Pillar of Fire (23 page)

When the alphabet came to Montana, Chet Huntley told viewers that the schools in his home state had been integrated with the few Montanans of color. Half of NBC's dominant news team, Huntley was a formidable presence as a Western, conservative balance to the more urbane David Brinkley—a kind of real-life model for the rugged “Marlboro Man” of cigarette advertising. His stoic delivery accented a startling departure into reflection. “We were a frontier people,” he said, “or at least our fathers were, and the tradition of judging each man by his merits had by no means died out. Still, in an odd kind of way, the Negro was outside our tradition, a thing apart. In a sense we never really saw him, not the way we saw our friends. We never looked with honesty at Negroes the way we examined the anatomy of a grasshopper, say, or speculated on the after-hours life of our teacher. We looked, but we had been told what to see.” Over old footage of lynchings, Negroes eating watermelons, cross burnings by the Klan, and black faces conniving in minstrel shows, Huntley's voice recalled images of separation. “What we were really showing, of course, was ourselves,” he said.

Newsweek
magazine published “The Negro in America,” a special issue before the March on Washington. “Who are these revolutionaries? What do they want?” asked the editors, adding that the answers “lie in a world as remote and as unfamiliar to most white Americans as the far side of the moon—the dark side.” An ambitious
Newsweek
poll showed Martin Luther King with a favorable national rating of 88 percent among Negroes, above 68 percent for Roy Wilkins, 51 percent for Adam Clayton Powell, and 15 percent for Elijah Muhammad. More than 40 percent said they did not recognize Malcolm X or the Muslims by name. A majority of Negroes would fight violently before giving up, said the report, but a larger majority preferred moderate, nonviolent methods “to join the white man,” and were determined to gain “dishwashers and clothes driers as well as human rights.”
Newsweek
concluded that Negroes “are playing to win. They think they can.”

An avalanche of mail led to a second special issue, “What the White Man Thinks of the Negro Revolt,” in which editors asked, “How much equality is the white man willing to grant the Negro?” About 80 percent of whites, including 60 percent of Southerners, said they believed Negroes were unfairly treated and deserved equal rights, but most preferred things to be put right without personal contact on their part. “We don't hate niggers,” a California woman told the poll-taker. “We just don't want them near us.” According to the poll, 85 percent of whites believed Negroes laughed a lot, 70 percent that Negroes had loose morals and a different smell, half that Negroes possessed inferior intelligence. In a special section, “What Science Says,” experts evaluated claims that a smaller Negro cranium meant less intelligence. Some anthropologists pointed out that such specious logic would make Eskimos smarter than white people, given the relative sizes of the average brain pan. A psychiatrist explained the allegedly large Negro sex drive as a bittersweet function of poverty. “When Negroes start moving up into the middle class,” he said, “they begin to experience the same kind of impairments of potency.” Overall,
Newsweek
found that “the 1964 election would be a Kennedy landslide except for the racial problem.” The largest disparity in the combined polls concerned the pace of integration: 3 percent of Negroes but 74 percent of whites said, “Negroes are moving too fast.”

 

R
UNNING STORIES
lasted months in the back pages, such as the Americus, Georgia, death case. For refusing a police order to stop singing at a street corner freedom rally in August, four SNCC workers had been charged under a dusty racial insurrection law that provided for a death sentence upon conviction. Just as important to the local prosecutors, who said they were fed up with demonstrations, the capital offense allowed indefinite pretrial incarceration without bail. The transcript of a telephone conversation about prison conditions in Americus was read to “a shocked and silent audience” at the annual convention of the National Student Association in Indiana, where Al Lowenstein was recruiting student help for the Mississippi freedom vote. Georgia officials tenaciously held the four in jail from August until November, when successive legal forays by lawyers, including the new church troubleshooter, Jack Pratt, finally won their freedom on bond.

In mid-July, Robert Hayling had deployed his NAACP Youth Council on small picket lines outside segregated lunch counters in St. Augustine. A local judge, Charles Mathis, ordered seven demonstrators younger than seventeen held at the county jail, there being no youth detention facilities in the area. After five days, during which Hayling rallied outside the jail to protest cruel treatment, Judge Mathis offered to release the seven prisoners if their parents signed a probationary guarantee of nonparticipation in racial protest until the juveniles reached the age of twenty-one. Four families refused, whereupon Judge Mathis bound two boys and two girls over to jail indefinitely, pending transfer to state reform schools. In desperate attempts to draw attention to the case, Hayling placed calls to reporters, NAACP superiors, the Justice Department, and to the FBI office in Jacksonville, which reported that he “seemed emotionally upset, rambled, and on occasions talked incoherently.” According to the wire from Jacksonville to headquarters, Hayling was “admonished vehemently” for suggesting on the phone that local FBI agents were lax in protecting the rights of the four juveniles.

A small newspaper in nearby Daytona Beach expressed outrage over the “totalitarian” conduct of Judge Mathis, likening his order to Fidel Castro's practice of sending children to Moscow for indoctrination. “Florida is going to get a black eye over this case,” predicted the
Morning Journal
, but most newspapers took the disappearance more calmly. A correspondent for the
New York Times
passed through a week later and reported that St. Augustine “drowses today under the hot Florida sun, unstirred by the marching feet of the Negroes….” The
Times
found the summer tourist season in full swing—“horses drawing old-fashioned carriages clop down the street”—and a prevailing view that “the whole racial problem” was manageable and best left ignored. “The townspeople…do not regard it as anything serious,” said the
Times
dispatch, which mentioned the disposal of the four Negro teenagers as something new under Florida law.

The St. Augustine students were destined to remain locked up until December, their appeals sometimes lost as the criminal and child welfare systems tried to unload jurisdiction on each other. Among local Negroes, however, the high reputations of the four families lifted controversy over responsibility for their suffering. As with the children of Birmingham, blame first fell on adult movement leaders for ruining the records of model students, but the callousness of white authorities slowly converted many who realized that four teenagers were about to lose their fall school term as well as their freedom. Resentment and inspiration welled up on Labor Day into St. Augustine's first large-scale demonstration, with more than a hundred adults carrying integration placards to the Old Slave Market. Police cut short the imitation March on Washington by sweeping in to arrest twenty-seven protesters, including Hayling.

Two Sundays later, on September 15, dynamite obliterated the exterior stone staircase and tore a large hole in the eastern face of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, freezing the sanctuary clock at 10:22. A concussion of flying bricks and glass destroyed a bathroom inside the staircase wall, where four adolescent girls were preparing to lead the annual Youth Day worship service at eleven, wearing white for the special occasion. Seconds later, a dazed man emerged clutching a dress shoe from the foot of his eleven-year-old granddaughter, one of four mangled corpses in the rubble. His sobbing hysteria spread around the world before nightfall. The Communist oracle
Izvestia
of Moscow raised a common cry with the Vatican newspaper in Rome, which bemoaned a “massacre of the innocents.”

A
New York Times
reporter kept busy that day making a list of twenty previous bombings in “Bombingham” since the destruction of Fred Shuttlesworth's home in December of 1956—all unsolved and all against movement homes or sanctuaries, including three at Shuttlesworth's former church. Those farther from the scene made numb gestures with Birmingham in mind. Mercer University of Macon became the first Southern Baptist college to admit Negroes.
*
In New York, the American Civil Liberties Union announced plans to intervene on the side of Shuttlesworth and the
New York Times
in the Sullivan libel case, which the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review in the fall term of 1963; at stake, said the lawyers, was Alabama's claim to repressive power “even more drastic than that imposed by the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798.” In Nashville, white Baptist leaders drafted a resolution of sympathy for the stricken congregation at Sixteenth Street—saying “we join you in mourning your dead” and “encourage our people to contribute toward restoration of your building”—but the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention rejected the expression and managed for thirty years to seal records of its fitful consideration.

“I know I speak on behalf of all Americans in expressing a deep sense of outrage and grief,” announced President Kennedy, who sent Burke Marshall of the Justice Department into a city on the verge of open racial warfare. A Negro boy had been killed already, shot off his bicycle by a white Eagle Scout who could not explain his sniper's reflex, and so many guns were brandished on street corners that federal officers refused to escort Marshall into Negro neighborhoods. The funerals produced the largest interracial collections of clergy in Birmingham history, but no city officials attended. Images of the bombing were so starkly black and white—of young black girls in white murdered by unfathomable evil, almost certainly in white skin—that they cut beneath intimate defenses. As in May, when bombings punctured the jubilation of the children's breakthrough, the church terror caused many Birmingham Negroes to seethe against Martin Luther King. Lashing out, King himself blamed “the apathy and complacency of many Negroes who…will not engage in creative protest to get rid of this evil.” On the other side, a white lawyer made himself a lifetime pariah from Birmingham by blaming every citizen who took discreet comfort in segregation, saying, “We all did it,” but Mayor Albert Boutwell stoutly insisted, “We are all victims.” In his statement to the nation, President Kennedy carefully pledged the full power of the federal government to the “detection” of those responsible, rather than to conviction or trial.

 

D
IANE
N
ASH
and James Bevel heard the news in Williamston, North Carolina, where they were assisting one of the most unusual of the satellite movements that had grown large since Birmingham. White divinity students from the New England chapter of King's SCLC migrated south for demonstrations with their teachers, such as Harvard theologian Harvey Cox and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, and Clarence Jones had recruited as their volunteer counsel Charles McKinney of New York, Adam Clayton Powell's principal lawyer in his libel trial. McKinney, who proudly traced his lineage back through eight generations of Northern free Negroes, developed a jailworthy devotion for the local leader, Golden Frinks, a nightclub owner of uncertain grammar and insightful charisma. As a tactician of theatrical flair, soon to release a flock of live chickens in the state legislature to protest the tabling of a desegregation bill, Frinks welcomed Bevel and Nash to his home as kindred spirits.

Retreating into a spare bedroom, Bevel and Nash raged in sorrow through Sunday afternoon. To answer the Birmingham crime with deeds of equal magnitude, their first impulse was to become vigilantes—to identify, stalk, and kill the bombers in the place of corrupted white justice. Bevel believed it could be done; he knew that the identities of lynchers tended to become more or less an open secret. In wild caroms of mood, Nash and Bevel swung from a “Black Muslim” option to a grand alternative as pioneers in nonviolence: to combine voter registration work in Mississippi with the tactics of Birmingham direct action, including the children's marches. They would raise a nonviolent army across the entire state of Alabama to converge upon Montgomery and settle for nothing less than the enfranchisement of every adult Negro in Alabama. By Monday night they were possessed to propose the latter plan to movement leaders gathering for the funerals. Leaving their one-year-old daughter behind with Bevel, who stayed to help Golden Frinks, Nash set off alone by bus.

She reached Birmingham on Tuesday afternoon in time to hear Fred Shuttlesworth preach the funeral of Carole Robertson, after which Nash pushed her way through cordons of mourners and preachers' helpers to outline the concept for him. For a second time—as with her declaration that the Freedom Rides must be renewed—Nash put Shuttlesworth in the rare state of being ambushed by a posture more audacious than his. With Ralph Abernathy, Shuttlesworth already had advocated a bold march to Montgomery to place a funeral wreath at the Alabama statehouse, but Nash's proposal swept far past symbolic gestures. When Shuttlesworth asked her to reduce the plan to writing for presentation to Martin Luther King, Nash found a typewriter and wrote late into the night, setting down guidelines of military zeal and organization: “…Marching and drills in command and coordination of battle groups…. Instruction in jail know-how; cooperation or non-cooperation with jail procedures and trial…. Group morale while imprisoned…. Drill in dealing with fire hoses, dogs, tear gas, cattle prods, police brutality, etc…. Practice in blocking runways, train tracks, etc….” She proposed to begin with Birmingham students straight from the funerals, fanning out across Alabama for recruitment and training toward the goal of laying siege to Governor Wallace's state government—“severing communication from state capitol bldg. and from city of Montgomery” with lay-ins, call-ins, park-ins, and a sea of nonviolent bodies. “This is an army,” Nash concluded. “Develop a flag and an insignia or pin or button.”