FOR TWO DAYS, SHUTTLESWORTH URGED PEOPLE NOT TO quit, raised a lot of spirits, but King announced a moratorium on the protests. The local folks heard it on national TV. King didn’t say the demonstrations were called off permanently. Moratorium was a compromise with the city and, King added quietly in his national voice, a compromise with the more urgent demands of some increasingly impatient Negroes.
WITH ALL THE TIME spent in jails, hospitals, and the Gaston Motel, Shuttlesworth had three more places as familiar to him as home.
On Friday, while he was again at the Gaston Motel, Shuttlesworth learned the value of compromising with the vast majority of white folks: next to nothing. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing on motel TV: King and his inner group surrounded by police, going off to jail.
After the compromise, after the moratorium compromise King had wanted to give and had given the white merchants, after that, there was still Bull Connor, their henchman, running the police. Shuttlesworth found out for sure what he’d already suspected: it didn’t matter what King and the president’s man said about negotiation and signs of good faith. The locals had the power, for better or for worse.
Why didn’t the federal government help more? But of course that was part of King’s plan—draw in the federal government.
Bull Connor arresting King, Abernathy—it was there in black and white on TV—and two dozen more were arrested and jailed for having “paraded” without a permit. Bull had a place for King in the Birmingham jail.
“I’m putting on my marching shoes,” Shuttlesworth told Andrew Young, and Andy didn’t know what to say and didn’t have any time to say it in because Shuttlesworth was almost out the door of the motel owned and named for black Birmingham millionaire A. G. Gaston.
“Moratorium’s over,” Shuttlesworth said again.
So Andy grabbed him, resorted to physical restraint as best he could, and somebody else phoned up Washington, D.C., fast as he could.
It was words, not Andy Young, that stopped a renewed Shuttlesworth in his tracks: “The attorney general would like to speak with you, Reverend Shuttlesworth.”
And yes, it was Bobby Kennedy. And yes, Kennedy did listen, and yes, Shuttlesworth listened, too. He could understand better now how it was when you talked to Washington. You pressed the telephone against your ear till it hurt. There was an awe to it all. Not one word of that listening could be lost.
RFK explained:Bull Connor wanted there to be protests. He arrested King in order to provoke the Negroes. He wanted the blacks not to trust the whites. Connor wanted there to be riots. Then Bull would have an excuse for violence. Wallace would get in the act. Governor Wallace would send in Al Lingo and the state troopers.
When RFK spoke, it was the federal government talking to you. You sat up straight. You held the ballpoint pen tight in your hand, if you needed to write.
The whites didn’t have any unity. The Birmingham merchants and lawyers were truly trying to make progress. Bull wanted them to seem untrustworthy.
You looked for whatever fiber in your being you had that could tie to the thread of Bobby Kennedy’s voice. And he listened. Your ideas, too, could be conveyed now, over the telephone, woven into the fabric of Washington. You wanted to be in accord with the voice that was a Kennedy voice. Reasonable, strangely accented, but understandable. Firm voice. Here were ideas that—yes!—you could go along with that! Yes, you held that same ideal.
Of course.
Fred Shuttlesworth agreed to help make history as bloodless as possible. Certainly.
Would try his best to cooperate.
Not a long conversation at all, but he felt different now.
THROUGHOUT THE DAY, Shuttlesworth reviewed what he’d learned, asked himself if it really made any difference:The merchants didn’t run the police. You had to think of the city government and the business community separately. Bull Connor embarrassed the rich merchants and white lawyers; they hadn’t invited him to the christening or compromise of whatever it was they had had with Communist-led Negroes. Yes, most southern whites thought the protests were Communist-led. They thought Birmingham-Southern College and Miles College were hotbeds of Communist activity. Naturally, Bull wouldn’t keep the promises the merchants made, wouldn’t acknowledge the compromise the Negro leaders so cautiously embraced. “The man is a hatemonger, Reverend Shuttlesworth, he doesn’t understand the power of love. Don’t let him trick you.” Had Bobby Kennedy said that, or was that Fred’s own voice, wiser, himself teaching himself, not words from the telephone?
It was an important question. Shuttlesworth knew he was dead if he quit listening to his own voice, the one God sent him so he’d know what to do.
IT WAS A. G. GASTON, local owner of the Gaston Motel, the Gaston funeral parlor, and enough other enterprises with a black clientele to make his million the equal of any white man’s million, who stepped forward with bail money. That being done, it would be Shuttlesworth’s obligation to be forthcoming on his front. After A. G. Gaston bailed King out of jail, Shuttlesworth would need to say at their joint press conference (he had his local following; King would address the Negroes of the nation) that he still had hope that justice would come, despite the many betrayals, the broken promises down through the years, despite his good friend King’s having been jailed. (Shuttlesworth walked toward the table, the press conference table.) He ought to plan to say that sort of thing, but he wanted to point out that the arrests had occurred “even after King had stopped the protesting, as he’d said he would do.” (He walked toward the TV cameras, their long, thick cables snaking behind them on the floor.)
But it was hard for the Reverend Shuttlesworth to feel that he was telling his own story anymore. (He wouldn’t say that into the microphone when it was his turn.) He wondered if he were telling King’s story. King was there beside him, already speaking in his strange, calm voice. Almost neutral at times, King’s voice. As though all people could come to his impartial voice and listen as equals. A voice that was not meant to make people mad; one that only wanted to console, inspire, reassure the frightened—black and white.
Shuttlesworth felt as though he himself had lost the sense of “I” as leading off a sentence such as “I am about to speak into this bouquet of microphones.” He could feel the sweat running down his skin inside his clothes. Whose body? Whose voice? It was as though “he,” Fred Shuttlesworth, was learning to recite a life “he” was living.
Maybe he knew this much was true: because the president’s brother, the attorney general of the United States, had called long-distance telephone to talk with him, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, he wanted to respond once again with hope. I want to respond with hope, he would say.
Before he spoke on the radio and the TV (he would be next, soon), he must reach deep in his heart to find a trusting response. (He knew he was scraping the bottom of the mayonnaise jar to bring up some small amount of faith.) But he wanted to believe the national government of his country, truly he did.
But he’d forgotten to tell Bobby Kennedy about the FBI! How they couldn’t be trusted, how sometimes they made bargains with the Bull’s police to allow so many minutes of beating before breaking things up. He’d forgotten!
“If there are demonstrations,” Shuttlesworth said into the microphones, his shoulder almost touching King’s shoulder (Lord, those lights were hot!), “they will be limited. We do believe that honest efforts to negotiate in good faith are under way.”