November–December 1965
ON the day before the Northeast blackout, King sent a letter of “personal encouragement” to Senator William Fulbright, with whom he had no acquaintance, and also sent a mortified emissary—his father—to fend off a car theft investigation by the FBI. Although Fulbright had not yet broken publicly with the administration on Vietnam, King extrapolated early hints according to his own private readings of President Johnson, and he knew that raging public vitriol against dissent, while the birthright and daily burden of the nonviolent race movement, was a disorienting shock for many newcomers. “I trust that you will not let any pressure silence you,” King wrote Fulbright in a guarded note. (Fulbright thanked King with a candid reply that “my influence is not sufficiently strong…to do much about the policy which is now being followed.”) Daddy King, for his part, walked bravely into Atlanta police headquarters to surrender the purchase documents for a 1965 Chevrolet in SCLC’s SCOPE fleet, volunteering that there might be something wrong with the documents. This preemptive move set a tone of forthright cooperation, and covered panic over sudden rumors that Hosea Williams had bought at least four stolen cars from South Carolina thieves cooperating with FBI agents. Williams, sputtering with indignation, avoided contact with King. He stalled surrender of the cars themselves because several had disappeared to scattered projects, and he was determined first to wring a refund out of the suppliers.
On Saturday, November 6, Andrew Young called Levison from Atlanta with cryptic news that “Hosea has a problem” best not discussed on the telephone. Half an hour later, word circulated through Stanley Levison that the SCLC treasury was short $190,000, and that “Martin acted as if the bottom had fallen out of the world.” King sent Young that same afternoon to New York. Advisers there tied the treasury crisis to a bookkeeping “goof”—unnoticed checks gone from the theft of SCLC’s safe during the August convention, many of which could be replaced—but discovered an alarming long-term drop in contributions to a level roughly one-third of expenditures, so that the current monthly deficit of $70,000 would bankrupt SCLC by early 1966. Levison, Clarence Jones, and the others called for drastic spending cuts and fund-raising reforms, grumbling as usual that King would forgive chronic laxity on the part of “pompous and ineffective” SCLC treasurer Ralph Abernathy. They knew that Abernathy recently inveigled Young himself to write an appeal for major SCLC donors to buy Abernathy a new automobile, and that a chagrined King worked to cover and repay the mistake rather than openly rebuke his best friend. Even now, out of abiding sympathy for Abernathy’s deep wounds and insecurities, King wrote a detailed letter to American Express headquarters appealing the recent rejection of Abernathy’s application for credit privileges. (The handy plastic card, introduced by American Express in 1959, was transforming not only business travel but much of retail commerce.)
Young and the New York advisers accepted that Hosea Williams might be in possession of stolen cars, doubted that he had ordered them stolen, questioned what he knew at the time of sale, and fully expected his exclamations that he would defy this persecution like all the others. Combustible, loose with rules, Williams had gone to jail more than anyone on the SCLC staff, and had just committed permanently to the movement by resigning his vested career as a chemist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. With Bevel away in Chicago, he was the available choice to mount a protest in remote Alabama, against travesties of justice in the Liuzzo and Daniels murder trials. Harry Wachtel, the Wall Street lawyer who had represented King in high-level negotiations on the Voting Rights Act, discreetly sounded out his contacts at the Justice Department about the likelihood of prosecution. Insiders at SCLC held their breath and hoped the scandal would fail to explode.
Far from King’s sight, the Hosea Williams case boiled in a continuing dispute that would spill from the secret chambers of government into the next presidential election. Officials at FBI headquarters ached to announce an ITSP (Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property) “rackets” case that touched King. “Hosea Williams is the Director of Voter Registration, SCLC,” wrote Assistant Director Al Rosen, “and in view of his high position, any prosecutive action taken against him would result in considerable publicity and would focus attention on the activities of the SCLC.” However, when FBI agents arrested the first middleman in late October, skeptical federal prosecutors in Atlanta and Washington made sure that the charging documents did not implicate Williams or King on the uncorroborated word of the South Carolina suspect. They asked why a convicted white thief from South Carolina would rent cars under his own name, sell them traceably to Negro middlemen in Atlanta, then confess the whole scheme to an FBI contact from previous arrests. Nevertheless, the neutral arrest statement infuriated Deke DeLoach as a muzzling. By his report he told the Justice Department that “the FBI did not make ‘secret arrests’…and that we simply would not sit still for this kind of treatment.” Alan Belmont, the FBI’s third-ranking official, hinted to counterparts at Justice that the Bureau might have corroboration of SCLC’s conscious guilt from surveillance intercepts, but this disclosure only ratcheted the matter up to Attorney General Katzenbach. A federal judge quickly sealed the record of the middleman’s arrest, which was publicly ignored without a salacious civil rights context. “The Dept Attys may have gotten to the judge,” Hoover groused to his inner circle.
FBI officials pushed for broader prosecution while the Justice Department held back for supporting facts, and their standoff intensified because King was the nerve point in a larger struggle over surveillance policy. The FBI scrambled in November to assure Justice that intelligence information would be “compartmentalized” from criminal agents, and therefore would not contaminate the evidence in an active prosecution, but Katzenbach stressed that skilled defense lawyers might win court-ordered discovery of all material about Hosea Williams in the government’s possession. Legally, he warned, such discovery could spoil any slim chance of a sustainable conviction, because judges would frown especially upon wiretapped conversations about Hosea’s “problem” among at least three SCLC lawyers, Wachtel, Jones, and Levison, as unconstitutional infringements of the right to counsel. Politically, any prosecution of Williams would risk the first public disclosure of the telephone wiretaps on King and his associates, which would bring down seismic repercussions.
For Katzenbach, still more danger lurked in the likely revelation of intercepts also by nonauthorized FBI microphone surveillance—bugs planted in rooms by trespass—at the worst moment. It had taken months of cajolery for him to secure from his nominal subordinates even a bare acknowledgment that the FBI used bugs, then finally a pledge to abandon them, both on the strength of President Johnson’s emphatic secret order. “As a consequence, and at your request,” Hoover had informed Katzenbach on September 14, “we have discontinued completely the use of microphones.” The memo of formal compliance bristled ominously with resentment. Hoover blamed official qualms about bugs on the “unrestrained and injudicious use of special investigative techniques by other agencies.” He objected that traditional, accountable FBI methods such as interviews and forensics fell short “in dealing with clandestine operations,” and that bugs were vital for the FBI “to assist our makers of international policy” as well as to combat subversion. “To the extent that our knowledge is reduced,” Hoover concluded with a royal flourish, “to that extent our productiveness is reduced.”
Reluctant submission lasted hardly a month before Hoover rebelled. He chose tactical ground shrewdly, aware that a federal government divided privately over bugs also tottered recently in attitude toward Martin Luther King. When wiretaps next alerted the FBI that King would meet his New York advisers, Hoover knew better than to ask special permission to bug the event. Instead, implying that Katzenbach would have approved if there had been time, he sent notice afterward in an unprecedented sort of post-facto request: “Because of the importance of the meeting, and the urgency of the situation, a microphone surveillance was effected October 14, 1965, on King in Room 345, Astor Hotel…. This surveillance involved trespass.” Hoover sent Katzenbach two nearly identical notices after King’s New York visits in late October and November, which put the Attorney General in a bind. He could ask President Johnson to confront the shaded disobedience, admitting that he could not handle Hoover himself, or he could overlook it. Choosing the latter, Katzenbach entangled himself in a bugging policy contrary to the one Johnson demanded. He became the first Attorney General ever to grant tacit written approval for a specific bug, as opposed to telephone wiretap. The unchallenged memos became leverage for Hoover, and gave Katzenbach still more reason to be wary of a Hosea Williams prosecution. Now he could be implicated as the highest authority for any bugs unearthed by court discovery.
For Hoover, these maneuvers breached the odious prohibition on bugs, and his top officials moved aggressively behind signs of official displeasure toward King. Agents recruited bookkeeper James Harrison as the Bureau’s first “penetration” informant inside SCLC. Hoover commended his Atlanta branch on November 10 for “thought and imagination…looking toward the possible exploitation of highly sensitive information recently obtained concerning the personal life of subject [King].” DeLoach gave House Speaker John McCormack his acrid confidential version of King’s Vietnam dissent, alleged Communist control, and personal faults, reporting afterward that the Speaker “was quite calm…. stated that he now recognized the gravity of the situation and that something must be done about it.” DeLoach also briefed Fred Buzhardt and Harry Dent, aides to the newly converted Republican Senator Strom Thurmond, but resisted as too dangerous their eagerness to let Thurmond “expose” King publicly with FBI information. Ever careful, Hoover favored confidential weapons that could not embarrass the Bureau, while pushing doggedly for the protected publicity of an authorized indictment against Hosea Williams. “It is disgraceful that we are kept ‘under raps’ in this case,” he scrawled on a memo, and speculated on another memo that even “air tight” evidence for SCLC’s complicity would not matter, “as that outfit is above the law in the eyes of the Dept.”
King sensed ephemeral new tides against the movement. His friend Morris Abram, a former Atlantan now on temporary Washington assignment away from the American Jewish Committee, solicited his participation in President Johnson’s proposed national conference on race, then awkwardly signaled that most of the colleagues King nominated for a November 16 planning session would not be allowed through the White House gates. Inside the administration, Abram and Johnson’s civil rights staff remonstrated with security officials not to bar Bayard Rustin on the FBI’s renewed allegation that he was a “confirmed Marxist.” Lee White reminded the President that Rustin had proved a responsible and insightful ally since the March on Washington, and warned that the proposed FBI blacklist, which extended to Wall Street lawyer Harry Wachtel, among others, would undercut the presidential mandate to insure that civil rights leaders did not “either take away control of the conference from your designated co-chairmen or withdraw their support from it.” The blocked invitations vexed King. Andrew Young, while dispatched to lead a march in Selma seeking courtesy titles for Negroes, appealed to Abram and Lee White by telegram on November 13 for reconsideration of “the other names which were submitted by Dr. King.” Such consternation within SCLC brought contrasting joy to FBI headquarters when intercepted over the wiretaps and bugs. “We may be overly optimistic, but perhaps this is a favorable trend,” wrote a supervisor. “We will continue, as in the past, to furnish the White House derogatory information concerning King’s people who indicate possible association with the White House.” Hoover approved: “Right.”
WITHIN THE broad community of civil rights activists, the November 16 planning session was considered so pivotal that religious leaders in New York convened a conference to prepare for it on November 9, hours before the Northeast blackout. King arrived two days later into the concentrated hum of crosscurrents in the media. Not a single speaker at the religious conference lasted long on the broad promise of Johnson’s historic Howard University speech before veering into an electric fixation on the structure of Negro families. Robert Spike, head of the National Council of Churches’ Commission on Religion and Race, apologized typically for his extemporaneous remarks on “the damage that is flowing from the Moynihan report.” An entire book soon would chronicle the ongoing tar-baby furor over the report’s central theory that a “tangle of pathology” infected Negro families, as measured by government statistics. Intellectual arguments cloaked in scientific language resonated through political culture, like Louis Agassiz’s theory of the Negro as a separate species. “Because of the newspaper coverage,” the book concluded, “the Moynihan Report was taken as the government’s explanation for the [Watts] riots.”
Nowhere did an author’s name appear on the Labor Department report printed in June, but Assistant Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan distributed copies avidly to friends and reporters, one of whom, Robert Novak, had surfaced him to fame during the Watts riots of August in a nationally syndicated column—“The Moynihan Report”—calling it a “political atomic bomb” that “exposes the ugly truth about the big city Negro’s plight.” Novak promoted a forbidden aura about the “much suppressed, much leaked” document, which in fact sold openly in government stores for 45 cents, and diverse commentators helped loose an avalanche of controversy. The New York Times reported within ten days that the Johnson administration was studying the report for clues about how to “replace matriarchy,” female-headed families, among Negroes. By September, Richard Rovere observed in The New Yorker that the upcoming White House conference “aimed at developing a national policy to strengthen the ego of the Negro male in the United States.” The Washington Star claimed to discern an obstacle looming from the “still secret” Moynihan report: “Negro life is another world as little known to middle class Negroes as middle class whites[,] and not understood at all by leaders such as Martin Luther King.”
Race propelled family issues to the forefront of national politics. Gender terms sprang into headlines from Moynihan’s opening section that identified matriarchy as the lead indicator of a ghetto deprivation he called pathological. “The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut,” declared the report. “Indeed, in 19th century America, a particular type of exaggerated male boastfulness became almost a national style. Not for the Negro male. The ‘sassy nigger’ was lynched.”
Pauli Murray of Yale, still working on the federal lawsuit to overturn Alabama’s blanket exclusion of women from jury service, raised an isolated howl against suggestions that women were hogging the few positions of relative advantage. It was “bitterly ironic,” she wrote Newsweek, “that Negro women should be impliedly censured for their efforts to overcome a handicap not of their own making.” Those women who did push past double discrimination by race and sex into middle-class prospects faced a chronically severe deficit of comparably situated Negro marriage partners, which to Murray made the female-headed household a desperate, heroic adaptation rather than a preference or sickness. Bayard Rustin objected more generally that for two centuries black families had been denied human status, let alone recognition or protection under state laws, in order to safeguard the property rights and breeding prerogatives of slave owners. “It is amazing to me that Negro families exist at all,” he said bluntly. King tried to salvage hope from a past he called too “ghastly” for words. “No one in all history had to fight against so many psychological and physical horrors to have a family life,” he said in a New York speech, recalling reproachful questions about why he allowed small children to suffer the trauma of jail-bound demonstrations: “The answer is simple: Our children and our families are maimed a little every day of their lives.”
Articles about Moynihan poured that autumn from opinion journals—Commonweal, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Christianity and Crisis. It made news that many Negroes felt insulted, which itself was new, and news again that Moynihan was nonplussed by the reaction. Few of the contending public voices were Negro or female. Most, including Moynihan, traced the high indices of broken Negro families to historical oppression, but the ambiguous drumbeat of social science spurred inferences of deviant character to run free of analysis: “22.9 per cent of the city-dwelling Negro women who have ever been married are now divorced, separated, or deserted…explosive cycle of poverty…one Negro family in four is fatherless…welfare dependency…birth rate for Negroes is 40 per cent higher than for whites.” A pathology model subliminally reduced civil rights forces from intrepid agents of change to quarantined patients, while reasserting full diagnostic privilege for mainstream opinion makers. “Moynihan’s facts were undisputed,” William Manchester later reflected in a survey history that captured an incoming mood, “but such was the Negro agony that year, and so shattering the impact of events on Negro pride, that blacks could not face them.”
FBI BUGS MISSED King in New York on the second weekend of November. John Malone, the New York special agent in charge, advised headquarters that functional devices were planted well ahead in the reserved rooms at the Astor when the target unaccountably checked in elsewhere, too late to plant substitutes. To dodge bureaucratic blame, Malone assured Hoover that he had scolded the New York Hilton for accepting King without a reservation, but the pinched hotel manager chose the government lecture over publicity for turning him away. By “physical surveillance” (snoopers) and subsequent collections, the Bureau sampled the range of worry yanking at the Hilton strategy sessions: King’s just published commitment to a Chicago campaign (“Next Stop: The North,” Saturday Review); orders for the SCLC accountant to cooperate with an FBI audit of car purchases; fantasy speculation that Harry Belafonte might stave off the financial crisis with a benefit gala featuring remarried film stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; multiple anxieties for the White House conference beginning Tuesday. “The government thinks the Moynihan report is priceless,” Stanley Levison remarked, adding that King must counter its misperceptions. Another wiretap caught the warning synopsis of a new runaway phenomenon. “Malcolm X wrote this book out of compulsion,” said Levison.
Consigned to nine months of oblivion in death, Malcolm’s name just then achieved sudden and miraculous rebirth. Publisher Nelson Doubleday had pulled the finished autobiography from the presses within days of the grisly February assassination, announcing that he must forgo publication to spare company employees from terror and retribution from the inscrutable Black Muslim factions. A dozen major publishing firms subsequently spurned the orphaned manuscript, just as major organs of American culture buried Malcolm himself with a barbed shortage of funeral charity. The Washington Post bid riddance to “the spokesman of bitter racism.” Newsweek derided him for “blazing racist attacks on the ‘white devils’ and his calls for an armed American Mau Mau.” Columnist Walter Winchell labeled him “a petty punk,” and the liberal Nation magazine faintly eulogized the “courageous leader of one segment of the Negro lunatic fringe.” Such disrepute drove Malcolm’s posthumous project at last resort to the feisty Grove Press, known for defying obscenity restrictions to publish works by Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade. Having survived a “banned in Boston” censorship drive against the 1964 edition of the D. H. Lawrence novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Grove executives prepared The Autobiography of Malcolm X for the autumn of 1965 with special security precautions and private trepidation, standing ready to defend First Amendment rights. Editors at The Saturday Evening Post introduced their preview excerpt with a memorably backhanded promotion for the late author: “We shall be lucky if Malcolm X is not succeeded by even weirder and more virulent extremists.”
Then came the reviews. The New York Times, which had appraised Malcolm’s “pitifully wasted life” in February—dusting away a “twisted man” marked by “ruthless and fanatical belief in violence”—hailed the autobiography on November 5 as “a brilliant, painful, important book.” Eliot Fremont-Smith declared in the bellwether notice that “with his death American Negroes lost their most able, articulate and compelling spokesman,” and reviewers elsewhere struck a similar tone of whiplash wonder. “The important word here is conversion,” wrote I. F. Stone for the November 11 New York Review of Books. Malcolm’s unsparing tale of his own serial conversions—“I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life,” began one of them—bowled over skeptics into a contagion of sustained sales that approached three million copies by the thirty-third printing of the Ballantine paperback in 1992, with translations into more than a dozen foreign languages. Time magazine scorned Malcolm at death as “an unashamed demagogue” whose “gospel was hatred,” but came to list his Autobiography in 1999 among the ten best nonfiction books of the twentieth century.
Like the Moynihan report, which omitted policy recommendations to concentrate on its thesis of family pathology, the Autobiography disregarded goals and ideas for reform. “It tells what happens to an intelligent Negro who discovers that he has, within American society, no future,” observed the Times review. “And it tells in the most powerful and precise terms what this really means—the systematized destruction of Negro self-esteem as an almost automatic function of white society.” Malcolm scorched the promise of American democracy. “I am not interested in becoming American,” he said, “because America is not interested in me.” Above any political ideology, he clung to the belief that only one force could dissolve racial hatred at the root—purified, nonsectarian Islam—but the Autobiography minimized this notion because ghostwriter Alex Haley and the Grove Press editors knew it would leave Americans cold.
The book’s spirited struggle with doom seized an audience of classic breadth. Secularist reviewers, wearied by the pious mainstream of the civil rights movement, applauded the unflinching realism. “Here one may read, in the agony of this brilliant Negro’s self-creation,” wrote I. F. Stone, “the agony of an entire people in their search for identity.” Yet theologian James Cone came to adopt Malcolm’s honesty as a depth indicator of Christian faith. “As much as I am persuaded by the truth of the gospel of Jesus,” resolved Cone, soon to be the first black professor at Union Seminary in New York, “I am equally persuaded that living and preaching Jesus’ gospel in America require the exacting test of Malcolm’s nationalist critique.” Generations of young readers reacted more to the book’s raw journey from pimp to martyr, embracing in Malcolm a passage of daring authenticity.
A Newsweek poll in the 1990s found that 82 percent of black Americans considered Malcolm X a quintessential “strong black male,” lifting him to approval numbers ten times his peak in life, and legions of young whites made him a crossover icon. The Autobiography charmed them with humble directness: “I became a bus boy at the Parker House in Boston.” White readers and “integration-hungry Negroes” braved merciless, edifying indictments safely on the page. “The white man is in no moral position to accuse anyone else of hate!” Malcolm wrote. “Yes, I will pull off that liberal’s halo that he spends such efforts cultivating,” he added later. “I know nothing of the South. I am the creation of the northern white man and of his hypocritical attitude toward the Negro.” An underlying pleasure in urgent communication, which had driven Malcolm to lecture often at white colleges, softened the raging prose. The book, while contemptuous of nonviolent strategy, presented violence not as an instrument of progress or condition of manhood but as a melancholy fact of life, subordinate to the power of words. “I have never felt that I would live to become an old man,” wrote Malcolm. “Even before I was a Muslim—when I was a hustler in the ghetto jungle, then a criminal in prison—it always stayed on my mind that I would die a violent death.”
No one could have foreseen that the year of the Voting Rights Act would conclude in lasting effusions over “Negro matriarchy” and Malcolm X. Both aimed to penetrate the broken heart of race without suggesting salves or remedies. Both discarded in passing the nonviolent methods of the civil rights movement. One mingled the wobbliest and sharpest tools of social science to redefine the issue from a presumption that Americans “have gone beyond equal opportunity.” The other insisted flatly from the grave that race scarcely had budged, and that the benevolent white liberal was a fraud. “I don’t care how nice one is to you,” wrote Malcolm X, “…almost never does he see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind.”
SPLIT IMAGES hovered over a changing landscape. Even sports remained white at Southern colleges until a lone basketball player made the Maryland roster in November. The first two Negro high school students were signing scholarships for Southeastern Conference football at Kentucky, though neither would ever play a game. (One quit after the other died of a broken back suffered in practice, which obliged the university to resolve suspicions of violent discrimination by teammates.) Shortsighted experts debated which Negroes and colleges might dare to step forward, while professional teams rushed ahead into newly integrated markets. By December, hastening to Atlanta behind the Milwaukee Braves, a new football franchise presold its 1966 tickets before receiving any players or even choosing its Falcons nickname. Comedian Danny Thomas helped organize a team called the Miami Dolphins.
Two drama series, The F.B.I. and I Spy, premiered in the fall television season to long-running popularity. One, under J. Edgar Hoover’s detailed supervision, banned a list of unmanly sponsors such as deodorants and cleaning products, and featured agents who were never unbuttoned, surreptitious, ethnic, wrong, or lethal on the screen, nearly always winging suspects with a clean first shot. The other introduced young Bill Cosby as the first actor of color ever to star alongside whites, playing a Rhodes Scholar CIA officer disguised as the tennis trainer for Robert Culp while both chased down enemy spies. The Los Angeles Times praised Cosby’s character as a “non-threatening Negro,” and only a few Southern cities refused the network feed.
Print observers noticed a fundamental shift in attitude toward urban areas. “No other nation hates its own cities,” wrote columnist TRB for The New Republic. “Only in the USA are suburbs afraid of their parents.” The editors of Life magazine prepared for December a double issue called “The U.S. City.” Half the spreads displayed dazzling lights, sophisticated people, and futuristic designs with matching headlines—“The Proud Shapes,” “Trains That Need No Wheels,” “Satellites, Megastructures, Platforms,” “Homework Done by Computer.” The other half showcased grim tenements and hungry children—“A Bitter and Insistent Plague,” “Racial Trap,” “Torn Family.” Scholar Herbert Gans observed more than a decade later that the Life issue marked an abrupt end to media celebrations of urban vitality, which traditionally overlooked or romanticized desperado street wars among the poor. Connotations of the word “city,” whose Greek root supplied the ancient concept and name for politics itself, sagged under impressions suffused with race.
At the White House, Joe Califano sent the TRB column to Harry McPherson with a note of worry on November 15. A day before, during his New York visit, King preached two Sunday services for Adam Clayton Powell on the 157th anniversary of Abyssinian Baptist Church. Stanley Levison warned that he would suffer more backlash among contributors for associating with Powell than for his plan to write Ho Chi Minh. Indeed, mere press notice of the guest sermon provoked James Phelan, a prominent banker who had stuck with SCLC through the Vietnam controversy, to send an irate letter canceling his pledge. Powell, who had tormented King with private blackmail and miscellaneous devilment, was a stylish performer of hybrid personalities—committee chairman in Congress, scion of a historic pulpit family, Harlem dandy with skin light enough to pass—who played nimbly in white and Negro styles all the standout roles from potentate and silver-tongued crusader to rascal. His mercurial ways irritated many who agreed with him on specific issues, and enraged those who demanded consistency, but his zest for provoking elite white people delighted multitudes of constituents in Harlem.
King tried to escape his long-standing commitment, then gave in to fear that Powell “would use it against me” if he did. Overriding Levison’s protest that middle-class supporters would not understand, King responded also to pleas from Wyatt Walker. He sensed no chance to undo the humiliation of Walker’s public dismissal as assistant pastor, but he did hope to dispel malicious rumors from Powell that he, King, despised Walker, never wanted to see him work again, and had insisted that Walker refer to him as America’s number one Negro. If Powell declined to appear as host, as appeared likely, King resolved to bring the banished Walker back to Abyssinian on his own guest authority for a farewell “gesture of reconciliation.”
Powell swooped into the robing room at the last minute, obliging Walker to wait outside while King pleaded his case alone. Expectant shouts rose from five thousand worshippers before the two Baptist legends appeared together after all on the broad marble platform. Powell, introducing “the greatest living American, black or white,” exhorted King with winks and orotund double meaning to expand his work “into the vacuums of leadership” nationwide. He suggested Newark, New Jersey. They hugged and King preached, which earned a front-page headline in the New York Times: “Powell, Denying Rift, Welcomes King to Harlem.”
Powell wrote King a note to express satisfaction “that we could present a united front.” King did not disclose what transpired to thwart the appearance by Walker, but his signature forbearance slipped with a hint of frustration heavier than all the compressed burdens of the movement. “Adam,” he told Walker numbly, “is going to hell.”
IN A syndicated column titled “Power’s Long Arm,” correspondent Joe Alsop praised spectacular deployment to forge history from the staples of iron and blood. Recalling vivid images of Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay “as it was in the French time…lying blue and empty of all shipping except a few fishing shacks,” he described by contrast “the staggering reality” of military engineers “making a sandspit into a port capable of handling 10,000 tons a week”: mammoth cranes towed by sea from Okinawa, “bulldozers literally big enough to move mountains…landing craft of every sort…at every turn there was something to make one’s eyes pop out.” Alsop flew with General William Westmoreland to An Khe, “a wide green vale among the hills” of central Vietnam. “The great sight here,” he wrote, “was the actual delivery halfway round the world of an entire U.S. division in complete fighting trim.” Lieutenant Colonel Harold “Hal” Moore, a battalion commander of the new 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), explored by jeep along the winding Highway 1 that war historian Bernard Fall memorialized in his book Street Without Joy, and located from Fall’s book a stone obelisk commemorating French and Vietnamese combatants fallen more than a decade earlier in a remote field still littered with shell casings and fragments of bone. Alsop told American readers that “the key dominant problem”—“grossly insufficient resources”—“no longer exists as it did in the French time.” More than 200,000 U.S. soldiers would arrive by Christmas. “The importance of this change that is now going on can hardly be exaggerated,” he concluded. “It does not mean, alas, that the war is being won…but it does mean that at last there is light at the end of the tunnel, and that is always something.”
On November 14, the Sunday when King preached for Adam Clayton Powell in Harlem, Colonel Moore landed at a forest clearing big enough for eight helicopters per drop in the dense Ia (River) Drang Valley, where the Ho Chi Minh Trail turned east from Cambodia through mountainous South Vietnam. His brigade of the 1st AirCav had been awarded a special, honorary designation as the 7th Cavalry, inheriting the spirited “Garry Owen” quick-step that Royal Irish Lancers had brought from Limerick pubs to become the namesake march for the most storied Army unit in the Old West, once commanded by George Armstrong Custer. While Moore claimed a crude field command among brick-hard termite mounds taller than soldiers, 7th Cavalry squads in Operation Silver Bayonet jumped from giant Huey gunships instead of horses, with orders to “search for and destroy the enemy.” A popping crescendo greeted skirmishers headed to form a tree-line perimeter, and an experienced captain recognized more regular North Vietnamese Army troops than Vietcong guerrillas. “Every man in the lead squad was shot,” recorded Sergeant Steve Hansen of Alpha Company’s 3rd Platoon. “From the time we got the order to move to the time where men were dying was only five minutes. The enemy were very close to us and overran some of our dead.”
Lieutenant Henry Herrick, son of a UCLA astronomy professor, charged after the Vietnamese up a hill into scrub brush until his second platoon of Bravo Company disappeared even to radio contact beyond surges of sniper bullets, colliding forays, and blind crossfires. Colonel Moore identified three opposing regiments of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), which comprised two thousand troops, and relied heavily on one glaring imbalance to offset the superior numbers commanded by Lieutenant General Nguyen Huu An: “I had major fire support and he didn’t.” An American artillery base five miles away sent four thousand high-explosive howitzer rounds into the surrounding hillsides the first day. Skyraiders swooped close with napalm and five-hundred-pound bombs. Bullet-riddled Hueys mangled the forest with suppressing fire as they discharged reinforcements. Thirty hours later, a lull in the raging attacks allowed a search party of Bravo Company to find Herrick’s lost platoon entirely prostrate. “Even the men who could stand up were so traumatized by what happened to them they preferred to lay down,” reported a rescuer. One refused to budge until someone moved a transfixing scarlet object a few feet away that proved to be one of many recovered battlefield diaries, with a final entry later translated from Vietnamese: “Oh my dear, when the troops come home after the victory and you do not see me, please look at the proud colors. You will see me there and you will feel warm under the shadow of the bamboo tree.” Near the diarist, Lieutenant Dennis Deal studied a North Vietnamese soldier with a severed trunk who had booby-trapped a grenade to his rifle stock while bleeding to death. “If we’re up against this,” muttered Deal, “it’s gonna be a long-ass year.”
Two American relief battalions entered the ghastly buzz of landing zone X-Ray on the third morning, November 16, helping first to stack the closest Vietnamese bodies six feet high between persistent assaults. Colonel Moore responded to numbers pressure by lopping off two hundred from his subordinates’ estimate of 834 Vietnamese dead from infantry fire, then adding an arbitrarily precise guess of 1,215 killed beyond sight by aerial support, to report a total enemy body count of 1,849. The U.S. casualty list so far was smaller and more reliable—seventy-nine killed, including Lieutenant Herrick, with 121 wounded—concentrated in the units originally enveloped. Charlie Company lost all five officers and more than half its 106 men, many of whom still awaited evacuation in the care of fresh replacements for two slain medics. Army Specialist 4 Hank Thomas of St. Augustine, Florida, lifted each of the lined-up ponchos to collect information for his first twenty-five death tags. He found only two corpses with closed eyes, the others gaping in arrested stares. Mutilations from the high-powered weapons overwhelmed his training to the point that at first he welcomed cries of “Medic!” so he could crawl away with bandages and morphine for the living wounded. Thomas had disclosed to no fellow soldier that he led the first Freedom Riders into Mississippi jails in 1961, when he was a cellmate and still nonviolent mentor for Stokely Carmichael, in part because he could not justify the conscription-driven change to himself. Night volleys rattled him awake from a depleted stupor to a ground’s-eye view along his row of motionless heels.
Americans vacated X-Ray Wednesday morning, November 17, to let B-52s from Guam drop two hundred tons of ordnance on the mountain range thought to conceal the withdrawn Vietnamese. Moore’s sister outfit of 7th Cavalry, the 2nd Battalion, marched six miles toward a larger clearing called Albany, where Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade gathered his commanders to plan the defense of scheduled helicopter lifts just before three battalions of North Vietnamese struck the leaderless companies stretched for five hundred yards along the trail behind, swarming through defenders who fired in all directions from pockets of visibility no bigger than kitchens. Those who died seemed to be shot most often in the midsection. “I don’t know why, but when a man is hit in the belly, he screams an unearthly scream,” recorded Army Specialist 4 Jack Smith, son of ABC News anchor Howard K. Smith. “They didn’t ever stop for breath. They kept on until they were hoarse, then they would bleed through their mouths and pass out. They would wake up and start screaming again. Then they would die.” An hour later, desperate lieutenants averted greater disaster by calling in napalm on their own positions judged decimated already. Smith’s company suffered 93 percent casualties. He and other wounded men survived an endless sixteen hours by playing dead among night stalkers who detected and shot Americans by listening for their telltale groans. Volunteer retrievers, heaving survivors toward the rear lines, paused in clouds of smoke as Captain George Forrest* urged them forward with cries for the safe entry of friendlies, all radios being disabled. He stood to shine a homing flashlight on his own dark face—and lived—but one stray soldier in the chaos mistakenly emptied a full clip into the first movements by returning compatriots. Thursday morning, as air strikes hit the Vietnamese reserves massed nearby, the carnage included some hundred PAVN snipers hanging from the ropes that had secured them in the treetops.
At headquarters, the 7th Cavalry brigade commander neglected to mention unsatisfactory and incoherent reports of a second major attack in his personal briefing for General Westmoreland, but journalists reached the Albany landing zone in time to file vivid stories about the combined Ia Drang battles as the first large-scale U.S. engagement in Vietnam, a costly victory by the numbers. The front page of the November 19 New York Times featured three AP photographs of captioned war drama: “U.S. Casualties Strewn over Vietnamese Valley…Wounded American crawls toward medic…Dead and injured Americans are illuminated by flares from U.S. planes that came to aid.”
The adrenaline of war stirred martial fervor in both countries, whose leaders praised military performance while masking internal strategic debates. Vietnamese generals credited American soldiers with determination far beyond the effete “paper tigers” scorned in Communist propaganda, yet welcomed empirical proof that peasant soldiers would stand up to lethal punishment from advanced weapons and “helicopter cavalry” tactics. Ho Chi Minh, while favoring remorseless war to drive Americans from Vietnam, conceded doubt about recent orders to initiate sustained large-scale engagements in a “heaven-storming” final push. Commanding general Nguyen Chi Thanh and Communist Party first secretary Le Duan, having dared to belittle as a “scared rabbit” even General Vo Nguyen Giap, the legendary architect of Dien Bien Phu, lost momentum to Giap’s renewed argument that the huge U.S. buildup recommended more years of patience with hit-and-run guerrilla warfare.
On the American side, professionals frankly respected the disciplined motivation of Communist soldiers. CBS News, in a special report that characterized the Ia Drang casualties as “light,” aired the straightforward longing of Special Forces Major Charles Beckwith to have two hundred such adversaries under his command: “They’re the best I’ve ever seen.” General Westmoreland focused on attrition ratios rather than long-term commitment to a standoff in valor. With Vietnamese battle deaths reckoned at least ten times the 305 Americans killed in the five-day campaign, he calculated that intensified combat would impose unsustainable losses on the Communist side. Sensing a military advantage to be pressed, he absorbed the painful but instructive ambush as no more threatening to long-term success than Custer’s Last Stand of the 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn in 1876, which scarcely had destined Sitting Bull to govern the Dakotas. Westmoreland cautioned against “headlines about victory.” He warned in a radio interview of danger that Americans “will be overwhelmed by a certain feeling of optimism and may lose sight of what I consider a true appraisal of the situation.”
ON NOVEMBER 16, amid early battle reports from Vietnam, a political crossfire sorely tested the hard-won promise in Washington to eradicate the effects of white supremacy. “I welcome all of you to two days of intense labor for your country,” President Johnson told 250 delegates gathered to prepare his spring conference on civil rights. “The tide of change is running with the Negro American on this mid-November evening. Neither the ignorant violence of the Ku Klux Klan nor the despairing violence of Watts can reverse it. For this tide is moved by decency and by love and by justice.” To thunderous applause, Johnson saluted the 200,000 Negroes registered in ten weeks since passage of the Voting Rights Act, and he announced that Attorney General Katzenbach would introduce new civil rights legislation to attack discrimination in the justice system. “We intend to make the jury box, in both state and federal courts, the sacred domain of justice under law,” he declared. To less enthusiasm, Johnson said he would order the Commission on Civil Rights to give “careful attention to the problems of race and education in all parts of this country.”
The President shook hands through the East Room with encouraging words for the assembled scholars, civil servants, activists, and leaders he called “the captains of peaceful armies.” Aaron Henry, board chair of the Mississippi NAACP, was one of many sober personalities turned bubbly. “We’re eating barbecue at the White House!” he told friends, but working constraints clamped down on the gilded deliberations to follow. White House aides blocked votes on resolutions deemed critical of the administration. In the education workshop, Al Raby argued from his Chicago experience that class sizes in poor Northern schools must be cut in half, that government must eliminate rather than study de facto segregation, and that an essential first step was to reverse October’s preemptive assurance of federal funds to Superintendent Willis. Such notions were tabled as premature. Martin Luther King, groping for a productive balance, spent two days in the jobs workshop without making quotable remarks for or against the pace of achievement. Clarence Mitchell of the NAACP urgently pressed a resolution from the justice panel that President Johnson should “speed up the lagging enforcement” of both landmark civil rights acts. “People in the South are in danger of being exterminated,” he told a plenary session. “It is a matter of life and death.”
Conference co-chair A. Philip Randolph ruled his friend’s motion out of order, but White House aides worried that Bayard Rustin and Randolph himself were circulating for spring consideration a supplemental “Freedom Budget” that sought a national investment of $100 billion over ten years in schools, housing, and jobs. The proposals exposed stark gaps between racial reality and the ringing commitment to equal opportunity proclaimed by President Johnson in the War on Poverty as well as his Howard University speech. The sheer scale of accepted tasks made the administration seem overmatched, which threatened its posture of sovereign control. Johnson abhorred intimations of frailty or doubt as the first symptom of failure in national politics. By the same predilection, J. Edgar Hoover’s ingrained rejection of the slightest alleged error had doomed White House entreaties for FBI observers at the exploratory, off-the-record workshops. Assistant Director DeLoach refused to supply agents to hear any anticipated “critical or unjustifiable statements concerning the FBI,” and suggested instead that if conference participants “didn’t know what they were talking about, or falsely accuse the FBI, they should shut up.”
White House aides vigorously promoted three alternative workshops on community, welfare, and the family. The panels opened topics not yet digested into budget-busting agendas or daunting politics, with a social science approach that was congenial to the majority of delegates with backgrounds in academics or government. Civil rights veterans resisted these attractions as a diversion or worse that devalued the cumulative experience and purpose of the movement. Of the few delegates who spoke publicly against the shift of focus, Andrew Young defended the Negro family as perhaps unorthodox—often with extra mothers, grandmothers, cousins, “and no father”—yet strong enough to have sustained both the civil rights movement and a vibrant institutional church. “We are not being deprived of family life,” he told reporters. “We are being deprived of justice, education, and jobs.”
A joke relieved undercurrents of tension among experts trying hard to be polite. “I have been reliably informed,” announced a conference moderator, “that no such person as Daniel Patrick Moynihan exists.” Peals of laughter confirmed the target of obsessive gossip suffused with race, and Moynihan broke silence the second day to lodge “a point of personal privilege” against one comment that he had undertaken his study of the Negro family in order to explain Watts. Granting that the report had been completed weeks before the riots, Dr. Benjamin Payton of the New York Protestant Council disputed Moynihan’s deeper application of cause and effect, and quoted the study’s thesis that family deterioration rather than the legacy of discrimination “is the fundamental source of weakness in the Negro community.” Heated exchanges receded again into whispered caucuses. In a compounded irony, news outlets made the bow-tied new Wesleyan University professor himself a symbol of civil rights. The Washington Star declared Moynihan “The ‘Non-Person’ at the Rights Parley,” and a headline—“Moynihan Conspicuously Ignored”—fashioned for him a white celebrity version of the invisible cage that novelist Ralph Ellison had portrayed at the heart of the black condition.
President Johnson seethed. The deadlocked racial summit annoyed him, as did the publicity about Moynihan, but he resented most the pinch from unruly civil rights leaders he found lacking in political trust for the long haul of a difficult cause. “They come right in and by God take their perch on the White House,” Johnson fumed to McGeorge Bundy, “and while they still got their hors d’oeuvres going, and whisky in one hand and a wienie sausage in the other, they’re just raisin’ unshirted hell and say it’s got to be a hundred billion.” The White House staff spread rumors during the conference that an irate President might abort the event in a fury over leaflets advertising that four delegates, including Martin Luther King, were listed as sponsors of a new march against the Vietnam War. Such warning inhibited use of the White House platform to criticize military priorities, chilling optimism along with dissent, and Johnson’s mood darkened with the ensuing news. On Wednesday, November 24, as he released a message of thanks to the armed forces (“A man does not inherit freedom as he inherits the land”), the Pentagon publicly confirmed 240 Americans killed and 470 wounded in the Ia Drang Valley. The understated toll tripled the previous weekly high, and hiked the number of deaths since 1961 to 1,300. Press Secretary Bill Moyers delivered what reporters called “a spontaneous and quite personal description” of Johnson’s anguish over the list, which led Thanksgiving Day news along with the miracle story of a lone soldier found wandering with multiple wounds seven days after the battle at Albany clearing. The hometown paper in Coward, South Carolina, retracted its obituary for Toby Braveboy, descended from Creek Indians, who lost most of a hand to gangrene but survived.
ON SATURDAY, November 27, the rally of thirty thousand at the Washington Monument exposed the hazardous psychology of war protest. From Vietnam, the president of the Communist National Liberation Front (NLF) sent an advance telegram wishing the demonstration “brilliant success,” which further guaranteed a lack of mainstream American politicians. Martin Luther King commended the draft of Coretta’s address, but canceled plans to speak himself. (She exhorted the crowd never to forget that democratic commitment made America a historic great nation: “This is true in spite of the bombings in Alabama as well as in Vietnam.”) Organizers from the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy sought to project a moderate image with a dress code and a suggested list of seventeen cautious slogans, such as “Supervised Cease-Fire” and “Stop the Bombing.” Although a visible few defied prescription by marching under an NLF banner instead of the American flag, the New York Times perceived “more babies than beatniks, more family groups than folksong quartets,” and gently mocked a tameness in the mannerly crowd. Norman Thomas, nearly blind in old age, announced from the platform that he wanted to cleanse rather than burn the American flag. “I’d rather see America save her soul than her face,” he declared. Baby doctor Benjamin Spock said the war discredited the United States more than it hurt Communism.
Rally organizers vetoed speakers considered too strident or ideological, including Nobel Prize chemist Linus Pauling and Bob Moses of SNCC, which caused infighting among the nascent antiwar groups over alleged “McCarthyite” loyalty tests. Moses, still in transition from his February breakdown, and still answering only to his middle name Parris, spoke privately with movement supporters who would listen. He told one interviewer that some white Southerners justified killing “gooks” in Vietnam for the same reason they condoned the murder of civil rights workers—as a threat to their civilization—yet most Americans justified the war for the very purpose that united them against the segregated South, to advance patriotic freedom. He said President Johnson blamed violence on isolated extremists, Klansmen and Communists, while himself defining the Vietnamese as inhuman, robotic infiltrators in their own land, to be met with massive violence. “What do you do when the whole country has a sickness?” Moses asked, wondering whether anything could “awaken this nation as the South is beginning to be awakened.” (The Mississippi Supreme Court, in a stab at fairness, had just overturned his 1961 criminal conviction from the first nonviolent march in McComb, when Moses submitted to mob beatings and then an Orwellian trial on charges of “violent, loud, offensive” conduct.) He sifted cruel paradox with the intensity that had driven him from New York to become SNCC’s solitary pioneer in Mississippi. “I want this country to be less sure of itself so that it can stop making war on other countries to export our system,” he said. “Another way of saying the same thing is that I want this country to be more sure of itself, so it can publicly admit it has real problems and must work to solve them.”
At the Washington Monument, one sanctioned speaker wrestled his thoughts in hypnotic self-examination like Moses, wondering how a country of consistently progressive government since 1932 could flood Asia with 200,000 young soldiers to “kill and die in the most dubious of wars,” while straining decades to deploy the first hundred voter registrars in the South. “What do you make of it?” shouted SDS president Carl Oglesby, a thirty-one-year-old father of three, normally a technical writer for Bendix appliances in Michigan. Oglesby surveyed the background commitment in Vietnam from Truman and Kennedy to the current leaders “who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead,” naming Bundy, Goldberg, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, and President Johnson. “They are not moral monsters,” he declared. “They are all honorable men. They are all liberals. And so, I’m sure, are many of us who are here today in protest.”
Oglesby groped out loud for a vocabulary of fresh confession to indict liberalism at its zenith. He traced the fault perhaps to material corruption in a small American populace that consumed half the world’s goods: “How intolerable, to be born moral, but addicted to a stolen and maybe surplus luxury.” He suggested among alternatives a global case of the stunted perception that comforted the mind of segregation. “We have become a nation of young, bright-eyed, hard-hearted, slim-waisted, bullet-headed make-out artists,” Oglesby charged. “A nation—may I say it?—of beardless liberals.” Calling himself a radical instead, he acknowledged that bitter apprehensions on the war sounded “mighty anti-American,” then cried out: “Don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.” Oglesby soon trailed off and stepped politely from the microphone into sustained applause from a dissipating crowd. He looked surprised, then perplexed, when rally coordinator Sanford Gottlieb of SANE lifted his arm like a prizefighter’s in spontaneous tribute. Although news accounts overlooked Oglesby as an unknown speaker, activists marked a birth moment for the “New Left” identity associated with young whites moving from civil rights influence to an independent stance on Vietnam.
Two days after the rally, facing a stateside VIP delegation inside a heavily restricted tent at the An Khe redoubt, Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore bluntly recounted the battle of landing zone X-Ray against an enemy he termed disciplined to the verge of suicidal fanaticism. “Sir, that completes my presentation,” he said, and met dead silence instead of examination. Wordlessly, flanked by the Pacific Fleet commander and two of the four Joint Chiefs, Defense Secretary McNamara nodded, shook hands, and exited with confirmation of grit in the backward Vietnamese. General Westmoreland gave him a classified request for another 200,000 troops—to exploit the attrition ratio—beyond the 200,000 already committed but not yet deployed or provided for in the national budget, and McNamara took home what he called a “shattering blow.” No character dividend or surprise good fortune yet greeted the can-do American plunge. With the projected numbers now being harvested in flesh, McNamara told President Johnson that exposure to field commanders from the recent combat, “particularly the First Air Cavalry Division,” resulted in “my personal judgment that the situation is much more critical than at least I had realized.”
In Washington, where partisans of the distant war retained confidence to address collateral issues, Joe Alsop’s column on the day of the An Khe briefing detected an “acute and rising anxiety about the next stage of the civil rights movement.” He reported that White House officials, shocked by the cold reception for the Moynihan report, “found themselves hardly talking the same language as the movement’s leaders.” Alsop endorsed their view that Negro delegates had “no practicable program,” being mired in protest and unrealistic demands for federal initiative. “Injustice is the theme,” he observed, “not what can be done about it.” Similarly, columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak charged that “shrill cries of Negro militants” had dominated the workshops, “sweeping the problems posed by the Moynihan report under the table,” wasting months that “went into researching the Negro male’s loss of manhood, the dominance of the Negro female, the breakdown of family life and the acceleration of illegitimate births.” Their column, “Civil Rights Disaster,” declared the two-day event the most dismal failure in the “glittering two-year history” of the Johnson administration. “White intellectuals who had come to Washington to discuss Negro social disorganization were stunned by the demagoguery,” they concluded. “The question is why? Some disillusioned liberals hint darkly that radical white elements are at work, prodding Negroes to seek the unattainable.”
LOST TO obscurity beneath the Ia Drang battles and other national news, the first racially contested elections in modern Alabama selected local farmers to supervise programs for the U.S. Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS). Movement hopes had dimmed in Greene County when five aspiring black voters were evicted and many received envelopes missing the official mail-in ballots. Only one farmer agreed to run in Hale County, none in Sumter. “Folks there are understandably jumpy,” reported a SNCC memo on these pioneer campaigns across five rural counties. Since an unexpected federal edict that any six farmers could put a nominee on the local ballot, which sustained the first Negro candidates, SNCC-sponsored workshops had sparked interest in the practical workings of ASCS crop loans and soil erosion payments. Poor farmers learned how the elected county committees also shaped price supports, distributed vital cotton allotments, and controlled indirect subsidies that could double their money-losing price of two and a half cents per pound for okra. In Lowndes County, where nearly two-thirds of the eligible farmers were black, optimism rose until ballots arrived listing seventy “extra” Negroes nominated by whites. Under deadline, lacking telephones, the unpracticed movement voters failed to sift out the last-minute decoys. The Lowndes County ASCS committee remained white, and a New Deal structure designed to foster citizen participation in governance (like the community agencies newly created for the War on Poverty) devolved again into the hands of the largest landowners. Stokely Carmichael decried the results announced on November 16. “We did it fair and square,” he told a mass meeting. “We believed in them, and they cheated us.”
Solemn resentment gave way within hours to a sauciness reflected in the circulating SNCC bulletin for the day: “Mr. Stokely Carmichael (star of stage, screen, and television) feels that there is ‘something fishy.’” Out of natural verve, protective calm, and hard calculation, he advertised a bigger lesson that movement strategy had the ruling minority of Lowndes County “running scared” already, before the first Negro ever voted in a regular election. The next night, Carmichael drove to a twenty-first birthday party for Sammy Younge, one of the many Tuskegee students who had been drawn into demonstrations since the Selma march. Younge resisted further canvassing for the election workshops. Conflicted, he told Carmichael with droll sarcasm that he needed to “kick Snick” and look out for himself. Younge came from a light-skinned Tuskegee family of relative privilege, having attended boarding school in Massachusetts. The mother of another SNCC worker served as a maid in his household. He had lost a kidney to disease during Navy service, then abandoned schoolwork for the lure of civil rights. When he confided that friends put him down for retreating into a nice car and his favorite Pink Catawba wine, Carmichael soothed familiar movement stress by endorsing the personal retreat. “Makes me no never-mind,” he said lightly, adding that he would be glad to share wine with Younge.
With the help of Younge’s friend Jimmy Rogers and other Tuskegee students, the Alabama SNCC staff carried roving schools on basic politics especially into Lowndes County, which supplied the bulk of some thirty farm-based activists for a trek to Atlanta at the beginning of December. They gathered at SNCC headquarters for all-day seminars, deciphering Alabama code books with the aid of charts and graphs prepared by the research staff. “The workshop spent one day on the electoral machinery,” wrote research director Jack Minnis, “and the rest of the time on the county governmental structure.” To nominate candidates for local offices in the 1966 elections, the participants learned strict statutory rules governing the establishment of independent political parties. If even one founding member participated simultaneously in an existing party, for instance, or cast a nominating ballot without verifiable proof of registration, a judge could disqualify the new party and all its nominees from the general election. By Alabama law, a new party also had to gain approval for a visible ballot symbol to aid voters of marginal literacy, meeting specifications of size and distinctiveness. The Lowndes County citizens reacted negatively to several proposed choices, finding a cotton boll sketch too vague, a dove too remote, clasped hands (modeled on SNCC’s own logo) too passive, and called instead for an active, farm-based symbol to compete with the Alabama Democratic Party’s official logo of a white bantam rooster topped with the motto, “White Supremacy for the Right.” Several suggested a cat as the best farm image. “Cats chase chickens,” said John Hulett, and Carmichael asked his volunteer artists to draw cats.
The caravan to Atlanta had passed Montgomery, where federal prosecutors weathered secret drama at the third trial of the Klansmen charged with the bushwhack murder of Viola Liuzzo in Lowndes County. Given the two prior failures in state court, their optimism sagged with the notice that star informant Gary Thomas Rowe refused to testify anymore, complaining of stress and isolation as the sequestered target of angry Klan associates. When FBI director Hoover discouraged measures to compel his cooperation, Attorney General Katzenbach himself enticed Rowe with a secret promise of relocation under a new identity. “I am prepared to help you obtain suitable employment either with the federal government or elsewhere,” he wrote. “This is not contingent on the performance of any further services or assistance that you may give to the United States at any time in the future.” Reluctantly, Katzenbach also sent Assistant Attorney General John Doar to argue the case before U.S. District Judge Frank Johnson—risking a higher government profile for a chance to end the string of abject humiliations in racial hate cases. Doar prepared hastily in the face of restrictions that had chafed Alabama attorney general Richmond Flowers before the state trials. FBI handlers, who never left Rowe’s side, severely curtailed acquaintance with the reluctant witness. They instructed Rowe not to answer questions about his background, especially his five previous years as a Klan informant, and forbade inquiry beyond “what happened in the car.” Unfamiliarity made for awkward examination, but did limit the scope of a wobbly performance on the stand. Rowe testified that Klan orders for the night of Liuzzo’s murder were to preserve white supremacy “by any means necessary, whether bullets or ballots,” in an unlikely paraphrase of the late Malcolm X.
FBI director Hoover startled Katzenbach on December 3 with word that the all-white, all-male jury returned verdicts of guilty, and that Judge Johnson promptly sentenced all three Klansmen to the ten-year maximum under a federal civil rights statute. (By coincidence, a second Alabama jury returned a breakthrough verdict almost simultaneously in a trial of less notoriety.*) Katzenbach rejoiced. Congratulating Hoover, he said the prosecution strategy had emphasized the FBI’s reputation this time to support the evidence, which he believed swayed the jury. In Montgomery, on his forty-fourth birthday, Doar lapsed briefly from stoic reserve to tell reporters that the case made him proud to be an American. Katzenbach called Texas with news vindicating the arrests announced from the White House on the day after the Selma march. “Really, it was quite a trial,” he told Johnson. The President, still recuperating from gall bladder surgery, issued a statement that “the whole nation can take heart” from the outcome.
Barely nodding at the trial news, the Atlanta workshops sank into the mechanics of Alabama government for long hours through the weekend into Monday, December 6. Presenters shared legal research to make plain the duties of elected officers from tax assessor to probate judge. “During the discussions,” recorded an internal memo, “it became clear to everyone that the mysterious deaths of Negroes in the South could never have gone uninvestigated and unpunished without the connivance or the collusion of the county coroner.” Research director Jack Minnis taught that field organizers and citizens alike could glean a working knowledge of “who’s pulling the levers of power.” Familiarity reduced exalted positions to specific tasks. “We went into the concept of the posse comitatus of the sheriff, quoting statutes all the way,” he wrote a friend, “and showing how, theoretically at least, most anything could be done with the other offices if the sheriff chose to enforce what they did.” New awareness seeded the first imaginings of actual candidates among the participants themselves, who took home a skeletal plan for legal steps required to field an independent slate drawn from their own first-time voters. “News about the new freedom organization travels fast in Lowndes County,” observed SNCC’s South-wide circular.
Antagonism spread also, so widely that the National Council of Churches already had asked Rev. Francis Walter to help investigate reprisals. On December 9, having documented twenty of the eighty reported cases in neighboring Wilcox County, the assigned replacement for Jonathan Daniels followed a wilderness road off the map from Possum Bend to a bridge-less dead end at a pig trail near skiffs tied in the Alabama River. He hiked toward bright colors on a distant clothesline, but Ora McDaniels fled her cabin upon sight of an approaching white man. Embarrassed, Walter spent the remainder of Thursday backtracking the river-looped county to find a Negro acquaintance who could mediate an affidavit about her being fired as a maid, and struck with a broom, for registering to vote. The bright colors turned out to be homemade patchwork quilts in distinctive patterns, sold locally at three for $5. Their striking quality inspired Walter to initiate a sustenance project that commanded auction space at New York galleries within six months. William Paley of CBS and Diana Vreeland of Vogue bought variations of the 1966 Chestnut Bud quilt. Artist Lee Krasner, widow of Jackson Pollock, would venture into Wilcox County to pick out Crow’s Foot originals. Bloomingdale’s in 1970 and Life magazine in 1972 offered tributes to the Freedom Quilting Bee, sustained more than two decades ahead by Ora McDaniels and her colleagues—among them Lucy Mingo, Polly Bennett, “Mama Willie” Abrams, Mattie Ross, Estelle Witherspoon, and China Grove Myles. Nearly all the folk artisans, who remained in their cabins, dated a new life from the wonder of a courthouse registration march the previous spring.
On Friday, December 10, as Walter began to collect quilts along with affidavits, two public events flashed lingering travail for Alabama. A state trial acquitted the three men charged with the beating death of Rev. James Reeb after the March 9 “turnaround” attempt to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. The Dallas County courtroom erupted in applause. Richmond Flowers denounced a trial process epitomized by the blatantly prejudiced all-white jury that included a Klansman who had escorted Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell to assault Martin Luther King. “Reeb Verdict Outrages Justice Department / How Hard Did Prosecutors Try?” declared a blunt Washington Post headline. Simultaneously New York Times reporter Gene Roberts surfaced the first hint of volcanic legend from a scouting visit that found young movement workers at the Atlanta SNCC headquarters crushed by “battle fatigue” and spiraling debt—“the worst in its four and a half year history”—yet still “generating more ideas than money.” Courtland Cox described the launch brochure for an Alabama pilot project to “bypass Southern institutions.” Ruth Howard and other SNCC artists traced a cat logo from the mascot of Atlanta’s Clark College Panthers. “The Lowndes County Freedom Organization will function as an all-Negro ‘third party,’” Roberts disclosed in Friday’s New York Times. “It will operate in only one county and use a black panther as its party symbol.”
KING CHASED his schedule through the week between Alabama trials, laboring to refine a prophetic message on the relative strengths of violence and nonviolence. He called Stanley Levison with word that rabbis from the Synagogue Council of America were pressing for Vietnam remarks because the American Legion of Boston had just canceled a citizenship award to Rabbi Roland Gittelson over his sponsorship of the Washington peace march. King felt obliged, saying he had preached in Gittelson’s synagogue only six months earlier, and called for specific quotations from the Hebrew prophets. Levison dictated paragraphs by relay through Dora McDonald, advising her to keep intact King’s favored adaptation of Amos 5:24—“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream”—as an improvement in rhythmic force on the exact biblical translation. King rushed to accept an award at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. “The stirring lesson of this age is that mass nonviolent direct action is not a peculiar device for Negro agitation,” he told the Synagogue Council. “Rather it is an historically validated method for defending freedom and democracy, and for enlarging these values for the benefit of the whole society.”
By refusing to give up a bus seat in 1955, King argued, Rosa Parks sparked nonviolent power that opened prospects a decade later for Negro seats in the Alabama legislature. Protests against a constricted economy unleashed reforms that “ultimately will benefit more whites than Negroes,” he added, just as the crusade against segregated schools “brought to the fore” a larger realization that the antiquated educational system had been designed for nineteenth-century rural America. “When Negroes by direct action sought to participate in the electoral process,” said King, “they awakened the apathetic white who so took his rights for granted that he neglected to use them.” But he warned that an undertow of violence against new enemies threatened the bright promise of nonviolence to overcome old ones. “War enlarges itself inexorably,” he declared, discounting the repeated official assurance that the military conflict would remain limited. Pointing to “ugly repressive sentiment” against Rabbi Gittelson and others, he asked if dissent were not already “being shot down by bombers in Vietnam,” and wondered “whether free speech has not become one of the casualties of the war.” King summoned the bold protest of ancient sources—“Today we particularly need the Hebrew prophets”—whose words had goaded the movement past fear and silence. “They did not believe that conscience is a still small voice,” he said. “They believed that conscience thunders, or it does not speak at all.” He quoted Amos on justice, Micah on beating swords into plowshares, and Isaiah on what King called an “inescapable obligation” to renounce violence of spirit: “Yea, when you make many prayers I will not hear/ Your hands are full of blood/ Wash you, make you clean/ Put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes.”
By the time his repression alert generated a tiny blip on page seventy-three of the morning New York Times—“Dr. King Sees Move Against Pacifists”—King was headed to Alabama by way of Atlanta. Documentary filmmaker Arnold Michaelis, in an interview arranged by Stanley Levison, seized a rare opportunity in the cabin of the airplane to film questions on informal background topics. King called plans for professional sports teams in the desegregated South “another very good step forward,” but confessed that the move of the baseball Braves from Milwaukee to his hometown would complicate a personal allegiance he traced to 1947, when Branch Rickey had integrated the old Brooklyn Dodgers with King’s teenage idol and subsequent friend Jackie Robinson. “And so I have been a Dodger fan,” he said, “but I’m gonna get with the Braves now.”
Leaving Michaelis temporarily, King disappeared to embattled SCLC projects in rural Alabama, where a mob of nearly two hundred had blocked a Greene County march for school integration led by Hosea Williams. At a mass meeting on Monday, December 6, King and Andrew Young recruited 375 people to continue marches seeking the dispatch of federal registrars into Butler County, adjacent to Lowndes. “This was a heart-melting demonstration,” wrote grizzled staff leader Rev. Samuel Wells of Albany, Georgia, who reported that men and women sang in tearful prayer as they “stood toe to toe with the policemen…. On Tuesday we marched again…. I, for one, was knocked over the head.” King by then had hurried toward another rally commitment but was stalled by Alabama state troopers who arrested Young and his passengers alike for speeding, then held them until each paid a fine of $50.
Back at home, King sat on December 9 for a rare filmed interview as his eight-year-old son Marty darted in front of the cameras. Producer Michaelis asked why he had departed from the philosophical acceptance of war expressed on page ninety-five of his first book, Stride Toward Freedom. “There was a time when I felt that war was, or could be, a negative good,” King replied. “I never felt that war could be a positive good, but…I felt that war could block the spread of some negative evil force like a Hitler, for instance.” Subsequent experience in the nonviolent movement had combined with apprehensions about the shrinking world, he explained, to convert him from the Christian pragmatism he once accepted from theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s anguished defense of World War II. “I came to the conclusion that war could no longer serve as a negative good,” said King, “because of the potential destructiveness and the actual destructiveness of modern weapons of warfare.”
When Michaelis pressed doubts that anyone could claim to oppose Communism in Vietnam without violence, King argued from colonial history that a long struggle for independence was blended into the identity of the Vietnamese Communist Party, while complicity in foreign rule there tainted American definitions of freedom. “There can be no gainsaying of the fact that we have taken a stand against a people seeking self-determination,” he said. “If one looks back over the history of this war, there are many things that turn out to be very ugly, and I am absolutely convinced that there is wrong on both sides.” King admitted personal indecision. “I don’t think President Johnson is a warmonger,” he said. “I think he is caught in a very difficult dilemma.” He surprised Michaelis by volunteering that he had received this impression in private talks with President Johnson since criticizing the war, “I would say on two different occasions,” and that he felt a heavy burden to “do something creative to create the atmosphere for negotiations.” King said he approved the dictum* of Mohandas Gandhi that seemingly impossible, saintly missions must be grounded in politics. “I certainly can’t claim to be a saint in any sense of the word,” he told Michaelis. “I try to emulate all the saints of history…and I think it is necessary for anyone who is working in these areas to have a keen sense of political timing.”
The atmosphere of war confronted peacemakers with “a very practical problem that runs the gamut of history,” said King, “and that is face-saving…. If we could get rid of our pride, and this is the word that I think America must hear more and more, that we have got to get rid of our pride. It won’t hurt us morally. It isn’t going to hurt us from a military point of view to pull out of Vietnam.”
Michaelis raised another awkward subject—“this is a very difficult thing”—about whether King could “see any advantage accruing to the civil rights movement by virtue of your death,” and King replied straightforwardly that any impact would depend on the circumstances. He pondered the example of recent suicides by immolation in both Vietnam and the United States. “I must say that I don’t think, personally, that this is the highest expression of creative sacrifice,” he said, and repeated instead the nonviolent standard of active readiness to die for a cause while refusing to kill. “I wouldn’t take my own life, but I would willingly give my life for that which I think is right,” King concluded. “And I am convinced that when one does this honestly, that death can have redemptive value.”