King found a telephone to call Washington for help to stave off a racial nightmare. Waiting to get through to the Justice Department, he sat in a supporter’s parlor, shirt soaking in sweat, wearily whispering: “When things happen like this tonight, you question sometimes, what are we doing to these people?” Sipping ice water, he said to Abernathy, Young, and Shuttlesworth: “It can’t go on like this. It just can’t go on like this.”⁹¹

As in Birmingham the specter of all-out racial violence finally forced the white establishment to give way. The governor announced he had formed the biracial committee that black leaders had long demanded, but promptly told the intransigent mayor, “There is no committee”; it was make believe.⁹² Despite fears of Klan reprisal, eighty white businessmen quietly voted to comply with the imminent Civil Rights Act. With no actual settlement like they got in Birmingham and only the fig leaf of a fragile détente (similar to the Albany outcome), King left St. Augustine in palpable relief. It was not the victory he had gambled on, but the impasse might be moot with the new civil rights law.

A few days later, July 2, he joined other black leaders (including Rosa Parks) in the White House to witness President Johnson sign the civil rights bill into law, using six dozen pens that he dispensed to his guests. LBJ corralled the civil rights generals into the Cabinet Room and asked them to halt demonstrations until after the election, calling them unnecessary and self-defeating. While Wilkins and Whitney Young (no fans of street protest) readily agreed, King and more-radical leaders were noncommittal. How could the new law be enforced without doses of direct action?

The 1964 Civil Rights Act set a national policy prohibiting legally sanctioned segregation. It outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations and schools, authorizing the attorney general to sue offenders; it banned discrimination in employment by race or gender. The law was not as strong as activists wanted—it soft-pedaled voting rights—but it was better than Kennedy’s original proposal of June 1963. In historian C. Vann Woodward’s words, Jim Crow as a legal entity was dead.⁹³

The test would be its effect on racism and altering race relations, South and North. The major difficulty, as always, was implementation, which depended on a committed attorney general with political will. The law provided only judicial remedies inaccessible to ordinary citizens lacking legal resources. Nevertheless, fear of prosecution compelled desegregation of public accommodations more rapidly than expected, though not much changed with segregated housing and jobs. School integration did not advance until the federal bureaucracy swung into action in the late 1960s, and then only by fits and starts. The long-term trend, especially in northern cities, was for de facto school segregation to worsen.

While most black leaders applauded the law, some were troubled by its shortcomings, particularly its irrelevance to the African-American majority living outside the South. A CORE analysis pointed out that “the ghetto minorities in the urban North are ignored.”⁹⁴ Malcolm X lambasted it as “only a valve, a vent, that was designed to enable us to let off our frustrations”—not “to solve our problems” but to “lessen the explosion.”⁹⁵

9

 

When Ella Baker, SCLC executive director, heard about the February 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins that were spreading like a fever, she called her long list of contacts at southern colleges. “It is time to move,” she told them in her deep, resonant voice. Defiance of racial oppression had been a tradition in her family. When she was a child her grandmother told her tales of slave revolts and of how she had been whipped for refusing to marry the man chosen by her owner. She wed instead a rebellious slave who became a Baptist preacher and was an important role model for his granddaughter. Baker, fifty-six, had been organizing for thirty years, setting up black consumer cooperatives during the Depression, recruiting NAACP members throughout the South, serving as NAACP director of branches, then heading its New York office before helping to found SCLC. She had an extraordinary ability to inspire people of all ages, especially young people, and to give them a deeper perspective on social change. Rising to the challenge of directing SCLC’s Atlanta headquarters, she was never accepted as an equal by King and fellow ministers, despite her organizing genius. She felt that SCLC’s centralized charismatic leadership had undermined the voting rights campaign she created.

Baker realized that the momentous sit-in movement would not endure without a structure to coordinate the local groups. On Easter weekend 1960 she convened a conference of sit-in leaders from over fifty black southern colleges at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she had been class valedictorian. King spoke to the two hundred fervent students, but Baker fought SCLC’s effort to capture the student groups as its youth wing. She believed that the students needed an autonomous organization “with the right to direct their own affairs and even make their own mistakes.”⁹⁶ She hoped they would be bolder than SCLC. The young activists set up a loosely structured Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and adopted a statement of purpose that affirmed its Christian-based nonviolent philosophy. As the sit-in movement slowed, SNCC shifted from a coordinating body to a cadre of ex-students committed to long-term organizing in rural southern communities.

Inspired by Baker, who had grown so critical of SCLC’s preacher hierarchy that she resigned in summer 1960, SNCC embodied an alternative style of participatory “group-centered leadership” that would clash with SCLC. She believed that what movements needed was “the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among other people.”⁹⁷ SNCC activists lived out the idea that real change came through empowerment of people at the grass roots. They understood that to overcome subjugation, especially in the rural South, black people had to rely on themselves, not on media stars who came and went. Because SNCC activists believed that they had to exemplify their values, prefiguring the redemptive society they sought to create—and because they shared a common risk of death—they were reluctant to recognize leaders among themselves. “We are all leaders,” they proclaimed. Their slogan: “Let the people decide.”

In late August 1962, a tired, strong-willed woman with a great smile and shining eyes strode into a meeting at her Baptist church in Ruleville, a Mississippi Delta town not far from where Emmett Till had been bludgeoned to death. “Until then I’d never heard of no mass meeting and I didn’t know that a Negro could register and vote,” Fannie Lou Hamer remembered. SNCC organizers Bob Moses, James Forman, and Jim Bevel led the meeting at the rural church. Bevel preached to the poor sharecroppers (from Matthew’s Gospel) that they must “discern the signs of the times.” God’s time was upon them, and they must act for their freedom.⁹⁸

“When they asked for those to raise their hands who’d go down to the courthouse the next day,” Hamer recalled, “I raised mine. Had it up high as I could get it. I guess if I’d had any sense I’d a-been a little scared, but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do to me was kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”

Forty-four years old, she was the youngest of twenty children of sharecropper parents. She had picked cotton since she was seven, for the previous eighteen years with her husband, Pap, on a nearby plantation. She had always known poverty and injustice. When she was a young girl, a white farmer had poisoned their mules just when her family was getting ahead. For a long time she had wanted to help her kind. “Just listenin’ at ’em, I could just see myself votin’ people outa office that I know was wrong and didn’t do nothin’ to help the poor. I said, you know, that’s sumpin’ I really wanna be involved in.”⁹⁹ Chief among those who did not care about poor people, in her opinion, was powerful Senator James Eastland, owner of a huge cotton plantation in Hamer’s county. He ruled the county like a feudal baron.

Hamer rode with seventeen others on a SNCC-chartered bus to the county seat of Indianola, birthplace of the White Citizens Councils in 1954. The registrar “brought a big old book out there, and he gave me the sixteenth section of the Constitution of Mississippi, and that was dealing with de facto laws, and I didn’t know nothin’ about no de facto laws.” She “flunked out” along with the others. Driving home, they were all arrested because the bus was “too yellow.” She sang spirituals to strengthen them. When she got home the plantation owner kicked her off her land. “I didn’t have no other choice because for one time I wanted things to be different.” The house where she stayed in town was shot up by vigilantes. It was one hell of a winter.

“Pap couldn’t get a job nowhere ’cause everybody knew he was my husband. We made it on through, though, and since then I just been trying to work and get our people organized.”¹⁰⁰ Bob Moses recruited the “lady who sings the hymns” to join SNCC, its oldest field organizer. Why was she drawn to this brash young outfit?

This country has “divided us into classes,” she explained, “and if you hadn’t arrived at a certain level, you wasn’t treated no better by the blacks than you was by the whites. It was these kids what broke a lot of this down. They treated us like we were special and we loved ’em. We didn’t feel uneasy about our language might not be right or something. We just felt like we could talk to ’em. We trusted ’em, and I can tell the world those kids done their share in Mississippi.”

SNCC had been struggling for a year to register black voters in the “closed society” of Mississippi, the kingpin of white supremacy, where rural blacks were still treated much like slaves. The state’s terrorism had kept it off-limits to SCLC. Blacks were almost half the population, but only 5 percent were registered, in some counties none at all, owing to intimidation and reprisals in general, the literacy test and poll tax in particular. Registering black people was incendiary.

Bob Moses, driving force behind the voting campaign, had moved to McComb, in southern Mississippi, where he set up the first of a string of registration “schools.” In his mid-twenties, the contemplative young man with fiery eyes had grown up in Harlem and had been a Harvard graduate student in philosophy, drawn to Camus and existentialism. While teaching high school in New York he had organized with Bayard Rustin. Inspired by the lunch-counter sit-ins, he volunteered for duty at SNCC’s makeshift Atlanta office. On a visit to Mississippi he was persuaded by Amzie Moore, a local NAACP leader, that enfranchising black people should be SNCC’s main mission. Moses would become a legend in SNCC not only for courage but for his ability to motivate leadership in others. With his guidance SNCC activists learned “how to find potential leadership, how to groom it,” Lawrence Guyot recalled, “and the most painful lesson for some of us was how to let it go once you’ve set it into motion.”¹⁰¹

McComb tested the mettle of Moses and his small cadre. They were routinely beaten and arrested when they accompanied local blacks to the county courthouse. Herbert Lee, a brave farmer who supported them, a father of nine, was gunned down by a state legislator who was never prosecuted. After a march to protest the cold-blooded murder, Moses and associates were jailed for two months. They left McComb in December 1961 and fanned out into several counties around the Delta.

Risk and repression became a way of life. SNCC workers were shot at in their cars, and mobs invaded their offices. When county supervisors cut off federal food aid to poor blacks as punishment, SNCC went all out to mobilize food caravans from the North, helped by comedian Dick Gregory. This boosted the registration campaign as activists drew the connection between children going hungry and lack of political power. In several county seats SNCC organized Freedom Days with courthouse marches seeking registration.

Success in turning out disfranchised voters to vote in the November 1963 election—though their votes were not counted—convinced SNCC and its partners in the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) that black citizens could build an electoral vehicle independent of the segregated state Democratic Party. As its immediate goal the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), founded in early 1964, prepared to challenge the all-white regulars for seating at the August Democratic national convention. When as expected MFDP members were excluded from the party’s precinct and county meetings, they set up their own, meticulously adhering to proper procedures. Four MFDP activists qualified for the June primary, including Hamer as candidate for Congress. Unsuccessful, they ran as independents in the fall.

Meanwhile, SNCC launched the Mississippi Summer Project, which brought a thousand northern college students, mainly white, to join a climactic registration crusade entwined with the MFDP effort. SNCC activists were risking their lives, and the lives of local people, for little gain in black voters. Their desperate gambit was to create a national crisis. Moses and other SNCC leaders calculated that if white students were beaten or killed, it would grab the nation’s attention and might lead to federal protection of voting rights. Black victims of Mississippi’s reign of terror had been ignored. Many in SNCC were concerned, however, that the white students would overshadow the indigenous organizers, take over leadership roles, and worsen the powerlessness of poor blacks.

In mid-June, while volunteers learned the ropes in a marathon training workshop at an Ohio college—Hamer lifting them to the heavens with her singing, Moses preparing them for possible death—three Freedom Summer activists disappeared in Neshoba County after a traffic arrest. Two were white, CORE’s Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, fresh from the first Ohio training session. One was black, eighteen-year-old James Chaney, from Meridian, Mississippi. Despite sensational media coverage, Robert Kennedy—champion of voter registration—claimed he had no authority to intervene. Six weeks later searchers found the three mutilated bodies buried in an earthen dam. The deputy sheriff who arrested them had turned them over to the Klan. The triple lynching fastened the eyes of the nation on Mississippi Freedom Summer.

By late June 1964 the white student army was settling into communities all over the state. The young women and men stayed with black families or in ramshackle “freedom houses.” In hundred-degree heat they trudged along dusty dirt roads in their straw hats and blue denim and nervously talked with people on cabin porches about their right to vote. The students escorted the few who dared register to the courthouse, where most failed the rigged exam. Rejected for the ninth time, one old man looked down as he walked out and said wistfully, “I want my freedom all right. I do mighty bad.”¹⁰²

Over the summer more black people were assaulted for aspiring to be citizens, and dozens of church headquarters were burned or bombed. Volunteers helped organize marches to protest brutality by police and the Klan, and many were jailed. At times even SNCC had trouble keeping up with the feisty militancy of local teenagers bent on integrating their towns. “The kids were moving, with or without us.”¹⁰³

Unable to make much progress, voter registration gave way to the building of the MFDP. “Have you freedom-registered?” organizers asked, in churches, on backwoods roads, and riding plantation buses with cotton pickers long before sunup. MFDP conventions in each county chose delegates to five congressional district conventions, which in turn sent delegates to the state convention in Jackson. “People straight out of tarpaper shacks, many illiterate, some wearing a (borrowed) suit for the first time, disenfranchised for three generations, without a living memory of political power, yet caught on with some extraordinary inner sense to how the process worked, down to its smallest nuance and finagle.”¹⁰⁴

Ella Baker gave a passionate address to the song- and prayer-filled Jackson convention. Most of the eight hundred delegates were black and poor; many were women. Sixty-eight men and women were chosen to fight for the party’s recognition at the national convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The MFDP had sprouted into a serious threat to the Democratic power structure of the Magnolia State, and of the nation.

ON AUGUST 4, 1964, the day that FBI and navy searchers found the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, President Johnson sent sixty-four jet fighters to cripple an oil depot and naval port in North Vietnam. He announced on TV that the bombing, the first by his country since the Korean War, was a justified retaliation for a torpedo assault on an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin. That incident never happened. But two days earlier, the destroyer had been attacked a few miles offshore by North Vietnamese patrol boats that suspected its involvement in a raid on two nearby islands, part of intensifying covert warfare against the North led by the CIA. In response the destroyer had blasted three patrol boats, sinking one.

Johnson and his national security advisers had wanted to leave it at that, but when the media got wind of it, LBJ feared that Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee, would have a field day haranguing the President for being soft. Goldwater sounded as hawkish on the Vietnam problem, turning it into a hot-button issue, as he was in condemning the Civil Rights Act he had just voted against. Referring to both fronts, he had declared in his acceptance speech that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” It was as if he had taken a leaf from King’s Birmingham letter (his speechwriter had probably read it). But Goldwater’s liberty and justice were the opposite of King’s, as were his means of pursuing them.

For half a year, LBJ’s inner circle had been looking for a dramatic provocation to secure congressional backing for deeper military involvement in Southeast Asia. Once it hit the airwaves and became a campaign issue, this shadow skirmish in waters claimed by North Vietnam did the trick. After meetings between the President and leaders of Congress, especially J. William Fulbright, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution sailed through the House unanimously, the Senate with only two dissents. It gave Johnson authority “to take all the necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States to prevent further aggression.”¹⁰⁵ Even Fulbright did not know that the administration deemed it a blank check, equivalent to a declaration of war. And the war came.

THE BALLOONS, BRIGHT LIGHTS, and glitter of Atlantic City—its ocean air smelling of seaweed and popcorn—felt like another world to the MFDP delegates arriving by bus from faraway Mississippi. Not that they had left the Magnolia State behind. Hundreds of their constituents followed them to the fading resort town, all wearing their Sunday best. They intended to buttonhole every delegate they could find to back the MFDP challenge, while their people kept a round-the-clock vigil on the famous boardwalk in front of the convention hall. SNCC organizers were dressed up in Ivy League suits and pressed the flesh like their lives depended on it.

With nine state delegations lined up and an unimpeachable legal case submitted by prominent Democratic broker Joseph Rauh, United Auto Workers counsel, the MFDP strategy was to garner enough votes in the credentials committee to force a floor vote to decide on recognition. Their trump card was that their state’s all-white delegation, like the Wallace-controlled delegates from neighboring Alabama, refused to declare loyalty to the national party and its nominees. They were defiantly in the Goldwater camp.

King, Wilkins, James Farmer, and other notables testified on the MFDP’s behalf at a nationally televised hearing, but more telling oratory came from black Mississippians who explained what happened when they tried to vote. Limping to the table, Fannie Lou Hamer, the MFDP vice chair, stole the show and won her country’s heart with her gripping tale of being beaten in Winona jail till her body “was as navy blue as anything you ever seen.” Her melodic voice rose to a shout. “All of this is on account we want to register,” she sang out, “to become first-class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America,” she asked, “the land of the free and the home of the brave?”¹⁰⁶

The millions watching did not catch the end of Hamer’s live testimony (though it was replayed that night) because President Johnson deliberately cut it off with an abrupt press conference about trivia. The big man from Texas was more frightened by the little people from Mississippi than by the North Vietnamese peasant army he had just rained bombs upon.

If not the whole loaf, MFDP delegates realistically hoped to get half the seats—how such a dispute had been settled in the past. But LBJ feared that giving the MFDP any seats would deliver the message that Negroes had taken over the Democratic Party. Feeling vulnerable because of the Civil Rights Act, which had more bark than bite, the supreme vote counter had calculated that fifteen southern and border states could be lost to Goldwater if Mississippi and other Deep South regulars stormed out of the convention. To keep a lid on the black insurgency that obsessed him, he had badgered Hoover into approving an elephantine FBI spy operation in Atlantic City, thirty agents plus informants aimed at King, SNCC, and the MFDP.

Watching telegenic Hamer in all of her righteous glory, he was determined, as Senator Hubert Humphrey put it privately to black leaders, to “not allow that illiterate woman to speak from the floor of the convention.”¹⁰⁷ This was an unlettered crippled sharecropper whose words could shake the nation to its roots, and possibly drive the President from office. “I felt just like I was telling it from the mountain,” she tearfully told a reporter.¹⁰⁸ After her high-voltage performance the Democrats were flooded with telegrams and phone calls backing the MFDP. Hamer had to be kept off the convention floor at all cost.

As the convention opened, the prospect of a successful floor vote for the MFDP challenge brought Johnson teetering toward an emotional breakdown. If the Negroes’ victory did not open the floodgate to Robert Kennedy’s stealing the nomination, his terror, it might lead to repudiation by the voters in November. LBJ could not imagine winning the election without a healthy chunk of the South, his home. Now he might even lose the Lone Star State. In any event, a narrow win without a strong mandate would doom his dreams of greatness.

On Monday evening, August 24, Johnson spoke on the phone to his close ally Walter Reuther, the auto workers’ chief. “I think the Negroes are going back to the Reconstruction period,” he said. “They set themselves back a hundred years.” The next morning his depression had deepened. He read to his press secretary, George Reedy, a handwritten statement withdrawing himself from the race: he was “absolutely unavailable.”

“This will throw the nation into quite an uproar, sir,” Reedy scrambled to reply.

Minutes later he bared himself to special assistant Walter Jenkins: “I don’t see any reason why I ought to seek the right to endure anguish,” he said. People “think I want great power. What I want is great solace—and a little love. That’s all I want.”

“You have a lot more of that,” his confidant struggled to reassure him. The President was listening only to himself.

“Goldwater’s had a couple of nervous breakdowns,” he said. “I don’t want to be in this place like Wilson,” paralyzed by a stroke during his last seventeen months in the White House. Johnson had suffered a major heart attack in 1955, his father had died at his age, and he had had nightmares of paralysis since childhood. “I do not believe I can physically and mentally carry the responsibilities of the Bomb and the world and the nigras and the South. I know my own limitations.”¹⁰⁹ He did not want to die in office like his father figure, FDR.

After vigorous debate on Sunday, the MFDP delegates had voted to accept a compromise proposed by Oregon congresswoman Edith Green: to seat members of both delegations who would swear loyalty to the party. The Johnson forces countermanded with their own offer: a loyalty oath, two at-large nonvoting seats for the delegation cochairs, guest passes for the rest, plus a nondiscrimination pledge for future conventions. Unlike Green’s “honorable” compromise, Johnson’s felt like a slap in the face—two token seats, not even representing Mississippi, handpicked by the white party bosses. The nondiscrimination pledge meant little without guaranteeing black voting rights. The bottom line of Johnson’s compromise was simple: Hamer was to be silenced.

At a Monday meeting Hamer and Humphrey shed tears together after she shamed him: “I been praying about you,” she said, “and you’re a good man. The trouble is, you’re afraid to do what you know is right.” LBJ had put it to him that the price of the vice presidential nod was for him to squelch the Mississippi uprising.

“God will take care of you,” she told the senator, “even if you lose this job. But Mr. Humphrey, if you take this job, you won’t be worth anything. Mr. Humphrey, I’m going to pray for you again.”¹¹⁰

MFDP leaders felt betrayed by Humphrey’s kowtowing because he had long been a courageous fighter for civil rights, recently in shepherding Senate passage of the Civil Rights Act. At the Democrats’ convention back in 1948, the Minneapolis mayor’s electric oratory supporting the strong civil rights plank caused southern delegates led by South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond to walk out and form the Dixiecrat Party. “The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights,” young Mayor Humphrey had exclaimed, “and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”¹¹¹ Sixteen years later it was Humphrey’s strange mission to stem another southern walkout over civil rights. Now with so much at stake he seemed to be sliding backward from sunshine to shadow. Hamer and her MFDP colleagues told him they would accept nothing less than the Green compromise.

On Tuesday, after an MFDP mass meeting ratified the Green compromise, Senator Humphrey convened in his hotel bedroom a summit meeting of movement leaders and LBJ loyalists from which he barred Hamer. He played hardball LBJ-style to hit home the Johnson compromise. With King, Moses, Rustin, MFDP chair Aaron Henry, white Tougaloo chaplain Edwin King (cochair), and others huddled around queen-size beds, UAW’s Reuther warned King: “Your funding is on the line. The kind of money you got from us in Birmingham is there again for Mississippi, but you’ve got to help us and we’ve got to help Johnson.”¹¹² Reuther had threatened to fire Rauh as UAW counsel. King, used to the final say in such decisions, turned to the MFDP leaders. They tried to find wiggle room, but Humphrey indicated that it was take it or leave it, above all on the question of Hamer’s participation.

The struggle for a tolerable compromise was cut short by a shock from the convention hall. TV anchors announced that the credentials committee had voted, unanimously, to adopt Johnson’s compromise. Rauh, who in fact voted against it along with others, tried to stave off a vote until he conferred with MFDP leaders, but the Johnson juggernaut, not even permitting a roll-call vote, bulldozed it through. Because of fearsome White House pressure, the MFDP no longer had the votes to bring their minority report to the floor.

Back in the hotel suite Moses, known for his calm manner, yelled to Humphrey, “You cheated!” and slammed the door in fury. “I have never seen such just really blatant use of power,” Congresswoman Green recalled, to block her proposal from floor debate.¹¹³

In the next twenty-four hours the embattled MFDP held two meetings on the Johnson compromise and rejected it unanimously both times. King, Rauh, Rustin, Farmer, and other leaders tried to sway them. As if repudiating his own quarter century of direct-action devotion, Rustin urged them to make a courageous but painful shift from protest politics to electoral coalition building.

“There is a difference between protest and politics,” he explained. “The former is based on morality and the latter is based on reality and compromise. If you are going to engage in politics then you must give up protest.”

SNCC’s Mendy Samstein stood up. “You’re a traitor, Bayard!”¹¹⁴ If Rustin had spent the summer in Mississippi, he would have witnessed politics and protest in fruitful collaboration, each indispensable to the other. Instead he was trapped in a false dichotomy. What he didn’t seem to realize was that in order for electoral politics to achieve large goals of socioeconomic reform, to move toward democratic socialism, the electoral process and party politics would have to be transformed by the moral force of the civil rights movement. This was the importance of refusing the Johnson compromise that meant politics as usual.

If ever there were two Martin Kings cohabiting one body, two minds in one, it was in these meetings. In the face of suffocating pressure by Reuther, Humphrey, and others, he held fast to his rock of ambivalence, seeing things both ways.

“I am not going to counsel you to accept or reject. That is your decision.” He said that he could see good reasons for either. He affirmed Rustin’s view that the movement was moving from protest to politics and that in the electoral arena odious compromises were unavoidable. He knew of course that this was hardly less true of protest politics. He had succumbed to as many dubious compromises as he had seen jail cells. But the MFDP and its delegates were, even by the movement’s high standards, of exceptional integrity. Time and again MFDP delegates argued that they were beholden to the folks back home who had chosen them. But they had been willing to accept a respectful compromise like Green’s.

Despite his ambivalence and deference to the delegates, King offered his view that accepting the two seats was the wiser course. “He did not pressure us strongly to take it,” Rev. Ed King remembered. “His position, as he told me, was that he wanted to see us take this compromise because this would mean strength for him, help for him in Negro voter registration throughout the South and in the North. He said, ‘So being a Negro leader, I want you to take this, but if I were a Mississippi Negro, I would vote against it.’ ” Accepting the compromise might help to build a progressive electoral coalition. But what would be lost?

After listening to the luminaries the delegates argued back and forth. Moses pleaded that it was not a choice between morality and politics. Their duty was to bring morality into the political arena. Hamer, who herself had wavered, captured the consensus in a memorable utterance: “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats!”

On the brink of torpedoing his political life, President Johnson had been relieved to hear from Humphrey and Reuther that the credentials committee had crumbled. But later Tuesday afternoon he was alerted that it was too late. In a last hurrah, half of the MFDP delegates staged a televised sit-in in the abandoned seats of the Mississippi delegation. Hamer got to speak from the floor after all. Merely floating a compromise with the Negroes had propelled most of the Mississippi regulars to walk out. They could stomach no MFDP delegates, even at-large, and sneered at a loyalty oath. A handful of holdouts turned tail when the black contingent claimed the vacant seats amid a media frenzy.

Johnson’s fears returned with a vengeance when he talked by phone with two southern allies, governors John Connally (Texas) and Carl Sanders (Georgia). “It looks like we’re turning the Democratic party over to the nigras,” Sanders chided him. As both Montgomery and Birmingham proved, any concession to black demand was seen as a slippery slope toward Reconstruction-style black rule. “It’s gonna cut our throats from ear to ear.”

LBJ replied that the MFDP deserved recognition: “Pistols kept ’em out.” He pleaded with his cronies to keep the rest of the Deep South from walking out. They were not encouraging. The South seemed to be seceding this time from the Democratic Party itself—his worst nightmare. At midnight, less than twenty-four hours before his own coronation, the crown he had always coveted, he was ready to throw in the towel.

“By God, I’m gonna go up there and quit,” he told his distressed press secretary, who was ready to resign himself. “Fuck ’em all.”¹¹⁵

By the time Johnson arrived in Atlantic City next afternoon with Humphrey in tow, his operatives had managed to hold off any further walkouts; Alabama was cocked to go. All on the surface was harmonious uniformity as LBJ was nominated by acclamation on Wednesday night, then Humphrey the next. Defeated would be too noble a word for what had happened to the true democrats of Mississippi. Moses was right: they had been cheated in a rigged game.

The boardwalk vigil grew monumental on the last night. A thousand spirited voices chanted “Freedom now!” With Hamer leading, they sang the movement’s anthem, tightly linking arms. The grassroots troops who had tried valiantly to inject moral passion and principle into cautious and unprincipled electoral politics returned to the southern battlefield dejected, disillusioned, angry, but far from giving up. Many had learned that, whether or not they could ever hope to build alliances with white liberals, they had to first have power of their own.

Hamer of course was disappointed with the Democrats, but willing to forgive, able to see that “regardless of what they act like, there’s some good there.” Despite their punishing trials she looked back on Freedom Summer as “the result of all our faith. Our prayers and all we had lived for started to be translated into action.” It was “the beginning of a New Kingdom right here on earth,” grounded in the Mississippi movement’s ethos of trust, integrity, moral courage, and spiritual connectedness.¹¹⁶ SNCC and MFDP activists could not see it at the time, but Mississippi Freedom Summer was no less crucial than the Selma movement in achieving the Voting Rights Act a year later. It was also the catalyst of Black Power.

10

 

Nothing exposed the chasm between civil rights elite and foot soldiers like the lessons each brought home from the Atlantic City debacle. The latter saw it as the cup half empty, the former as the cup half full. King, perhaps alone, saw both what was lost and what was gained. The MFDP delegation and their retinue returned to Mississippi with the bitter but defiant realization that they must go it alone. They could depend on no one in high places, not even in their own movement. They had been abandoned by the national party for which they had risked their lives and livelihoods.

The civil rights generals, to the contrary, had an unbeatable presidential candidate who had just rammed through Congress the most significant civil rights legislation since Reconstruction and had also declared an “unconditional war on poverty.” They had a vice presidential nominee, whatever his backsliding in Atlantic City, who had fought hard for the civil rights bill and had been the Senate’s conscience on civil rights for fifteen years. They had a commitment from the national party to ban discrimination in delegate selection to future conventions (though no promise on voting rights). Not least, they had forced a walkout of the Mississippi segregationists, possibly the first step toward wholesale party realignment benefiting the civil rights forces, at least in the long run. The sharpest difference was that while grassroots leaders felt deserted by Machiavellian liberal allies, the elite felt upbeat that they could work profitably with the Democratic power structure. It was not surprising that Andrew Young assessed the Atlantic City outcome as comparable to Birmingham.

Evidence of the civil rights generals’ new hubris was their willingness to honor LBJ’s request to halt demonstrations for the duration of the presidential campaign. Wilkins and Whitney Young insisted on an outright ban. Leaders of CORE (which had virtually invented civil rights direct action in the 1940s) and of SNCC were against the idea of a breather. Neither group wanted to brake the momentum of Freedom Summer. CORE believed there was no better time for militant protest, which they had been spearheading all over the country, especially around employment and housing issues.

As usual when the movement’s left and right flanks clashed, King assumed the position of mediator—the self-styled unifier of opposites, seeking to clarify and merge the strengths of each side. James Farmer and John Lewis hoped that King would back them up, but he recoiled from tangling with the combative Wilkins. “Martin was not an arguer at all or a debater,” Farmer recalled.¹¹⁷ “He never was able to infight,” Rustin observed. “He always took a neutralist position, and let the decision be made.”¹¹⁸

While it was true that he was no infighter and assumed an outwardly passive pose in such confrontations, he was not a neutralist, one who took no position. Having faith in a larger unity, King held both positions at once, in creative if chaotic tension—his interest in each cloaked by compassionate listening—as he sought to blend them into a principled compromise agreeable to both sides. At this late summer summit, the generals hammered out a statement calling for a “broad curtailment, if not total moratorium of all mass marches, picketing and demonstrations”—not quite what the President had in mind, but SNCC and CORE would accept nothing more binding.¹¹⁹

King’s October 1 address to the SCLC convention in Savannah, Georgia, showed that Rustin’s influence on him was as strong as ever. If SCLC was to move beyond its southern base, lead a national movement, and focus on economic justice, he said, it must place greater priority on electoral coalition building, and not just in the pressure cooker of a presidential campaign. “We are now facing basic social and economic problems that require political reform.”¹²⁰ To fight a full war on poverty, the movement would have to exercise control over Congress and the bureaucracy, necessitating new allies and new methods.

Both the movement elite and the foot soldiers agreed that they must shape power nonviolently through the electoral process. But the former believed in political breadth, the latter in moral depth—an expanding universe versus a solid moral core.

While King called for a shift in priorities, unlike Rustin he did not propose replacing protest with politics. Although the unexpectedly high degree of compliance with the Civil Rights Act’s public-accommodations provisions meant that the movement would not need to engage in direct-action enforcement like the freedom rides, on a large scale, King had no illusions that voting rights could be achieved without nonviolent combat. Rather than the false dichotomy of direct action versus electoral politics, he wanted to combine the two—the best of each tradition—into a creative if ambiguous synthesis, working simultaneously outside and inside the political system. He was vague on the details, in which the devil would no doubt be found. His experiences in Montgomery and Birmingham had taught him that on a local level, direct action was never divorced from municipal politics; for disfranchised black citizens, direct action was usually an expression of politics by other means.

His personal effort to combine the two approaches—shepherding a direct-action organization while barnstorming city after city against Goldwater, sometimes with parades honoring King, and to get out the vote—landed him in an Atlanta hospital with a virus and high blood pressure, “completely exhausted, tired and empty,” according to his wife.¹²¹ As he was sleeping in his hospital bed, Coretta King called him with news that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Although hesitant to disrupt his rest, she “realized that this was exactly the sort of lift Martin desperately needed.”¹²² He had not felt exalted when chosen as Time’s “Man of the Year” back in January, but this was the highest earthly honor that leadership could attain, his own and the grassroots leadership of the movement. At his bedside he gathered Coretta and three assistants in solemn prayer that they would bear the heavier cross that the prize bestowed.

“History has thrust me into this position,” he told the crush of reporters who invaded the hospital.¹²³

Now it would be harder than ever for him to reclaim the old Martin King who had been swallowed up by this gargantuan persona. It would be harder than ever for him to distinguish between the two realities, to determine which self was more real—the Whitmanesque cosmic Self containing multitudes, with a mission to save them, or the bantering Baptist minister whose favorite pastime was devouring barbecued pig’s ears and trading “nigger jokes” with his preacher pals, listening to the blues.

In early November Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater by the largest popular-vote margin in U.S. history (61 percent to 39 percent). The Arizona senator carried only his own state and the Deep South. LBJ’s strategy of campaigning as president of all the people and showing restrained forcefulness abroad and at home had paid off. Coattails of Camelot gave the Democrats an increased majority in the Senate and even more in the House; they now controlled two-thirds of each chamber. Johnson’s “Great Society” seemed more than a mirage. Although Goldwater, the jet-piloting senator from Phoenix, and his right-banking party had hit the ground, a longer-winged phoenix would before long take flight from the Republican ashes.

SHORTLY AFTER THE HISTORIC election SNCC held a retreat in Waveland, Mississippi. In a turbulent atmosphere belied by the Gulf of Mexico’s calm waters, weary activists grappled with pressing internal conflicts, particularly between blacks and whites (also between men and women), and charted new directions. Anger festering over summer and fall now burst its seams. Many black organizers, especially from poorer families, were steamed that the army of white college students, despite noble intentions, had sometimes disrespected and pushed aside native blacks, dampening their budding somebodiness. Betrayal in Atlantic City combined with the white students’ insensitivity had led SNCC’s black majority to deeply question its interracial basis. The brave white students had served their purpose as cannon fodder, but the price might have been too steep. To survive and grow, many came to feel, the movement had to get blacker.

. . .

THROUGH DOGGED WILLPOWER King kept his fractured self intact during the final climactic weeks of 1964. The Nobel glory—he was feted by global leaders—lifted his public persona into the stratosphere while depression plagued his soul.

The FBI was in hot pursuit. Meeting with women journalists in mid-November, J. Edgar Hoover attacked King as “the most notorious liar in the country” for his criticisms of southern FBI agents, particularly in Albany, Georgia. King and his aides were blindsided. What was Hoover up to? Should they fight or try to make up? King issued a conciliatory statement and arranged an appointment with Hoover to clear the air, which turned out to be pure show, a “completely nonfunctional meeting,” in Young’s words.¹²⁴

A week later King met with Farmer at Kennedy airport and flatly denied charges of Communist ties or financial misdealings that the FBI was gearing up to hit him with. Playing down the sexual rumors, he nonetheless confided in Farmer that “when a man travels like you and I do, there are bound to be women.”¹²⁵ In fact he was terrified that his compulsive sexual romping would catch up with him—and his divine anointment might crumble into dust.

In early December, as King was flying to Oslo with a princely entourage of thirty friends and family, his inner self was as despondent as his public one was triumphant. Pressing royal flesh and hobnobbing with European bigwigs, he showed no sign of the black mood within. But he could not hide it from Coretta and those who knew him best. Besides sexual guilt eating at him, he was distressed by Abernathy’s juvenile jealousy in petulantly claiming his share of the Oslo limelight and of the fifty-four thousand dollars prize money. King had decided to give it all to the movement that had won it with him, vetoing Coretta’s plea that half be saved for their children’s college education.

“Only Martin’s family and close staff members knew how depressed he was during the entire Nobel trip,” Coretta King revealed later. “He was worried that the rumors might hurt the movement and he was concerned about what black people would think. He always worried about that. We had to work with him and help him out of his depression. Somehow he managed all the official functions, the speeches, the whole trip and the public never knew what he was going through.”¹²⁶

After receiving the gold medallion on a grand stage in Oslo frosted with carnations, he declared that he was accepting the award as trustee on behalf of the entire civil rights movement. In his public lecture at Oslo University he extolled the power of nonviolent methods and urged they be used to bring about world peace and disarmament, the highest aim of humanity.

“Those who pioneer in the struggle for peace and freedom will still face uncomfortable jail terms, painful threats of death. They will still be battered by the storms of persecution, leading them to nagging feelings that they can no longer bear such a heavy burden.” Nonviolent warriors would always face “the temptation of wanting to retreat to a more quiet and serene life,” as he surely did in his inward soul, but they must not succumb. They must carry their cross to the bitter end.

Returning to New York, he was given a tumultuous welcome as though he were the pope or had won the World Series. He was now world famous. The American president hosted him, his wife, and parents at a warm White House reception.

11

 

Following the White House welcome, King met alone with the President, who sang the praises of his war on poverty. King applauded the new program but insisted that the movement’s higher priority was strong voting rights legislation.

“Martin, you’re right about that,” Johnson replied. “I’m going to do it eventually, but I can’t get a voting rights bill through in this session of Congress.”¹²⁷ He wanted to wait until the dust had settled from the Civil Rights Act, just five months old. Like the cautious JFK he could not forfeit the support of southern barons in Congress for his Great Society programs. As shown by his response to the MFDP insurgency, black voting rights were not as important to him as substantive reforms like medical care for the aged and aid to education and to cities.

The Nash and Bevel master plan to enfranchise black Alabamians, conceived as a permanent memorial, and the moral equivalent of revenge, for the four slain girls, was finally coming to fruition fifteen months after the church bombing. King called a staff retreat in Birmingham shortly after the election, where he stressed the need to export nonviolent methods to the urban North, but they decided that an Alabama voting rights campaign was the next order of business. Should it be statewide, they debated, which would scatter their forces; should it focus on the state capital; or should it apply concentrated force on one city or county that was notably resistant to black registration?

Longtime Selma activist Amelia Boynton, a Tuskegee graduate, gave the answer when she reported on the awful situation in Dallas County, where 2 percent of eligible black voters were registered, registration was restricted to two days a month, and local judge James Hare had flouted the First Amendment by banning all demonstrations. Local leaders were convinced that only by electing their own city and county officials could they overcome the racist repression that plagued the black community. For two years a small band of SNCC activists had been organizing ward meetings and registration marches in the central Alabama city fifty miles west of Montgomery. The marchers had braved fierce attacks by Sheriff Jim Clark and his Klan-ridden posse similar to St. Augustine’s. But the 1964 Mississippi campaign had depleted SNCC’s efforts and small progress had been made. Moderate black leaders were hopeful, as they had been in Birmingham, that the election of a new mayor, Joe Smitherman, replacing a staunch segregationist, would alleviate racial conflict.

Boynton and the Dallas County Voters League invited SCLC to help them boost registration locally. The new strategy was for SCLC to go first to Selma (population thirty thousand, about half black), then fan out into several neighboring counties in Alabama’s Black Belt, culminating in Montgomery. They made plans to challenge the seating of the all-white legislature and discussed creating a Freedom Democratic Party in Alabama. Boynton and her colleagues worried, though, that SCLC would leave town before the local battle was won. Nor did they want SCLC to run the show, weakening indigenous leadership. But they were willing to take the risk. The two groups planned a kickoff rally in Selma for the day after Emancipation Day.

Before heading to Selma, King had his own local concern to deal with—helping to resolve a strike by black workers at Atlanta’s Scripto pen company, a few blocks from “Sweet Auburn” Avenue. Some strikers worshiped at his church. One night he disappeared from home and stood alone at the plant gate in the midnight chill, talking with workers at the shift change. They won a decent settlement by Christmas. Ahead of many of his movement peers, King was attentive to economic deprivation and workers’ rights. But he was at a loss for how to translate his concern into a strategy.

The Selma rally on Saturday, January 2, filled the red-brick, twin-steepled Brown Chapel AME Church across from a black housing project. Defying Judge Hare’s prohibition, it was the first black political gathering in six months. But Selma’s director of public safety, Wilson Baker, part of the new city leadership, had no intention of halting the peaceful if rambunctious rally. Although Christmas radiance and the Nobel afterglow had not relieved his depression, King’s spirited pep talk betrayed no hint of his inner roiling.

“At the rate they are letting us register now,” he asserted, “it will take a hundred and three years to register all of the fifteen thousand Negroes in Dallas County who are qualified to vote.”

“That’s right!”

“But we don’t have that long to wait!” The audience roared.

“Today marks the beginning of a determined, organized, mobilized campaign to get the right to vote everywhere in Alabama. If we are refused, we will appeal to Governor George Wallace. If he refuses to listen, we will appeal to the legislature. If they don’t listen, we will appeal to the conscience of the Congress in another dramatic march on Washington.

“Give us the ballot!” he belted out again and again as the assembly’s rising shouts shook the walls and stained-glass windows.¹²⁸

Three days later 75 million Americans, a record TV audience, watched President Johnson deliver his second State of the Union address to Congress. Plugging voting rights in passing, he spotlighted his Great Society reforms that constituted the most ambitious progressive legislation since America’s halfhearted welfare state was born in 1935. The measures passed in 1964 and 1965 would bring the nation a quantum leap closer to the social democracies of western Europe and Canada, while still falling short without fundamentals like national health insurance and economic planning. No wonder conservatives condemned the Great Society agenda as a communist five-year plan.

Unlike Kennedy, Johnson reveled in Civil War echoes and analogies. In his address he called for a “new quest for union” as the nation began its second century after the Civil War’s “terrible test of blood and fire.” Somewhere in his soul he may have sensed that a new civil war of blood and fire was about to break loose. If he was to be another Great Emancipator he would, like Lincoln, have to pay a price in national blood.

The FBI was surely after King’s blood. Just before his meeting with Hoover at Thanksgiving an anonymous package landed in his Atlanta mailbox, secretly delivered by FBI agents—a bombshell as politically deadly as the dynamite tossed on his porch in Montgomery. The package contained an audiotape of King and friends having an apparent sexual party in a hotel room, along with a letter purportedly from a black man (composed by the FBI) urging King to commit suicide. Damning him as “a great liability for all of us Negroes,” the hand-scrawled letter stated that “Satan could not do more. What incredible evilness. Your end is approaching. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”¹²⁹

The letter showed that, whatever its failures at capturing hooded killers in the Deep South, the agency’s yearlong surveillance of King had hooked into his psychological Achilles’ heel. How did the FBI know that he felt himself to be a fraud, an impostor? What if the world found out that he was not really a man of God underneath his robes? Because mail piled up at the King home, the suicide package was not opened—by Coretta King—until after New Year’s. She read the letter and listened to her husband’s earthly exaltations. Shaken, she called him to come home. He played the tape over and over.

THROUGHOUT JANUARY 1965 SCLC and the Voters League organized marches to the courthouse to seek registration, and tested desegregation of restaurants. Run-ins with Sheriff Clark resulted in clusters of arrests. King led a Monday-morning march of four hundred, many of them teenagers, to the courthouse, where they were blocked by Clark and harassed by George Lincoln Rockwell and his Nazi thugs. King invited the American Nazi führer to speak at that night’s mass meeting, a ploy to tantalize the media. He and his aides then checked in to the grand antebellum Hotel Albert, a replica of the Doges’ Palace in Venice, to test desegregation. When King and Dorothy Cotton encountered a white supremacist in the lobby, he asked the man, “You’re still going to be with us tonight?”

“I’m afraid not,” he replied, then hit King in the face and, as he fell to the floor, kicked him in the groin. He was more startled than injured. Baker quickly arrested the attacker. That evening at the mass meeting the public safety director seized Rockwell and his Nazi band when they rose to King’s bait. Despite this adrenaline release, the movement, with few new voters, appeared to be stalling.

As the unleashing of children turned the corner in Birmingham, teachers broke the impasse in Selma. On January 22, with King back in Atlanta, Voters League president Frederick Reese, a high school teacher and pastor, led an after-school march of over a hundred teachers—nearly all the black schoolteachers—to the courthouse. Although female teachers such as Jo Ann Robinson in Montgomery had spearheaded the bus boycott, in other Deep South towns teachers scared for their jobs had been among the last to join in; even in Montgomery they never protested openly. Often as in Birmingham teachers conspired with principals to keep students captive. Reese had labored hard to get the teachers out, shaming them when need be.

The miracle of these marching teachers, some already registered, risking their livelihoods and the administrators’ wrath, gave black Selma a feeling that they might win the battle. Their students felt proud of them. Now the principals had to keep both teachers and pupils penned up. Teachers were the first middle-class citizens to march; they were followed by beauticians and undertakers. Activists started saying to one another, “Brother, we got a move-ment goin’ on in Selma!”

Physical encounters with Sheriff Clark revved up as well. He decked campaign director Bevel and Rev. C. T. Vivian when, eyeball to eyeball, each tried to speak truth to power on the courthouse steps.

When King led another courthouse march in late January, the sheriff roughly shoved Annie Lee Cooper, who had been fired from a white-owned nursing home for organizing employees to vote. “With a curse under her breath,” an eyewitness recounted, “she slugged Clark near the left eye with her fist. She was a tall, powerfully built woman, and Clark staggered to his knees under the blow; as he did, she hit him again.”¹³⁰ When deputies grabbed her, she pummeled and kicked them, then ran over to punch the fallen sheriff once more for good measure. Three deputies wrestled her to the ground. The sheriff got to his feet and bashed her with his club. She wrenched it away and knocked Clark’s helmet off as they fought over the stick. With trembling hands he finally pulled it free and smashed her again on the skull as deputies dragged her away in double handcuffs.

“Don’t bother with it!” King yelled out, to keep the marchers from striking back.¹³¹

After a month of marching and jail-going they had a movement in Selma, but it was not having national impact. Bevel and other leaders decided that, as in Birmingham, King needed to be arrested in order to stir up the media. On Monday, February 1, King led a march of three hundred adults out of Brown Chapel, all in one body rather than in clumps in order to force arrest by Baker, the Laurie Pritchett of Selma. If they made it to the courthouse Sheriff Clark would be waiting for them, which would put King at risk of bodily harm if not death. He and Abernathy were the last to be arrested. Baker did not want them jailed, but they gave him no choice.

At first they were placed with a hundred other protesters in a steaming, ninety-foot holding tank, where King was able to greet and talk with ordinary inmates through the bars. He was appalled to hear from some who had been in for months or even years without knowing the charges. In no mood to make a speech, he proposed a Quaker-type meeting where any of the protesters could speak, sing, or pray as the spirit said do. Abernathy read Psalm 27: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?”¹³² Fervent testimony, prayer, and freedom songs brought bodies and emotions to a fever in this Quaker meeting like none other.

Transferred to a small cell with Abernathy and white SCLC staffer Charles Fager (the jail had just been desegregated), King fasted as usual for the first two days and conducted his jail routine of prayer, meditation, hymn singing, and workouts. He chatted with Fager about the obstacles that lay ahead to fundamental change. “If we are going to achieve real equality,” he said, “the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.”¹³³ He liked what he had tasted in Norway and Sweden.

As leaders hoped, the tempo of protest stepped up during the first week of February. In the afternoon after King was jailed, five hundred schoolchildren, inspired by teachers and parents, joined the grown-ups behind bars. In Marion, Coretta King’s hometown, thirty miles north in Perry County, several hundred adults and young people were jailed in their first Freedom Day. Hundreds more got arrested in both counties by the end of the week, the total of three thousand prisoners surpassing Birmingham’s peak.

Before the chain reaction of arrests that week, SCLC leaders had anticipated a breakthrough in Selma, then moving on to adjoining counties like Perry and Lowndes, where virtually no blacks voted and repression was heavier.

A federal judge’s decision easing registration rules seemed to offer a way for SCLC to leave Selma gracefully. Bevel and Young ordered a moratorium on marching. King might have gone along with such an exit strategy a year or two before, as he had accepted the Birmingham compromise that Shuttlesworth had opposed. He learned from that experience that Shuttlesworth had been right about the city’s backsliding, just as he himself had been right that the truce was adequate to gain national legislation. Now in February 1965 he was not willing to settle for a half-a-loaf victory that would not appreciably expand Selma’s black electorate. Tensions had been rising already between the Voters League and SNCC’s concern with local empowerment on one hand and SCLC’s larger goal of a voting rights law on the other.

From his jail cell King criticized Young for the pause, ordered a new round of protests, and wrote out a detailed game plan for upping the ante, with presidential and congressional intervention and a media offensive. He was not ready to leave town.

In the first month of Selma protests the small SNCC team found itself as an awkward third wheel squeezed between SCLC and the Voters League, not sure of its rightful role. What could they do to further mobilize Selma’s youth? While King was in jail two SNCC organizers drove an hour east to Tuskegee to hear Malcolm X address a packed hall at famed Tuskegee Institute, built by Booker T. Washington. When they met with him afterward, Malcolm encouraged their work and they invited him to visit Selma.

Next morning, to Bevel’s and Young’s shocked chagrin, he showed up at Brown Chapel in time for a morning youth rally. In a hurried parley in the pastor’s study the SCLC staff sought to fence in what he might say, to which he retorted, “Nobody puts words in my mouth.”¹³⁴ The SNCC workers insisted that he speak, freely. Bevel and Young gave in.

Malcolm’s message to the youth rally was restrained and constructive. Calling himself a field slave, with a different perspective than “house Negroes,” he declared that the white folk “should thank Dr. King for holding people in check, for there are others who do not believe in these measures. But I’m not going to try to stir you up and make you do something you wouldn’t have done anyway.” He urged them to take their grievance to the United Nations and put the racists on trial before the world. The young people clapped and cheered.

“I pray that God will bless you in everything that you do,” he concluded. “I pray that you will grow intellectually”—as he had shown the way, especially in the past year—“and I pray that all the fear that has ever been in your heart will be taken out.”¹³⁵ When he returned to the church study Diane Nash apologized for the ministers who had tried to censor him. She confessed that some of them did not understand nonviolence themselves. During the rally he talked with Coretta King, in Selma to visit her jailed husband. She had spoken to the young people to reaffirm the urgency of nonviolent principles.

“Mrs. King,” he said to her, “will you tell Dr. King that I had planned to visit with him in jail.” He couldn’t now because he was late for an African students’ conference in London. It was doubtful he would have gotten in to see him. The two men had met once briefly, the past March, a chance encounter at the Capitol during debate over the civil rights bill.

“I want Dr. King to know that I didn’t come to Selma to make his job difficult. I really did come thinking that I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.”

She was moved by his sincerity and goodwill and told her husband about their conversation when she visited him later that day. “He didn’t react too much one way or the other,” she recalled.¹³⁶

Two weeks later, the chickens came home to roost for Malcolm X. On February 21, he appeared at Harlem’s Audobon Ballroom to unveil the new political program of his Organization of Afro-American Unity, which he wanted to ally with the civil rights movement. He was convinced that he could work with SNCC and even with King. He had been highly impressed by the Selma movement on his brief visit. As he began his address, his wife and children in front of him, Nation of Islam assassins shot him down in a burst of gunfire. They were presumably acting on orders of Malcolm’s rivals in the Nation, who had openly called for the apostate’s death.

THE DAY AFTER Malcolm’s Selma visit, King walked out of jail in time to meet with fifteen mostly liberal congressmen on a fact-finding trip. In a breach of protocol that showed his clout, he announced that he would be meeting with the President, though uninvited. LBJ and his aides were put off by King’s chutzpah, but they acquiesced to a meeting at which Johnson for the first time publicly supported a voting rights bill that his Justice Department was drawing up. Guided by the federal court’s new rules, white and black Selma leaders met and worked with the obstinate county registrar to make black registration swifter and easier. While the Voters League was pleased with incremental progress, SCLC wanted to step up protests in Selma to build pressure for national reform.

The morning after his release from jail, King attended a meeting to decide whether to send two SNCC activists as scouts to forbidding Lowndes County to investigate the climate for voting rights work. The plan was for them to leave early the next morning, Sunday, and get out before dark. Sometimes during meetings King would excuse himself, go into another room, and pray on the decision at hand. When he returned Abernathy would announce with biblical pomp that the word of God was about to be spoken, and King would reveal to them what God had told him. No one was willing to gainsay or second-guess the Lord.

At this meeting, according to a participant, King abruptly started reciting by heart the passage from Hebrew Scriptures about Moses sending twelve scouts into Canaan to scope out the Promised Land. When they came back after forty days, two of the scouts encouraged the Israelites to fight for the Promised Land of milk and honey; the other ten terrified them with reports of giants who would slaughter them. Defying the command of God and of Moses, the people refused to go forward. Moses beseeched God not to kill them all, so instead the Lord banished the Hebrews to the wilderness for forty years. The ten cowardly spies died from a plague. The brave ones, Joshua and Caleb, were the only two of that generation allowed to enter the Promised Land. After reciting his Torah portion, King was followed without pause by other preachers in the circle: Abernathy, then C. T. Vivian, then Hosea Williams, all speaking from memory. The land of milk and honey, one said, would be a land flowing with black people exercising the vote. Telling the biblical tale in this round-robin prayer gave the group courage while revealing the answer. King insisted that the two SNCC spies take the fastest car to Canaan.¹³⁷

Next week King returned to Selma from Washington, ill with a virus, as marches built momentum. Jails full, the sheriff’s frustration led him to loose his posse on young marchers, chasing them with whips and electric cattle prods on a long-distance run into outlying woods. Soon after, Clark was hospitalized with heart pains; in their next courthouse foray marchers prayed for his recovery. At a mass meeting King called for night marches, the explosive element in St. Augustine, to escalate the struggle.

The movement was spreading out through the Black Belt with protests in Perry and Wilcox counties, in Montgomery, and a planned move north to Birmingham. Just out of jail, Rev. Vivian reluctantly answered a call by activists in Marion, the Perry County seat, to speak at a mass meeting that would spill out into the night. After his pep talk at Zion’s Chapel Methodist Church, driving back toward Selma, he was alarmed to pass a twenty-car convoy of siren-blaring state police racing toward Marion. Protesters left the church intending a short march to the courthouse. They were met by a phalanx of state troopers who gave them no chance to turn around. Streetlights went out as the troopers clobbered them with heavy clubs. White toughs attacked newsmen, giving NBC’s Richard Valeriani a near-fatal head wound, beating up UPI photographers, smashing their cameras.

Protesters retreated back to the church but were blocked by people still coming out. A few dozen found refuge in Mack’s Café, but troopers burst inside, shot out the lights, and brutalized people indiscriminately. Cager Lee, eighty-two, beaten bloody on the street, had run into the café after his daughter Viola Jackson. Lee’s grandson Jimmie Lee Jackson, twenty-six, was trying to lead the old man to medical help, but troopers forced them back inside. When they attacked Jackson’s mother, who was aiding her father and son, Jimmie shielded her with his body. Troopers slammed him against a cigarette machine and shot him twice in the stomach. Crawling through a gauntlet of beatings, Jackson managed to escape from the café, then collapsed on the street, bleeding heavily. A friend took him to the small Marion hospital; he was ambulanced to Selma, where they could give him blood.

During the rampage someone ran into Sheriff Clark, off duty in civilian clothes, and asked why he had left his own turf. Things were too quiet in Selma, he replied with a smirk.

Thousands prayed for the devout Jimmie Lee Jackson, a well-loved pulpwood-mill worker and youngest deacon of Marion’s St. James Baptist Church. He had attempted five times to register in Perry County courthouse. Rather than the voting card he risked his life for, Col. Al Lingo, head of the state police, served him at his hospital bed with a warrant for assault and battery with intent to murder a state trooper. Eight days after the shooting he died.

Bevel and Bernard Lafayette mourned with Jackson’s bandaged family in their small house by a creek. The family told Bevel they should keep moving. Cager Lee said he was ready to march again. Weeping as he left their house, Bevel asked Lafayette if he would trek with him to Montgomery. The idea for a march to the state capital, starting from Marion, had come to him in the dark hours before Jackson died, as he walked his own garden of Gethsemane outside the Torch Motel.

“I tell you,” Bevel said to the mass meeting at Brown Chapel the next night, “the death of that man is pushing me kind of hard.” People wailed. He spoke two Bible passages, one about King Herod killing James, the other from Hebrew Scriptures in which Esther was called to go to the king to save the Jews from destruction. The king in this kairos time was George Wallace, their chief oppressor.

Personifying Esther, he yelled out, “I must go see the king!” The assembly pledged that like Esther they would all go on foot. “Be prepared to walk to Montgomery,” he cried. “Be prepared to sleep on the highway!”¹³⁸

Bevel was not the only one driven by a vision of marching to confront the king, but the most vocal. Marion activists felt the same boiling urge; they wanted to carry Jackson’s coffin to Wallace’s office. SCLC staff had been contemplating a march to the capital for months. Ever since Bevel and Diane Nash had dreamed up their Alabama battle plan in the hours after the four girls were blown apart, they knew that the climax would be in Montgomery, where the movement had started out a decade before. But the impulsive Bevel did not seek approval from King or the Voters League before trumpeting the march. A preacher’s fighting call to reenact a biblical journey could not be turned back easily.

“I had to get the people out of a state of grief,” Bevel recalled of his motivation. “If you don’t deal with negative violence and grief, it turns into bitterness. So what I recommended was that people walk to Montgomery, which would give them time to work through their hostility and resentments. If you went back to some of the classical strategies of Gandhi, when you have a great violation of the people and there’s a great sense of injury, you have to give people an honorable means and context in which to express and eliminate that grief and speak decisively back to the issue. Otherwise the movement will break down in violence and chaos.”¹³⁹

SCLC staff and Selma leaders went along with Bevel and grassroots rage and set the date: the journey would begin the next Sunday, March 7, from Selma. King reluctantly OK’d the decision. Bevel persuaded him to stay in Atlanta for his safety. The air was thick with death threats against him. He also felt obligated to lead the communion service at his church after being absent for weeks. They did not expect to get past the bridge over the Alabama River, named for Edmund Pettus, Selma’s own Confederate general, who ruled the county after the Civil War.

On Tuesday, March 2, King spoke at Howard University in Washington, appending his first public criticism of the Vietnam intervention, as “accomplishing nothing.”¹⁴⁰ Three weeks before, National Liberation Front guerrillas, aka Vietcong, assaulted a U.S. base at Pleiku in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, killing several soldiers. Just as the Gulf of Tonkin incident provided the pretext for August’s air attacks and a congressional blank check for more, so the Pleiku incident was the awaited provocation to unleash the “sustained reprisal” bombardment of North Vietnam code-named “Rolling Thunder.” Little could King imagine that these air attacks would mushroom into an air war whose bomb tonnage surpassed the Allied bombing of Europe, Japan, and Korea combined. Six days after King’s Howard speech the first combat marines arrived to defend the sprawling air base at Da Nang. A few weeks later President Johnson secretly changed the marines’ assignment to “search and destroy” the Vietcong.

“THERE WAS THAT PILE of rolled-up blankets,” marcher Maria Varela scribbled on a scrap of paper, “taken off beds and wrapped up with belts, or old ties, or string. There they were in the corner by the altar—a patchwork mountain of rolled-up trust. ‘We are going,’ ‘WE ARE GOING’ spoke that patchwork mountain in its unvalued dignity.”

After workshops in Brown Chapel that included lessons by medics on coping with tear gas, Hosea Williams of SCLC and SNCC’s John Lewis led six hundred people carrying rolled-up blankets past the housing project toward the Alabama River, walking two by two. They were defying an order by Governor Wallace prohibiting the march.

Crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the large-framed Williams whispered to slender Lewis, “John, can you swim?” Lewis shook his head. “I can’t either, and I’m sure we’re gonna end up in that river.” On the downward end of the arching bridge the long thin column, keeping to the sidewalk, was halted by a solid body of gas-masked state troopers. With little warning they lunged at the marchers, smashing heads and lobbing tear-gas grenades, the first thrown by Sheriff Clark as he shrieked, “Get those god-damned niggers! Get those god-damned white niggers!”¹⁴¹ Felled Amelia Boynton, knocked unconscious, barely avoided suffocation by a gas-spewing grenade a trooper had placed by her face.

Troopers and Clark’s mounted posse, the riders with bone-chilling rebel yells, chased and trampled the marchers all the way back to the church headquarters, madly flailing whips, clubs wrapped in barbed wire, and electric cattle prods. Scores were injured, some severely, the lucky ones rescued by movement ambulances. At a Baptist church cops hurled a youth through a stained-glass window of Jesus. Despite a fractured skull, blood flowing, Lewis found strength to direct his fallen comrades out of danger. Back at Brown Chapel Bevel, Williams, and Lewis conferred by phone with King at home in Atlanta. He was upset about the unexpected rampage, regretful that he wasn’t there.

“HE DIDN’T COME, and they went without him,” Varela’s poem, found crumpled in a raincoat, exclaimed. “Picked up their bedrolls, umbrellas (we had laughed about what ‘de lawd’ would do if it rained) and brown paper sacks with toothbrushes.

“I wonder would it have been different had he been there? But no matter.

“A man is allowed his weak moments, and other christs always seem to rise up to take their place. Many hundreds did that day.”¹⁴²

As happened in Birmingham, the graphic televised brutality—sharply contrasting with the protesters’ nonviolent discipline—won over much of the American public. In a rare act of media morality ABC interrupted its national broadcast of the film Judgment at Nuremberg, starring Spencer Tracy as the war-crimes judge, to show the Selma racial pogrom in living color.

Protests against “Bloody Sunday,” demanding federal action, erupted in cities all over the country, including a SNCC sit-in at the attorney general’s office—protesters dragged out late at night—and a ballooning White House vigil and picket line. Congress members called Bloody Sunday “an exercise in terror.”¹⁴³

At King’s direction SCLC flashed telegrams to hundreds of northern clergy urging them to join him two days later to carry on the march. Federal judge Frank Johnson, the swing vote in desegregating Montgomery’s buses, enjoined the Tuesday march pending a hearing. King agonized under opposite pulls from the feds and the locals. At one point he decided to call it off, but finally resolved to proceed. He was not sure he could stop the march without being spurned. But he had never before violated a federal court order. If he could disobey a federal court, why couldn’t white supremacists?

The two thousand singing and chanting marchers, ranks swelled by a Who’s Who of religious notables and a large Unitarian contingent, recrossed the river. A forbidding line of troopers stopped them at the same point as on Sunday. King led the gathering in prayer, then ordered the long column to turn back. They retreated to Brown Chapel singing “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round,” the Selma theme song—an irony not lost on many. Back at the church he promised his followers that they would still get to Montgomery.

King’s unilateral move, apparently a secret last-minute deal with federal officials, angered more-militant protesters and deepened SNCC’s distrust of De Lawd. In King’s view, marching across the bridge to the police barricade and turning back was a reasonable, even honorable compromise, a middle way between unacceptable extremes. He violated the injunction, but to a limited extent. SNCC’s Forman called King’s compromise “a classic example of trickery against the people.”¹⁴⁴ King denied that he had made an agreement with the feds to turn around, claiming that he had decided to halt when they faced an impassable helmeted blockade.

COURTHOUSE MARCHES CONTINUED in Selma. A quiet procession led by youthful Jimmy Webb was halted by deputy sheriff L. C. Crocker, who told them the courthouse was closed.

Webb: All we want to do is go to the lawn of the courthouse, kneel in prayer, and we’ll gladly return—

Crocker: You take your prayers back to your church. That’s the proper place to pray. I’m sure that God’ll hear your prayer just as well down there as he will up here, but you’re not going on this courthouse lawn.

Webb: Sir, whenever there are men in a sinful condition, prayer should be uttered wherever they are.

Crocker: Then why don’t you pray where you are? Go back down there and pray. You think you’re lily white? You think you’re not sinful?

Webb: No.

Crocker: Well then, go back to your church and pray.

Webb: Sir, can we pray together, you and I?

Crocker: You do your prayin’ and I do mine, big boy. You don’t pray for me. I don’t want you to pray for me! Because I don’t think your prayers get above your head.

Webb: Will you pray for us?

Crocker: No, I’m not going to pray for you. I tend to my business, you tend to yours.

“What about love?” a young woman asked him

Crocker: I don’t have to love anybody I don’t want to love. You do your own lovin’. You love your little niggers. I’ll love who I please.

THE RAPID-FIRE EVENTS in Selma, especially the vigilante slaying of Rev. James Reeb, a Boston Unitarian minister—arousing national concern and presidential attention that Jackson’s killing had not—worked magic on Washington politicians, not least the supreme politician in the Oval Office. A sit-in disrupted his own home, a first in the White House. As demonstrations mounted around the country Johnson resolved to make a bill ensuring universal suffrage, with federal registrars and a ban on literacy tests, his most urgent domestic priority. He and Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach quickly crafted a coalition to enact the bill.

George Wallace wired LBJ for a meeting about the crisis. On Saturday morning, March 13, the President gave Wallace the “Johnson treatment” in the Oval Office. Sitting practically on top of him, his steely eyes locked on Wallace’s for three hours, LBJ cajoled and scolded the much smaller man about black people’s right to vote in Alabama, and why the governor should do all in his power to help rather than hinder them. This would stop all the protests. “Why don’t you let the niggers vote?” When Wallace nervously insisted there was nothing he could do, LBJ shot back, “Don’t you shit me, George Wallace!”¹⁴⁵ He goaded Wallace to live a hundred years in the future, instead of a hundred years in the past.

Taking the governor in tow for a Rose Garden press conference, a thousand chanting protesters outside the gate, the President declared that Bloody Sunday and the Reverend Reeb’s killing were “an American tragedy.” Embracing the Selma protests, he called for immediate passage of a strict voting rights bill. He said he had urged Wallace, standing mute by the big guy’s side, to support universal suffrage and the right of peaceful assembly.

The cowed governor admitted to the press that “I have much more respect for him than I thought I’d ever have. If I hadn’t left when I did,” he quipped, “he’d have had me coming out for civil rights.”¹⁴⁶ But Wallace in Johnson’s maw was a different animal than the fox in his Alabama lair.

Selma protesters huddled around worn black-and-white TV sets on Monday evening, March 15, to watch the President plead for the bill, with uncharacteristic passion, before a joint session of Congress and 70 million viewers. No president had made such an address on a domestic matter for two decades, never before on television.

“At times history and fate meet in a single time in a single place,” he began, his big frame hunched over the lectern, “to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.” He recalled his own encounters with discrimination against Mexicans as a young Texas schoolteacher and declared: “I do not want to be the president who built empires, or sought grandeur, or extended domain. I want to be the president who helped to feed the hungry.”¹⁴⁷ No doubt LBJ’s finest hour.

SCLC leaders were watching the speech at a Selma participant’s home. When Johnson promised the nation that “we shall overcome,” a subdued Martin King blinked tears while his colleagues cheered. They had never seen him cry before.

After a Montgomery hearing Judge Frank Johnson ruled that the extreme nature of wrongs black citizens were facing justified redress to the outer limit of the First Amendment’s right of peaceful assembly. He permitted protesters to march on the highway to Montgomery, even if disrupting traffic; the state of Alabama was responsible for protecting them; and if the state failed to, the federal government would step in. The protest would be limited to three hundred where Highway 80 was two lanes, but unlimited for the first and last legs, especially entering the capital.

Under fierce presidential pressure Wallace agreed to provide protection, then reneged, wiring LBJ that he did not have adequate forces. Infuriated at this double cross, Johnson urged him to call up the Alabama National Guard. When Wallace balked, playing into his hand, the President federalized the Alabama guard and sent in two thousand army troops, including two field hospitals, one of the largest military deployments in the South since Union forces pulled out in 1877.

Before the trek could commence, SCLC staff had to pull together a monumental logistics operation: inviting a multitude of outsiders, setting up encampments along the route, requisitioning food, blankets, and sleeping bags for thousands, recruiting medical teams—and the delicate task of choosing three hundred privileged souls to carry the torch all fifty miles. At a mass meeting logistics czar Hosea Williams pleaded “dire need of personnel with formal training and experience in the following categories: portable latrines, water tanks, bath trucks, garbage trucks, medical service, camp housing, parade marshals, campsite security guards, food, office administration, finance, transportation, communications, press, public relations, electricity and the screening of marchers.”¹⁴⁸ A team of white theologians signed up to cook garbage cans full of hot meals and drive them to the nightly encampments at black farms along the way.

King ventured to Montgomery in advance of his troops to make sure that its black community would welcome them. Partly because he (and then Abernathy) had left town, little of the spirit of ’56 had endured. Ministers and other local leaders were displeased when SNCC activists organized courthouse marches in support of Selma sisters and brothers. The day after the President’s historic speech to Congress, peaceful Montgomery protesters were brutally attacked by sheriff’s men in a less noticed reprise of Bloody Sunday. King led another march to the courthouse, negotiated a public apology from old nemesis Sheriff Mac Butler, and mediated among angry SNCC activists, arrogant SCLC staff like Bevel, and put-upon preachers resting on dried-up laurels.

On the first day of spring, Sunday, March 21, several thousand pilgrims flowed over the Pettus Bridge. Wearing flower leis brought by a Hawaiian delegation, King and other leaders in the front row marched arm in arm with white clergy, including a guest of honor, Jewish theologian and Hasidic rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. King and Heschel, a Polish émigré, had first met at a conference on religion and race in Chicago two years before. They saw eye to eye on the imperative of the prophetic voice calling passionately for social justice in the modern world, a voice each of them exemplified. The white-bearded Heschel had just led a march in New York to FBI headquarters protesting brutality against Selma protesters. Now in Selma, he wrote in his diary that “I felt a sense of the Holy in what I was doing.” He felt “as though my legs were praying.”¹⁴⁹

The marchers paused at the site of the bloody assault. This time there was no turning back. Flanked on either side by rows of bayonet-wielding soldiers, marchers passed crowds of whites who yelled out ugly words but couldn’t get close. For five days the mud-caked assembly snaked through the humid heat and drenching rain, through the spooky swamps of Lowndes County, past rickety Baptist churches, half-collapsed shacks whose inhabitants waved warmly, and a dilapidated black school in Trickem with no roof.

King marched along Jefferson Davis Highway for the first three days, appearing “terribly tired” and aloof. “He seemed to have his mind on something else all the time,” a marcher recalled. “He wasn’t anything like a leader in the sense of communicating with people” openly, a theologian rued.¹⁵⁰ To the extent that he was detached and uncommunicative, this was a different King than the one who loved to talk and listen to ordinary people, especially black folk with whom he felt more comfortable. The depression that had spiked in Oslo had not eased its grip. He had withdrawn into inner recesses, seeking sanctuary in the privacy of his own soul.

And the long march was strenuous. King’s feet like all the others’ got painfully blistered. The foot soldiers’ feet were treated every night by volunteer docs. But unlike all the others, who slept on cots or the ground, King camped out in a mobile home that accompanied him. In midweek he flew off to a fund-raising gig in Cleveland and returned for the climax.

The marchers multiplied as they approached Montgomery. On the last night they were regaled by Belafonte, Joan Baez, and other entertainers. Next morning, Thursday, March 25, at least twenty-five thousand people strode confidently into downtown Montgomery and up Dexter Avenue, filling the wide street toward the white statehouse flying the Confederate flag. Wallace peered sheepishly at the surging masses below his window who were petitioning him for freedom—impressed in spite of himself. King stood near the bronze star marking the 1861 inaugural site of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, covered with plywood to protect it from the black rabble. A few feet away stood a Confederate cannon and Davis’s statue.

King must have felt wistful as he looked down to the left of the vast assemblage at the red brick church he had pastored. There it had all begun for him. In ten years the movement had traversed the South and grown into the nation’s preeminent political force. On this day many thousands of participants had come back to its birthplace for the largest-ever freedom gathering in the South. King’s address was a breathtaking synthesis of realism and hope, forbearance and faith, courage and love.

“My people, my people, listen! The battle is in our hands. I must admit to you there are still some difficulties ahead. We are still in for a season of suffering. I must admit to you there are still jail cells waiting for us, dark and difficult moments.

“We will be able to change all of these conditions.

“How long?” he asked the faithful below. “Not long,” he answered, offering the litany over and over as a multitude of voices joined in the rhythmic crescendo.

“How long?” he concluded. “Not long, ’cause mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on.

“He has sounded forth the trumpets that shall never call retreat. He is lifting up the hearts of man before His judgment seat. Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him. Be jubilant, my feet. Our God is marching on.”¹⁵¹

One of his rapt listeners was Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a white Unitarian activist from Detroit who had labored with boundless energy to make the march triumph. That morning she had felt a strong premonition that someone would be killed. As she drove her conspicuous green Oldsmobile back to Montgomery that night with a black teenage boy to ferry another carload home to Selma, she was shot to death by four Klansmen, one of them FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe, on a desolate stretch of Lowndes County.

12

 

SCLC left a skeletal crew in Selma as it prepared to create more Selmas across Alabama’s Black Belt, and as the voting rights measure moved forward through Congress more quickly than the 1964 bill. Frederick Reese, Amelia Boynton, and other local leaders—their stature raised by the protest campaign—resented SCLC’s expected departure. SCLC’s fourth bug-out in as many years—it seemed almost an annual rite of passage—aggravated SNCC’s mistrust of King and his staff. They felt that De Lawd had let them down once again.

But SCLC had left Selma in better shape than St. Augustine, Birmingham, Albany, or even Montgomery. Those black communities had sometimes felt worse off after King’s departure—and more vulnerable to retaliation—even while the regional and national movement gained ground. In Selma voter registration did rise, with expectation of full enfranchisement by the new voting rights law. Tested by protesters, Selma had desegregated public accommodations and was taking steps to integrate schools. The climate of intimidation and fear had cooled, as the new moderate city government negotiated with Reese, Boynton, and other black leaders to improve race relations. These talks upset the White Citizens Council types. Even if officials were only going through the motions, waiting for the burnout of black assertion, a Reconstruction to be replaced by Redemption, they were compelled to take black demands seriously. Unlike the other battlegrounds, black voters could potentially win control of Selma and Dallas County, as they later did. Local black leadership had been strengthened not diminished by SCLC’s political tornado, which was SNCC’s benchmark for a successful campaign.

SNCC was not content to criticize its big brother. As always, it walked the talk. They would show the movement and the world what local empowerment could mean, in an Alabama Black Belt county where the Confederacy still held sway.

The day after Viola Liuzzo’s murder, seasoned SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael arrived in Lowndes County with a sleeping bag and the name of someone to stay with. He had pressed the flesh with Lowndes residents along the march, winning their trust. He was joined by a handful of others, including Scott B. Smith Jr., just recovered from a gang shooting in Chicago; in the hospital his mother had told him it was time for him to do something right for his people.¹⁵²

Carmichael hailed from a much different world. Born in Trinidad, he had grown up in New York ghettos and graduated from elite Bronx High School of Science, where he hung with Old Left children, white and black. He had attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and had thrown himself into the sit-ins and freedom rides, one whose baptism by fire was Mississippi’s Parchman penitentiary. He had recently won praise as a district director of Mississippi Freedom Summer.

SNCC leaders decided that if they could get impoverished blacks to vote in this “totalitarian” county—where they were four-fifths of the population and not one voted—it could be a prototype for the Deep South. Having learned from the MFDP crusade that blacks could not rely on white allies and must create their own base of power independent of the Democrats, Carmichael’s cadre carefully organized local folk, notably ministers and older women, to form the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). An obscure law made it feasible to qualify an alternative county party. LCFO’s symbol was a black panther. When pressured the panther “moves back until it is cornered,” explained LCFO chair John Hulett, longtime local activist, father of seven, “then it comes out fighting for life or death. We felt we had been pushed back long enough.”¹⁵³

The plan was simple, wrote SNCC program secretary Cleveland Sellers: “We intended to register as many blacks as we could, and take over the county.” After achieving success in Lowndes “we intended to widen our base by branching out and doing the same thing in surrounding counties. We were convinced that we had found The Lever we had been searching for.”¹⁵⁴

Black enfranchisement steadily took hold in Lowndes, boosted by federal registrars who came with the Voting Rights Act. White retaliation spiked. In the county seat of Hayneville Jonathan Daniels, a white Episcopal seminarian involved in voting work, was murdered in broad daylight by a deputy sheriff as he shielded a black girl from getting shot.

A grassroots LCFO convention chose candidates for county offices and conducted a remarkable grassroots campaign during summer and fall 1966. At a spirited church rally on election eve, the candidate for tax assessor, Alice Moore, gave a short speech. “My platform is tax the rich and feed the poor,” she announced to roaring applause. Hulett pledged that they would govern the county “as a model for democracy.”¹⁵⁵ Although they lost every seat, the party of the black panther made a worthy start toward building a network of indigenous black political organizations. Some years later the black majority took power in Lowndes County. Hulett was elected sheriff and county supervisor.

ON THE SUNDAY AFTER the marvelous march on Montgomery, King appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press from San Francisco. He let it be known that the Alabama campaign, far from finished, was about to intensify. Liuzzo’s death had distressed him. It sharpened his animus toward Alabama politicians, whom he blamed as much as the Klan. The next step, he announced, would be a national boycott of Alabama products. Unions would refuse to ship goods to or from the state. SCLC would lean on the feds to suspend contracts with Alabama firms. The boycott would aim at getting Alabama’s white moderates to pressure the statehouse to enfranchise black citizens and end the reign of terror. His words recalled the intemperance of SNCC’s John Lewis at the great march in August 1963, so controversial at the time. It was a measure of how far King had traveled in eighteen turbulent months.

The response of media commentators and liberal allies was uniformly negative. Perhaps they had hoped King and his legions would ride off into history after he had told his people in Montgomery that victory would not be long. Movement heavyweights scored the boycott plan. Rustin called it stupid. It was the first time a King initiative had been publicly rebuked by liberals, a turning point in his relationship with them. But he would not back off, yet.

The bittersweet Selma aftermath marked the beginning of a two-year interval in which Bevel would shape King’s course as much as Rustin and Levison had earlier. While most Selma activists and SCLC were burned out, King beyond exhaustion, Bevel had gotten warmed up. He saw the Selma-to-Montgomery march as the dam break in his grand plan to free Alabama from tyranny. His strategic vision sometimes crossing the line of rationality, he nonetheless won King’s backing for a scenario that climaxed with mass arrests in Montgomery for disrupting state operations. Bevel imagined shutting down the legislature and even removing Governor Wallace by nonviolent abduction. This was roughly the script by Bevel and Nash that King had scoffed at a year earlier.

The SCLC board met in Baltimore in late March 1965 to hear proposals for new directions. The circumspect Young called for a “new militancy.” Less than wholeheartedly the board approved the boycott of Alabama, watered down, but King failed to link it with the mass civil disobedience in Montgomery that Bevel had designed the boycott to support; one without the other would not reach the goal. King and his board also approved a competing plan by Hosea Williams for a summer campaign, SCOPE, that would take Mississippi Freedom Summer to the rest of the South, combining voter registration with citizenship education, conducted by hundreds of northern students. With some reservation the board backed King’s resolution to focus more on poverty and to move into northern cities.

In typical fashion King juggled the dueling projects of SCLC’s two field marshals, giving both Bevel and Williams a nod. But the strapped organization could not handle both enterprises. When SCLC committed half a million dollars to SCOPE and gave Williams control over all southern field staff (including Bevel), it was evident that King had made a choice. He had not been up-front about it. He suffered a severe hit of depression during April 1965 (caused, his doctors thought, by extreme fatigue) and was not fully in charge. By the time he returned from a week’s rest in Miami and Nassau, SCOPE was revving up and the Alabama Project sputtering. Withering criticism of the Alabama boycott combined with the exhaustion of grassroots forces and Bevel’s alienation from Montgomery’s local leadership would have made the Alabama revolt dubious at best. But SCOPE, rife with mismanagement and lax supervision of its young organizers, proved an embarrassment, a shadow of Freedom Summer 1964. SCLC was drifting once again.

By summer the dispirited Bevel had moved to Chicago to plant new seeds. In the northern battleground, where Mississippi-born Bevel had grown up, King would follow his lead.

During spring 1965, as marines landed both in Vietnam and in the Dominican Republic, King worried more about relations with the SNCC community than his own staff’s infighting. The conflict was all about the use and abuse of leadership. SNCC organizers accused SCLC of exploiting local people for the sake of King’s aggrandizement and SCLC’s reach for national power. They did not believe in leadership trickling down but rather in its welling up. They had long felt that the cult of personality around De Lawd undermined the emergence of grassroots leaders who, facing retaliatory violence, had to keep the local movement going after the media show left town.

King felt guilty about his royal status and was stressed by its demands; it contributed mightily to his depression. But he was convinced of its necessity and addicted to its comforts. It was like a drug, with fearsome highs and lows. Although he suffered from serious depression, he did not show signs of bipolar disorder (manic depression) as did an unsettling number of 1960s’ radical organizers, black and white. His highs were not so high (and always modulated); his lows not quite so low, until later. He did not exhibit the kind of manic excitement that, for example, Bevel was known for.

While SNCC people bristled at SCLC’s haughtiness, the latter group felt that despite their principled dedication, SNCC cadres were undisciplined, anarchistic, and heading toward separatism. King shared these criticisms, though he was fond of the SNCC people and had friendly relations with them as individuals. Although they felt hostility toward his staff, SNCC’s umbrage toward King was more about disappointment than disrespect.

On April 30, Harry Belafonte mediated a respectful gripe session between the two groups to grapple with their differences. Putting aside the most divisive issues that might have been unresolvable, they reached consensus on all major points except SCLC’s insistence on excluding Communists from the movement. To reporters after, King downplayed feuding between the groups that the media had been sensationalizing since Selma. They hammered out a unity statement that finessed the split over radicalism. The movement “is by its very nature a radical movement which seeks to eliminate an established order of racism and segregation.”¹⁵⁶

Tutored by Levison, Clarence Jones, and other New York advisers, King grew alarmed about President Johnson’s belligerent foreign policy in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. He opposed LBJ’s intervention in the Dominican Republic, which upheld the military junta that had overthrown democratically elected Juan Bosch. The furtive escalation in Vietnam, which Johnson refused to explain or even own up to, impelled him to speak out against it firmly.

At a rally in Petersburg, Virginia, in early July he declared that the war in Vietnam “must be stopped,” with a negotiated settlement that included the Vietcong. “I’m not going to sit by and see war escalated without saying anything about it.” He urged citizens to conduct “peace rallies just like we have freedom rallies,” but later denied calling for antiwar protest.¹⁵⁷ In mid-April 1965 Students for a Democratic Society had mounted the first large Vietnam peace march, bringing twenty-five thousand protesters to Washington. When a journalist asked him why he was sounding off about Vietnam, King replied, “I’m much more than a civil rights leader.”¹⁵⁸

Five days after the Petersburg rally he spoke on the phone with LBJ to strategize about a snag in the voting rights bill nearing passage. He claimed that his recent statement on Vietnam “in no way is an attempt to engage in a criticism of your policies,” but that the press “lifted it out of context.” Johnson countered that it had “distressed” him.

“I’d welcome a chance to review with you my problems and our alternatives there.” He tried to justify his current policy and why the bombing of North Vietnam was necessary.

“I don’t want to pull down the flag and come home running with my tail between my legs.” But “I don’t want to get us in a war with China and Russia. So I’ve got a pretty tough problem. And I’m not all wise.” Aware of whom he was talking to, “I pray every night to get direction and judgment and leadership that permit me to do what’s right.”

Biting his tongue, King complimented him for his “true leadership and true greatness,” especially in civil rights.¹⁵⁹

In fact, the commander-in-chief’s stealth in escalating the war bespoke his grave doubts about it. He did not think he could win in Vietnam—only stave off defeat. After three months of wrangling, including a long but spineless Senate filibuster, an exceptionally strong voting rights bill passed Congress. LBJ signed it amid the usual pomp on August 6, 1965, a bust of Lincoln peering over his shoulder in the Capitol Rotunda. Here Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The Selma crusade, culmination of the entire southern movement, especially voting rights campaigns, not only turned the White House around but sped up the legislative process, toughened the bill, and won over the wavering. New York Democrat Emanuel Celler, head of the House judiciary subcommittee that shaped it, acknowledged that the “climate of public opinion throughout the nation has so changed because of the Alabama outrages, as to make assured passage of this solid bill—a bill that would have been inconceivable a year ago.”¹⁶⁰ Activists had walked a long, tortuous road since black suffrage agitation had begun in the North a century and a quarter past.

Implementation of the Voting Rights Act in the eleven covered southern states, particularly the ban on literacy tests and use of federal registrars, brought a big jump in black registration. From 1967 on, a growing majority of those eligible were registered. The number of southern black officeholders rose substantially, though not proportionately with black voters. Nearly all were local positions. Another generation passed before black politicians won statewide office. Although fear of reprisal diminished with blacks now serving on juries, white elites still conspired to subvert black voting with intimidation, evasions of the law, registration obstacles, purging voting rolls, gerrymandering districts, and other practices that lasted into the twenty-first century.

Five days after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, the arrest and beating of a young black man for drunk driving in the Watts ghetto of Los Angeles set off rioting by several thousand blacks. Violence escalated over the week in a sweltering heat wave, as black men and women looted stores and firebombed businesses. The California National Guard, aided by the army, belatedly restored order with excessive firepower. Thirty-four people died, mostly black, hundreds were injured, about four thousand jailed.

Black ministers in Los Angeles beseeched King to help calm the fever. He arrived in the burned-out ghetto as the uprising subsided and spoke to gatherings of stunned residents. Next day he met with the rightwing mayor and police chief about police brutality and urged a civilian review board. Both officials denounced him.

King was shaken by the warlike destruction he witnessed, block after block in smoky ruin, his first swallowing of the strange fruit of ghetto rage. “He was absolutely undone,” Rustin recalled. For over two years Rustin had been trying to convince him that the inner cities were time bombs of mad misery, that black oppression was economic as much as racial. “I think it was the first time he really understood.”

King called the rioting “a class revolt of underprivileged against privileged.”¹⁶¹ But he was disheartened to hear from the young rebels that despite loss of black life and gutting of black business, they believed they had won. They had drawn the nation’s attention to their desperation.

After the Watts revolt of August 1965, which wrenched his soul, Martin King began his journey from moderate radical to revolutionary. He was leaping beyond Lincoln into an unknown land.

IN EARLY JUNE 1966 quixotic James Meredith, thirty-three, set off on a solitary march through his native Mississippi to make the point that black people could live like human beings. After serving for nine years in the U.S. Air Force, Meredith, born to a poor farm family, had integrated “Ole Miss” in 1962 with the strong arm of federal troops—two people were killed in the white rioting—and became its first black graduate a year later. Just after commencing his “march against fear,” a white racist ambushed him by shotgun, seriously injuring him, which precipitated a dramatic conflict among the movement’s leaders that had historic repercussions.

The civil rights generals converged at Meredith’s hospital bedside in Memphis. They resolved to jointly continue his march against fear, to reunify the movement and to push voter registration in places where the feds were delinquent in enforcing the new voting law. King had just started an SCLC campaign in Chicago, ultimately unsuccessful, to force Mayor Richard Daley to end racism in housing and hiring and to prove that nonviolent action could work in explosive northern ghettos. Stokely Carmichael had been elected chair of SNCC in May. Dynamic ex–freedom rider Ruby Doris Robinson replaced Jim Forman as executive secretary, the first woman in a SNCC leadership position. At this pivotal meeting the organization decided that white SNCC members should organize only in white communities. SNCC had crossed the Rubicon toward becoming a separatist, black nationalist organization that no longer adhered to nonviolent principles. CORE was pursuing a parallel path of black militancy, with a particular focus on black economic development.

In Memphis Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young angrily packed their bags when Carmichael, backed by CORE’s Floyd McKissick, won King’s reluctant assent for the march to minimize white participation, to have protection from the armed Deacons for Defense, and to promote independent black organization.

As the marchers trod through familiar SNCC territory in the Delta, they roused the local folk and expanded voting rolls but were met by ferocious police assaults. After being jailed for setting up sleeping tents, Carmichael was warmly welcomed by a huge night rally in Greenwood.

“This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested—and I ain’t going to jail no more!” The crowd cheered him on. “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” SNCC’s Willie Ricks led the assembly in passionate cries of “Black Power!” repeated over and over. The expression, which starkly encapsulated SNCC’s new political vision, had been used before by Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and others, but now caught on and electrified black youth all over the country as it ignited a storm of criticism from older leaders and white allies. On the march the nightly rallies turned into contests over which chant, “Black Power” or “Freedom now,” could drown out the other.

In Yazoo City, where to his chagrin he had been booed by some marchers, King held a long summit meeting with Carmichael, McKissick, and other leaders to try to resolve the antagonism. He said he understood the new slogan’s magnetic draw to young blacks, whose expectations had been lifted by himself and others, but who felt bitter and betrayed because their elders were unable to deliver on their promises. Yet he argued that the slogan would be self-defeating for the movement. Leaders must be concerned with how their rhetoric was interpreted, he counseled. No one doubted his genius for shaping his own words to be understood as he meant them. Words must both fire up and cool down.

While the concept of black power was sound, he said, the slogan had the “wrong connotations.” He worried about the violent images it conjured up and the media’s alarmism. Carmichael replied that the issue of violence or nonviolence was irrelevant, a remark bruising to King.

“Power is the only thing respected in this world,” he asserted, “and we must get it at any cost.” He looked King straight in the eyes. “Martin, you know as well as I do that practically every other ethnic group in America has done just this,” creating its own political and economic power base to advance itself. “The Jews, the Irish and the Italians did it. Why can’t we?”

“That is just the point,” King answered. “No one has ever heard the Jews publicly chant a slogan of Jewish power, but they have power. The same thing is true of the Irish and Italians. Neither group has used a slogan of Irish or Italian power, but they have worked hard to achieve it. This is exactly what we must do. We must use every constructive means to amass economic and political power. This is the kind of legitimate power we need. We must work to build racial pride and refute the notion that black is evil and ugly. But this must come through a program, not merely through a slogan.”

Carmichael and McKissick insisted that slogans were crucial, as they had been all along. “What we need is a new slogan with ‘black’ in it.” King, master sloganeer, did not gainsay the need for one.

“Why not use the slogan ‘black consciousness’ or ‘black equality’?” he asked. “The words ‘black’ and ‘power’ together give the impression that we are talking about black domination rather than black equality.” He didn’t have to be reminded how white hysteria about “black domination,” “black rule,” had damaged black-led Reconstruction after the Civil War. Carmichael countered that neither slogan would have the appeal and rhetorical force of ‘black power.’

“Martin,” Carmichael confessed, “I deliberately decided to raise this issue on the march in order to give it a national forum, and force you to take a stand for Black Power.” King let out his full-throated baritone laugh.

“I have been used before. One more time won’t hurt.”¹⁶² He and his younger adversaries were unbending, neither side swaying the other. Out of respect for De Lawd the SNCC and CORE chiefs agreed to cease using either slogan until the expedition was over. Later King disavowed the Black Power slogan, but he never repudiated Carmichael or SNCC. He still hoped for a united black movement.

Despite the acrimony, some SNCC activists were impressed with King when they made friends with him hiking along the hot highway, “discussing strategy, tactics and our dreams.” SNCC leader Cleveland Sellers found that King had an engaging sense of humor and an open mind, and that he was “much less conservative than we initially believed. I will never forget his magnificent speeches at the nightly rallies. Nor the humble smile that spread across his face when throngs of admirers rushed forward to touch him.” He was “a staunch ally and a true brother.”¹⁶³