Pillar of Fire (142 page)

*“I felt that we could not say no to Dr. King after we had applauded him and had given him the Dahlberg Peace Award at our convention,” she told reporters.

*On the legal front, Katzenbach did not dispute the published contention of law professors that the “breakdown” of justice in Mississippi justified federal intervention under 10 U.S.C. 331-34. He did argue that the June 26 FBI arrests in Itta Bena were legal only because the white assailants had loudly announced their desire to punish Negro voters—a rare, almost cinematic, declaration of intent that met the Supreme Court's absurdly restrictive test of federal jurisdiction from the
Screws
case.

*To the
Chicago Defender
, John Ali denied the accusation of corruption and violence as “just charges…allegations…lies.”

*Maddox recalled the pivotal incident in his 1975 memoir: “The photographs of Lester Maddox and his son, armed with pistol and pick handle in defense of what was theirs, were widely circulated, and everywhere the liberal press made me out a racist and bigot and rabble-rouser. I knew then, just as I know now, that I was trying to protect not only the rights of Lester Maddox, but of every citizen, including the three men I chased off my property….”

*Jackson's Robert E. Lee Hotel posted a sign on the front door: “Closed in Despair—Civil Rights Bill Unconstitutional.” As a private club, the management invited the entire Mississippi legislature to board without charge during a special session called to convert the state school system into segregated clubs, which proved impractical.

*With clear trepidation, Robert Moses told a July 5 news conference that the dispatch of summer workers into the McComb region resolved a long-deferred choice between ignoring the Negroes there or “sharing their terror with them.”

*When Twine recovered enough to try again, tensely divided observers watched him take a seat in the Palms restaurant. Managers tried to compromise by bringing Twine his order in a sack for takeout, whereupon several of the Negro cooks threw down their aprons and stalked off the job, one saying, “That ain't no trash out there.”

†Later that July, Galimore died in an automobile crash near the Bears' summer training camp.

*A waterlogged notice found in a jeans pocket helped identify Charles Moore as one of several hundred students expelled on May 20 for protesting social restrictions at no-nonsense Alcorn A&M. Killers seized him on his way home.

*“…girls with dank blond hair, parading in dirty blue jeans; college boys in sweat shirts and Beatle haircuts; shaggy and unkempt intellectuals; bearded Negro men and chanting Negro women.”

†“It was a gathering of the utterly comfortable, come together to protest that they should be having it better…angry even in victory.”

*“The Georgia delegation,” recalled a Cleveland paper, “for many years was headed by the first Negro national committeeman in either party, Henry Lincoln Johnson.”

*The Bureau's sole initiative in the case was to cull from private records the victim's confessions to social workers that he liked to fight, skip school, and “get high on whiskey”—a portrait that contrasted sharply with
Jet
magazine's eulogy for “Little Jimmy,” as a “quiet youth” who worked in a neighborhood store and volunteered for summer school.

*Noting that Washington, D.C., was then the only major city with a nonwhite majority, White projected that by 1990—“almost tomorrow in the eyes of history—these trends,
if unchanged
, will give America a civilization in which seven of her ten largest cities (all except New York, Los Angeles and Houston) will have Negro majorities; and the civilization in this country will be one of metropolitan clusters with Negroes congested in turmoil in the central cities and whites defending their ramparts in the suburbs…. Something has got to give.”

*“I have Jack Valenti, who nobody knows, and Bill Moyers, and Walter [Jenkins],” Johnson said privately. “That's my team here. The rest of them are their people.”

*Johnson knew that Kennedy did not like the front-runner and eventual nominee, Senator Hubert Humphrey, because he had run against John Kennedy in the presidential primaries of 1960. Also, Johnson's advisers warned that advance notice would give disappointed contenders time to rally against any choice.

*Three decades later, the prevailing judgment of historian Stanley Karnow and others held that the Tuesday attack never happened.

†
Newsweek
: “The U.S. ships blazed out salvo after salvo of shells. Torpedoes whipped by, some only 100 feet from the destroyers' beams. A [North Vietnamese] PT boat burst into flames and sank. More U.S. jets swooped in….For more than three hours the battle continued in the turbulent seas. Another PT boat exploded….”
Life
: “There was now plenty for the radar-directed guns to shoot at. The
Maddox
and the
Joy
were throwing everything they had.”

*During World War II, the Court overturned the federal conviction of a Georgia sheriff named Claude Screws, who methodically had beaten to death a handcuffed Negro prisoner in his custody, on the ground that his deed, while “a shocking and revolting episode in law enforcement,” lacked a distinct, provable motive that applied to federal rather than state crime.

*“In this course of human events, it has become necessary for the Negro people to break away from the customs which have made it very difficult for the Negro to get his God-given rights. We, as citizens of Mississippi, do hereby state….”

*This plank protested evacuations set for October 22, when the Atomic Energy Commission detonated a 5-kiloton underground device near Hattiesburg. Stronger than expected blast effects lifted the surface of the earth ten inches and rolled detectable tremors as far away as Finland. Shortly after this first—and last—nuclear test east of the Mississippi, New York's Port Authority abandoned plans to clear ground for a new airport with visionary applications of atomic force.

*
Playboy
interviewer Alex Haley—whose book subject, Malcolm X, remained overseas—sweetened the magazine's offer with his own admiration. If King would sit for an interview, Haley promised to donate his entire writing fee to SCLC.

*“The motivation of King, of course, is well known to yourself,” Wilkins told Johnson. “You know some of the forces behind him.”

*In
Adickes v. S. H. Kress & Co
. (1970), Justice John Harlan delivered the prevailing opinion that lower federal courts had erred in summarily dismissing the Adickes complaint, and remanded the case to Mississippi for further proceedings, which Adickes chose not to pursue.

*Johnson had put Humphrey's challenge succinctly to Walter Reuther on August 17: “You better talk to Hubert Humphrey, because I'm telling you that he's got no future in this party at all if this big war comes off here, and the South walks out, and we all get in a hell of a mess.”

*Johnson had sent a plane to fetch the Steinbecks from their home on Long Island. The novelist had developed a private bond with the President since volunteering to design for him an aura of personal folklore, which he defined as a “vernacular of the spirit…. Lincoln breathed it, Kennedy exuded it…. LBJ exudes little of it, although I think he would like to.”

*“…The times require leadership about which there is no doubt and a voice that men of all parties, sections, and color can follow. I have learned after trying very hard that I am not that voice or that leader. Therefore….”

†Johnson referred to President Woodrow Wilson, who suffered a debilitating stroke in 1920, toward the end of his second term.

*Johnson reached one of the three before the commotion on the convention floor that night. “You're a patriot,” he told Doug Wynn of Greenville, a family friend. “…This is history and you'll always be proud of this.” Within days, the President would be asking the Justice Department to protect the nonwalkouts from Klan death threats on their return to Mississippi.

*“These letters…have
not
been appreciated,” wrote Judge H. C. Echols, who added his criticism of FBI methods: “Personally I thought your agents had no right to give Mr. Guest a birthday cake….”

*In the
Times
, Orthodox Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik rejected talk of kinship with “any other faith community as ‘brethren'”: “Rabbi Says Faiths Are Not Related.”

*Moore's volunteers for Mississippi came disproportionately out of the New York FBI office, where agents wished to escape the notoriously clumsy supervision of Assistant Director John “Cement Head” Malone.

*“Now the Black Muslims say they're supportive, they're looking out for each other,” Barnette said in a 1965 interview. “But when Ronald Stokes was killed, no support was given…. His child had to live in the home of my aunt, who is a Christian, for one year. Not a Muslim from Boston came to visit that child….”

†In its closing intercept, the FBI recorded a phone notice from an unknown foreign cleric who pronounced Malcolm an orthodox Muslim qualified to “spread Islam among the Afro-Americans.”

*Lawyers for the station submitted transcripts of the McComb broadcasts as evidence of fair (or reformed) racial coverage, in rebuttal of the FCC license challenge prepared in March of 1964 by researchers from the National Council of Churches. The case would consume the balance of the decade. Judge Warren Burger—in his last decision before becoming U.S. Chief Justice—revoked WLBT's license in a landmark 1969 decision that established procedural rights for consumers and minorities in broadcast license awards. Ownership of the former WLBT-TV devolved to a consortium that included NAACP chairman Aaron Henry.

*One of every ten American students lived in California, which became the country's most populous state in 1964. Nationally, the first baby boom cohort left high school that year in numbers bulging one million more than in 1963.

*“I don't want you sneaking around down any back alleys and signing any niggers,” Yankees president George Weiss instructed scouts into the 1960s.

*His 61 percent of the national vote exceeded Roosevelt's record of 60.8 percent in 1936, as well as Richard Nixon's future mark of 60.7 percent (1972), for the remainder of the twentieth century.

*“Their defense is always that it must have come from somebody in your office,” Katzenbach wryly stated in a 1969 oral history. “…You get back thirty seconds later: they made a complete full field investigation [and] it was not leaked by anybody in the FBI. [laughter] And they had positive evidence that it was not. But of course they run that whole operation there.”

*“The added touch of the group photograph was just so nice of you,” Carey wrote Hoover in 1959. In 1960: “I cannot tell you how pleased I was to note that both Houses of Congress joined in voting you a full pay, whenever you may retire.”

*In 1970, after King's death,
Time
published Hoover's tough-guy account of the 1964 meeting: “I said, ‘Mr. King'—I never called him reverend—‘stop right there. You're lying.'”

*Eskridge promptly wrote NAACP lawyer Jack Greenberg on King's behalf: “Will you help relieve his mind of this pressing problem?”

*“I remember the conversation well,” added Moyers, “because you had just arrived at the Ranch at midnight, your time, and called me. I was having dinner at a restaurant and talked from a phone booth. I felt you were doing the right and honorable thing….”

*To buttress the contention that the recent elections excluded Negro voters illegally, King recited the 1870 statute that readmitted Mississippi to the Union on condition that Negro residents of age be allowed to vote freely unless they were “convicts or insane.”