Pillar of Fire (24 page)

Carrying her finished proposal, Nash heard King preach the next day over the open caskets of the three remaining victims. “There is an amazing democracy about death,” said King, who urged mourners to take from hard reality—“as hard as crucible steel”—a comfort in the message left behind. “History has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive,” he said. “The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as the redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city…. We must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and worth of all human personality.”

When the service ended, and King pulled away with the motorcade toward the burial sites, Nash was left behind among a crowd of several thousand that walked a short way after the last hearse, then stopped and spontaneously sang “We Shall Overcome.” Although there were numerous leaders among them—including Bob Moses, who had brought a busload of movement veterans from Greenwood—the clinging mass of people spilled aimlessly in one direction after another, never marching more than two or three blocks before confronting a blockade of white policemen. Alarmed, seeing that the crowd and the police were in no mood to tolerate each other, Nash tried to push her way through to head off the march, only to find herself behind a constantly shifting front. Freedom songs mixed with the sporadic sound of rocks and soft drink bottles lobbed toward police lines. Nash shouted that this was not the way—no demonstration could succeed without organization and clear purpose. Coming upon Rev. Ed King of Tougaloo, still wearing heavy bandages in recuperation from his facial surgery, she begged him to help her control the swirling crowd, which eventually subsided.

That evening Nash pushed her way into King's room at the Gaston Motel, where a wake competed with phone threats and rumors of a visit to the White House. She seized time to distribute her plan for laying nonviolent siege against Montgomery, which King received politely at best. Some waved off the proposal as inflammatory and apocalyptic—not to mention an abrupt shift out of Birmingham. Nash insisted that the first duty of movement leaders was to offer a constructive outlet for people burning with nonviolent spirit. When she lost the general attention of the room, Nash began to advocate the plan one-on-one, distributing copies, accusing the preachers of being too eager to rush off to Washington. The young Negro staff lawyer for the Justice Department, Thelton Henderson, would forward a copy by mail to Washington officials, who received it like a hand grenade. Burke Marshall called the document's attitude “revolutionary.”

 

O
N THE
W
EDNESDAY
of the Birmingham funeral, Robert Hayling decided that he must not let the evening's Ku Klux Klan rally go unchallenged in St. Augustine, Florida—not after the church bombing, and not after authorities had so brutally repressed the first local rally for racial democracy. He called local television stations to urge coverage of the Klan event. More boldly, he proposed to NAACP friends that they scout the Klan rally themselves to prove that Negroes no longer were afraid of the invisible empire. Most contacts feared that Hayling had taken leave of his sanity. A few volunteered but soon made excuses. The postman Henry Twine later insisted that he had been waiting at the designated pickup spot, but Hayling managed to collect only three NAACP stalwarts, including Clyde Jenkins, the barber. The four of them drove slowly toward the rally site in a wooded field off the highway, behind a bowling alley. Hayling stopped indecisively, then turned onto a dirt road—either to sneak toward the rally by an indirect approach, or, as some in the car hysterically recommended, to turn around for a hasty retreat. A car pulled up behind while they hesitated, and one man with a shotgun jumped out to freeze them under guard. Finding a telltale NAACP sticker on Hayling's windshield, he and his cohorts smashed the car windows and marched their captives off through the field toward the rally.

A crowd of three hundred had gathered sometime earlier for the ceremonial burning of a twenty-foot cross, plus the featured address by a traveling celebrity Klansman, Rev. Connie Lynch of California, founder of the National States Rights Party. Lynch had arrived in his custom coral Cadillac, wearing his trademark string tie. In his rhythmic, brickbat oratory, perfected during twenty years in sectarian pulpits, he declared that a resurgent Klan was on the move to destroy a worldwide conspiracy of Negroes and Jews. “Some of you say, ‘But Jesus was a Jew,'” he said, feigning a religious qualm. “That just goes to show you how these cotton-picking, half-witted preachers have fooled you. Jesus wasn't no Jew. He was a white man!”

Similarly, Lynch dismissed squeamishness about the Birmingham church bombing, saying the four young girls had been “old enough to have venereal diseases” and were no more human or innocent than rattlesnakes. “So I kill 'em all,” he shouted, “and if it's four less niggers tonight, then good for whoever planted the bomb. We're all better off.” On local politics, Lynch denounced Robert Hayling as a “burr-headed bastard of a dentist,” and challenged the Klavern to “kill him before sunup.” The crowd was fairly well spent, growing bored with follow-up speakers and Klan announcements when an electrifying cry of “Niggers! Niggers!” went up in the darkness at the perimeter. Lynch scrambled to retrieve a rifle from his Cadillac, and the audience bristled with lesser weapons by the time sentries led the four captives to the platform.

Poked with knives, menaced with guns, Hayling and his three companions stood miserably at the center. When one of them claimed to have gotten lost on a fishing trip, the crowd hooted at transparent panic. When a search of wallets identified Hayling as “the nigger who wants to be king,” cries of murderous bravado rose against one of the very Negroes whose death had been proposed and applauded moments earlier. A Congregationalist minister, who had sneaked in to study the Klan, subdued his repulsion with the thought that so precise a delivery of quarry must have been staged. The Klansmen circled and swaggered, but eventually their threatening gestures lapsed into empty, self-conscious inhibition against attacking helpless people, Negroes or not. A lull of surreal confusion set in until women of the Klan prodded the hesitant enforcers with graphic shrieks of encouragement. Uncertainly at first, men darted in to tear away pieces of shirt, then struck with fists, chains, and assorted clubs. Sight of blood turned theater to reality for the horrified Congregationalist minister, who repressed urges to intervene for fear that the slightest betrayal of sympathy would draw hostility upon himself. He worked his way slowly to the rear, he reported, “then sauntered casually towards my automobile…kicking aimlessly in the sand as I walked along.”

A shotgun blast from an overexcited Klansman briefly scattered the attackers, diverting them long enough that sheriff's deputies came upon the Negroes alive in a heap. Abrasions, concussions, and broken teeth sent all four to the hospital, but authorities interpreted events steadily against the victims. The earliest FBI teletypes reported that “Negroes were discovered by Klansmen approaching meeting area from woods, resulting in fight between Negroes and Klansmen.” Taking professed evenhandedness a step further, county authorities prosecuted the four Negroes as well as four of the armed men found standing over them. All charges against the Klansmen would be dismissed on November 4, but a jury convicted Hayling of criminal assault. Judge Marvin Grier, mindful of Hayling's wounds and the absence of injuries to Klansmen, limited the punishment to a hundred-dollar fine.

 

N
OT A WORD
of the St. Augustine Klan beating intruded upon the September 19 summit meeting at which President Kennedy received King, Fred Shuttlesworth, and five Negro leaders of Birmingham. Rev. J. L. Ware took the lead. A conservative senior minister, who had resisted King's spring campaign, Ware let loose an unguarded torrent of despair about Birmingham authorities who refused to carry out the spring settlement or even meet with Negroes. Ware said troopers had aimed guns and insults at him on his own property. “People are frightened,” he told the President. “…Some of them won't even go to church during the day services. The police are
brutal
….” President Kennedy interrupted to ask, “What's the hope in Birmingham?” When Ware, taken aback by the President's irritation, said he thought U.S. troops might be the only answer, Kennedy pressed the issue with snappish finality—“What is the
long-range
hope for Birmingham?”—and King stepped in quickly to retreat. “I still have faith in the vast possibilities of Birmingham,” he said. “There are many white people of good will in Birmingham. They need help.”

The volatile standoff recurred four days later in mirror form, this time with a delegation of white leaders from Birmingham. When the President implored them to hire at least one Negro policeman, the mayor's assistant replied that a third of the Birmingham officers would quit rather than serve in an integrated force. They answered Kennedy's pleadings with theories that the four girls accidentally may have set off a cache of dynamite stored in the church basement, and with rumors that the FBI had spirited the janitor out of town to hide Negro complicity in the crime. When a vice president of the local telephone company accused President Kennedy of giving comfort to King's meddling ways, Kennedy emphasized the greater menace of SNCC. He disclosed alarming intelligence about the Bevel-Nash campaign to paralyze Alabama, warning that SNCC “has got an investment in violence.”

“Who is heading up SNCC?” asked the telephone executive.

“Well, this fellow Lewis,” replied Kennedy.

“They're sons of bitches, I'll tell you that,” said another Birmingham guest.

“Oh, they are,” agreed Kennedy. “They're gonna get tougher. They're gonna be tough.” Someone jumped in to say that SNCC students protested segregation at “the airports and the libraries and the buses, and everything else. That's a real militant group.”

If the President slandered SNCC purposefully, to make concessions to King seem more palatable, the ploy failed with all the others. When he proposed that they undertake “even a public relations action…anything that gives a hook that suggests that the prospects are better,” the white leaders replied that such actions would only encourage the Negro demonstrators. Their backs up—“we came here, sir, with big chips on our shoulder”—they rejected all hints that they were not doing more than enough already. Kennedy backed away from their prickly distemper, as the Negro delegation had backed away from his. He sent two retired Army officers—General Kenneth Royall, Truman's Secretary of the Army, and Colonel Earl “Red” Blaik, coach of legendary West Point football teams—to Birmingham as nonbinding mediators. King dutifully predicted that the two presidential emissaries “will help a great deal,” but within days he regretted his trust. Kennedy explicitly ruled out federal intervention, and his negotiators disappeared into private, segegated meetings in Birmingham. To avoid controversy, they issued no public statements or recommendations. Movement critics ridiculed King for allowing the Kennedys to palm off the national crisis of the church bombing on a football coach.

King despaired. After nearly three years, his relationship with President Kennedy had run out of room. Although the movement needed federal intervention more than ever, realism told King he could not pressure President Kennedy an inch further. Brooding, he took the young Justice Department lawyer Thelton Henderson privately aside. “I'm concerned about having you in my meetings,” King said, taking pains to say he liked Henderson personally
*
and accepted his duty to report what he heard to Robert Kennedy. King said something worse was eating at him lately. “I'm worried that the Kennedys only want to know in advance if we're going to do something,” he told Henderson. “Then they act to stop us. But they don't act when the whites do something. They just let us take another beating.”

King explored the idea of mounting a new campaign elsewhere, but held back for fear that a fresh start would be taken as an anticlimax, or an admission of failure in Birmingham. Meanwhile, SNCC chairman John Lewis led carloads of students directly from the Birmingham funeral to join systematic daily demonstrations at Selma, Bernard Lafayette's voting project. Some three hundred people went to jail there within two weeks, including Lewis himself and the embattled Rev. L. L. Anderson, whose arrest sent another shudder through the upstanding members of Tabernacle Baptist.

By then King was in Richmond, suffering through SCLC's annual convention. Several ministers in his inner circle endorsed variations of the Bevel-Nash mass siege as a desperate gamble to save nonviolence, but harsher voices said nonviolence was dead beyond revival—the fifth casualty of the church bombing. Wyatt Walker huffily resigned as King's chief of staff for lack of a threefold salary increase. Adam Clayton Powell flatly told the Richmond convention that the civil rights bill would not pass the Congress, then offered King a consolation job in his pulpit at Abyssinian.

On September 27, King closed the convention with an address of abject confession. “I was naive enough to believe that proof of good faith would emerge,” he said of his support for the Kennedy emissaries to Birmingham. “Today we are faced with the midnight of oppression which we had believed to be the dawn of redemption,” he told the convention. “We must deal with today…. We are faced with an extreme situation, and therefore our remedies must be extreme.” Yet King found himself helpless to propose remedies. He found a way to make everyone an accomplice to the church bombing—from Governor Wallace to his own movement followers—but still he renounced no one. Instead, he exhorted listeners to bridge rather than exploit gulfs of separation. He retold the story of Lazarus and Dives, and preached from his blend of sources: Jesus on loving one's enemies, Reinhold Niebuhr on justice, Abraham Lincoln on the ideal of common citizenship. King quoted Lincoln's reply to a vengeance-starved Unionist who resented his stubborn refusal to call the Confederates enemies: “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” He wobbled on a sensitive spot, desperate to move but stuck in melancholy, confessing that his leadership was “standing still, doing nothing, going nowhere.”