking to learn why the school board rejected forty-one of forty-six freedom-of-choice applications for transfer to Hayneville High School. Superintendent Hulda Coleman blocked Daniels at her office door, and received the parents one at a time.
Bernice Johnson went inside alone. Her husband, a part-time preacher, recently consented to open Friendship Baptist for movement activity in Hayneville, but fearful church members had foiled the first meeting by removing the pews. Mrs. Johnson herself filed the applications for their three oldest children, from Malachi down to Samuel, and when Superintendent Coleman said they had tested too poorly for academic work in white schools, she fell back on the reasoning discussed with Hulett, Lillian McGill, and the other parents. “The Lowndes County schools ain’t no good,” she told Coleman. “That’s no secret, they ain’t no kind of nothing.” The schools turned Negro children out to work in the fields and “passed ’em up” the grades no matter what, Johnson said, which was why the parents wanted the transfer. She tried to hold steady as the superintendent checked names and test scores.
Those outside felt tensions compressed at the color line. Lowndes County people were saying Coleman had closed the Negro schools a week early out of furious embarrassment over the photograph of Rolen School in The Saturday Evening Post, illustrating King’s passage through Trickem on the Selma march. Now, less than a month before the new fall term, the federal Office of Education still counted Lowndes’s among nearly two thousand desegregation plans not yet approved, while local white constituents pushed hard against even minimum concessions. A small group of hostile white people converged upon the waiting parents and demanded to know what a conspicuous outsider was doing in Hayneville.
“I’m with my friends,” said Daniels.