Pillar of Fire (45 page)

Holding fast on one controversial issue, SNCC leaders confirmed in Atlanta that the summer project would accept help from anyone willing to brave movement service in Mississippi. They welcomed the National Lawyers Guild, a venerable leftist society that did not exclude Communists and former Communists, even though every one of SNCC's allies vehemently objected. On King's behalf, Andrew Young promptly advised that it was a losing game to fight the “red issue” and segregation at once, especially in Mississippi. Gloster Current of the NAACP called SNCC “naive” to think the guild was acceptable. CORE's chief counsel took his worries to the FBI in Washington, reporting that the students were too young to remember from the 1930s and 1940s that the slightest Communist presence was invisibly corrupting. Jack Greenberg of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund threatened to pull his lawyers out of Mississippi rather than work with the guild. Jack Pratt seconded Greenberg for the National Council of Churches, and his boss, Robert Spike, warned Moses against SNCC's “deliberate link” with guild lawyers. The church objection weighed heavily on Moses, because Spike had followed up the Presbyterian work in Hattiesburg with the first institutional commitment to the summer project: a pledge from his Commission on Religion and Race to finance all training and transportation of summer volunteers.

Lowenstein campaigned against the guild, too, in a way that would be remembered long after the broader opposition was forgotten. Something about Lowenstein mirrored the internal tensions within the student movement. Moving between separate worlds easily—too easily for many students—he was part big shot and part itinerant waif. Lowenstein would materialize out of nowhere, argue all night, and nap on the floor like a fresh recruit for the sit-ins, all the while dispatching messages to personal friends in Congress. Lowenstein wanted to debate not merely the substance of decisions but how they were made. Rather than deferring as an outsider to peer consensus, he pressed for votes and rules of representation to match SNCC's goals for Mississippi. He wanted to know why the approval of the summer project remained tentative but the welcome of the Lawyers Guild seemed final. He wanted to know how the wishes of several thousand Mississippi NAACP members were to be counted against those of a few hundred SNCC workers and followers. To objections that sharecroppers like Fannie Lou Hamer represented a moral and political transformation far beyond their present numbers, Lowenstein argued that COFO needed a working bridge between politics and ideology. If the SNCC workers of Mississippi could not find common language with the middle-class Negroes who had supported Medgar Evers, how could they hope to reach an understanding with President Johnson?

These were sensitive questions. Rebuffed in Atlanta, Lowenstein peppered SNCC with so many questions on the terms of political cooperation that Moses finally asked an assistant to fend off his calls. Lowenstein knew SNCC well enough to cite the one cardinal rule of its informal brotherhood: that the movement should respect the wishes of those willing to put themselves on the line. Students had built the movement on this standard, breaking through traditional authority, but now embattled pioneers wanted summer volunteers to face the risks of Mississippi while submitting to them as entitled experts. Lowenstein believed the movement should treat the summer volunteers as partners. To run the summer project, he proposed a joint policy board composed of students and Mississippi workers, headed by Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin. It infuriated him to hear that while the SNCC leaders refused to exclude guild lawyers on principle and necessity, they could bar him from meetings and exclude the volunteers themselves from their councils.

Over the two chaotic months of preparation that remained, Lowenstein tried to protect the summer project from public attacks, sometimes against his own sympathies. When the NAACP's Roy Wilkins threatened to denounce COFO as infiltrated by the National Lawyers Guild, Lowenstein hurried to New York to pacify him with the traditional argument that defendants had a right to counsel of their choice, Communist or not. He delivered more speeches about Mississippi as a historic crucible of American democracy. “My roommates were positively awed, and they don't awe easily,” wrote an admiring correspondent from Yale. At Queens College, Lowenstein inspired New York students to apply for Mississippi assignment—including one senior, Andrew Goodman, who was completing a term paper on the startling racial controversies emerging from the Nation of Islam
*
—and a Stanford speech rallied even those students to whom Lowenstein had confided his stinging criticisms of SNCC as immature and undemocratic. He confined his public doubts to cryptic remarks—“militancy should not be confused with effectiveness”—but close contacts knew he felt troubled and betrayed. His acolytes included campus politicians who by nature were acutely conscious of student rights on everything from cafeteria quality to constitutional expression, and some of them looked past Lowenstein's barnstorming enthusiasm to pick up his cautions about going blindly into alien Mississippi. “It is fundamental to our role in this that we insure the student voice and perspective in policy formulation,” a worried student body president wrote Lowenstein.

To SNCC leaders still struggling with fundamental strategy, Lowenstein represented two opposing nightmares about the Mississippi summer project. A newly calculating, political faction feared that his recruits would bowl over a fledgling movement by numbers and cultural connections, while those who embraced the conscience of the “beloved community” shrank from the implications of using prominent white volunteers as bait for federal intervention. If the daughter of a U.S. senator were arrested, who would decide when to post bail—her family or the Mississippi movement? If she were jailed with Mississippi Negroes, must they be released as a group? How would the safety and comfort of the prisoners be weighed against the political value of continued confinement?

Nervous applicants and their parents bombarded COFO headquarters with hundreds of related questions, receiving mostly evasive replies. A Stanford organizer complained that COFO planners remained about “as communicative as a colony of Trappist monks.” Moses, firmly resolved that control must be retained within the Mississippi movement, lacked the means to supply definitive answers even if he had them. As late as early May, he acknowledged that SNCC could not feed even the few permanent workers who were supposed to be processing volunteer applications. Only $10,000 had been raised for the project against a minimum budget of $800,000, and the toilet in the Jackson Freedom House remained clogged for want of $5 cash to pay a plumber. Moses sometimes despaired of going forward at all.

Hearing that Moses was giving up, Lowenstein discontinued his campus recruiting in May. SNCC workers rallied to the project as a leap of faith, and even those who still opposed the summer project recoiled from the notion that Lowenstein might call it off. Some saw Lowenstein as folding for selfish reasons, while others suspected that he had been plotting sabotage all along. Lowenstein railed against mixed signals, and battled personal rejection by maneuvering with more frenetic stealth than ever—showing up on the fringe of meetings, drawing confidants aside while looking past everyone else. The few whites already working with SNCC in Mississippi mistrusted him as a manipulator.

As deadlines approached, Lowenstein became as evasive about his own plans as COFO leaders were about the inner workings of the summer project. Admirers who still called him the “human syllogism” grew mystified by his hints that he might not be in harness with Bob Moses. “I admit it took me four readings to discover I still didn't know what was happening after getting your letter,” confessed one correspondent. Another bewildered, aspiring volunteer wrote: “Where will you be this summer if not in Mississippi?…Where are you going to be for the next few months so I can catch you some time? Won't you be in Miss. at all?”

In the end, Lowenstein fled not only Mississippi but the United States. Before retreating to Europe and the ferment of his original childhood cause—restoring democracy to Franco's Spain—he asked some volunteers to withdraw from the summer project, too, arguing that COFO was forfeiting its chance to develop a historic biracial coalition. Dennis Sweeney, one of his most ardent student followers, was among those trapped between warring passions. But for Lowenstein, he never would have left Stanford to work on the Mississippi Freedom Vote the previous fall; having gone, he could not stay away from fears and inspirations of melting purity. Sweeney decided to return to Mississippi without the approval of his mentor. Lowenstein, characteristically, first resented the choice as a personal defection, then helped arrange a foundation grant to finance it. Sweeney was destined to become one of the movement's most extreme psychological casualties—he would assassinate Lowenstein in 1980—but for now he shrugged off the conflict. “Please let me know what you're doing next year when you decide,” Sweeney wrote as he left for Mississippi. “I may join you.”

A
BOARD AN EVENING FLIGHT
from Boston on March 29, still wearing their church dresses and Easter hats, there arrived four distinguished reinforcements known mainly for their marital connections to three Episcopal bishops and to H. S. Payson Rowe, a socially prominent insurance executive with John Hancock. They were greeted at the Jacksonville airport by a man of slightly oversized head and superabundant energy—Hosea Williams of Savannah, who, since capturing publicity the previous year with his jail marches and his daily sermons atop Tomochichi's Rock, had volunteered his way into trial duty on Martin Luther King's SCLC staff. Williams briefed the arriving matrons on the drive south to St. Augustine. In less than a week, he had battled the equally temperamental local leader Robert Hayling about the discipline of nonviolence while preparing white New England college students for coordinated demonstrations over spring break. Integrated groups had been turned away from most of the white churches that morning, he reported to his passengers, and nearly seventy people had been jailed in the opening sit-ins.

Not all the passengers shared Williams's excitement over what he called the early signs of a bona fide movement. In particular, Mary Peabody, wife of Bishop Malcolm Peabody, replied that while she had enjoyed the nonviolent training at the Blue Hill Christian Center, she did not think they would need it once they got a chance to explain themselves to local authorities. “I do not believe they will deny me the pleasure of lunch with my Negro friend,” she said pleasantly.

Hosea Williams turned from the steering wheel. Although he knew Dr. King had entrusted him with a maximum celebrity in the mother of the Massachusetts governor, he felt compelled to prepare her for reality. “Mrs. Peabody,” he said finally, “these folk will deny Jesus.” His comment stifled discussion in the car. The women remarked that if it could be true, there would be little common ground for discussion.

In St. Augustine, they made a grand entrance upon the mass meeting at Zion Baptist Church, where the wife of a Yale divinity professor told of being surrounded by angry-looking men that day while handing out leaflets to tourists—how the terror had lifted from her face with such mysterious clarity that her assailants left her alone. The chaplains of Smith College and Amherst were present, along with nearly a hundred students from Harvard, Mount Holyoke, Brown, and schools as far north as Gorham Teachers College in Maine. All of them joined Hayling's local stalwarts the next morning for nonviolent workshops at the Elk's Rest Lodge in the center of Lincolnville. From there, the four senior arrivals went off to test segregation against the perfume of chivalry.

Downtown near the Old Slave Market, Esther Burgess made sure that the fruit cup at McCartney's lunch counter was fresh rather than canned, and her three companions ordered a breakfast of pancakes. When their dishes arrived, Mary Peabody congratulated the waitress. “How nice it is that you serve colored people here,” she said.

“We don't,” the puzzled waitress replied.

“Well, Mrs. Burgess is colored,” Peabody observed, whereupon the waitress retreated from view. A premonition made Burgess hastily consume her fruit cup before a store manager arrived to study the four faces at his lunch counter. Settling before Burgess, whose skin was light enough to pass, he asked whether she considered herself a Negro. She did.

Evicted, the four women walked on to other designated sites. Peabody decided that she had declared victory too early, and devised new strategies, but advance blockades materialized at every entrance. The women eventually gave up on the assumption that someone had spread a warning, perhaps identifying them by Peabody's distinctive red hat crowned with a double tier of sequins.

Back at Elk's Rest Lodge, Hosea Williams asked if they would join the afternoon corps of jail volunteers. Burgess stepped forward, and late that afternoon seven companions escorted her first to the Monson Motor Lodge—where the manager intercepted them with an offer of outdoor service near the kitchen. “But that's insulting,” protested Mary Peabody, speaking for the delegation.

“You and I will never live to see the day when people will be forced to take others into their hearts,” the manager declared.

“Where is your heart?” Peabody inquired, but she moved on when the manager held his ground.

The group managed to reach a table in the empty bar of the Ponce de Léon Motor Lodge, and when Sheriff L. O. Davis entered with a brace of police officers and two German shepherds, Peabody refused to leave until he retrieved and read for her the exact language of Florida's “undesirable guest” statute. None of the unflattering definitions applied to her party, she remarked, but Peabody and two of her Boston friends retreated politely before Sheriff Davis's stern choice of immediate departure or jail. The other five stayed on to face arrest: Hayling, two chaplains, a Pembroke student, and Esther Burgess, who, trembling, was placed with one of the police dogs in the back seat of a squad car. A Boston reporter called out to her, asking whether her husband, Bishop John Burgess, would approve of her course. “I have a higher loyalty to God,” she called back.

Sealed off from the hymns of public encouragement in the mass meeting, a leadership crisis was flashing from the back room at Elk's Rest Lodge to the sponsoring officers of the New England SCLC chapter. It superseded even the concurrent plague of hit-and-run violence against the spring prayer vigil in Williamston, North Carolina, their chapter's adopted project. (On Easter, segregationists had beaten their colleague Paul Chapman outside the local Espiscopal church, smashed the windshield of Lois Chapman's car, and hospitalized a visiting Massachusetts student with blows from a baseball bat.) From Boston, Virgil Wood and James Breeden contacted William Sloane Coffin at Yale, where he was on standby alert, and dispatched him to St. Augustine with the sole objective of talking Mary Peabody into jail, grandmother of seven or not.

 

B
EFORE
C
OFFIN ARRIVED
in St. Augustine the next day, March 31, Peabody tried to attend the morning communion service at Trinity Episcopal Church, a prestigious congregation across the Slave Market plaza from the cathedral. She found the doors locked and Sheriff Davis standing guard outside along with the rector, Rev. Charles Seymour, who explained that the vestry considered her attendance a demonstration rather than worship, and therefore had canceled the service to protect life and property. Seymour invited Peabody into the church anteroom to hear his vestrymen defend the cancellation vote on the ground that their Florida bishop had interceded with her husband, bishop of the Massachusetts diocese, to argue by phone that his wife's purpose would damage comity within the national church. For more than an hour, Peabody tried to justify her theology against their charges of meddling.

Meanwhile, Hosea Williams drilled more than 150 teenagers who skipped school that day to conduct a climactic march, honoring their four friends who had been locked away for the entire fall semester. As in Savannah, Williams preached ecstatically on nonviolence as a glorious kind of militant perfection, and he placed a large collection bucket up front to gather up knives, rocks, and rulers—anything the most hostile segregationist might construe as weapons. Willie Bolden, the former Savannah bellhop who had bonded himself to Williams in a new movement life, walked up and down the aisles coaxing students to surrender even pens and pencils before they marched off in double file down the sidewalks to the Old Slave Market. There they sang hymns, including an up-tempo “We Shall Overcome,” then marched before bystanders through the downtown streets to the majestic Ponce de Léon Hotel, through its doors and on into the enormous dining room where Vice President Johnson had spoken the previous year. The hall having emptied on word of their approach, the marchers sat down and waited alone in good order—careful not to wrinkle the white linen or touch the crystal—until Sheriff Davis and his men surrounded them with cattle prod “persuaders” and the full squad of fifteen police dogs. After quiet consultations between student leaders and the few white New England volunteers with them, the marchers decided that they could not submit to arrest there without inevitable muss to the place settings. They passed the word to stand up in unison, push back their chairs, and file outside to be arrested in the driveway.

News of the impeccable student witness was relayed to Elk's Rest about the time Mary Peabody returned from Trinity Church. William Sloane Coffin had arrived there along with Robert Hayling, who had paid a cash bond out of the county prison. In private, asking permission to speak straightforwardly, Coffin told Peabody that the arrest of Esther Burgess from her group sent a demoralizing message to the local integration movement: the Negro alone suffered, while her white friends accepted a privileged escape. Peabody confessed that her experience thus far had strained her belief in persuasive dialogue, especially since some of the Trinity vestrymen had refused to shake her hand. “I think I'd better call my son,” she sighed. Within minutes, she informed Governor Peabody of her predicament, worrying out loud that her controversial deeds might injure his political career. His encouraging response brought mist to her eyes. “Thank you, Endicott,” she signed off. “You're a wonderful fellow.”

Florence Rowe decided that she could not go through with the arrest, but Hester Campbell determined to stick with Peabody. With a Harvard divinity professor making a third white volunteer, Hayling scoured Elk's Rest for Negroes willing to fill out an integrated arrest group. He found no takers, the remaining adults intimidated and the supply of teenagers depleted by the morning march. Before offering to go back himself, Hayling ventured into a nearby kitchen where the humblest women supporters were cooking chicken and cornbread snacks for the evening mass meeting. He begged them not to let Peabody's important gesture go to waste, and painted images of glory, asking whether they ever dreamed of going to jail with a governor's mother. Finally, Georgia Reed, a diminutive home seamstress crippled by polio, who walked laboriously on heavy canes, spoke up with powerful effect. Her example inspired four of her fellow cooks. Drivers excitedly sprang up to rush the five women home and help them change into their best outfits for the occasion.

During these midday preparations, phone lines continued to hum between Florida and Massachusetts as politicians took over from the worried bishops. Governor Peabody warned Florida Governor Farris Bryant of his mother's intentions, and Bryant promised to protect her from serious harm. Governor Bryant still thought Peabody did not quite grasp the acute political sensitivity of what Bryant called “the civil rights thing.” He was having similar trouble getting Walter Jenkins and other White House aides to understand why Florida's elected officials were refusing to serve as delegates to the upcoming Democratic convention. To Bryant, these racial matters required a sixth sense that was essentially Southern. He advised Mayor Shelley and other St. Augustine leaders not to arrest Mary Peabody at all, no matter how incensed they were with her. Jail was exactly what she wanted, he warned, and they should let her sit in at restaurants or motels until she got tired and went home—all night if necessary. With everything seemingly agreed to, it exasperated Governor Bryant all the more to learn that his St. Augustine friends got their backs up within minutes and arrested the Peabody group. Their stubbornness left Bryant feeling more victimized than the prisoners.

Inside St. Johns County jail, the newly arrived Georgia Reed and the four volunteer cooks spread word that the governor's mother was being fingerprinted and booked behind them. Nearly two hundred demonstrators filled the segregated jail to double its capacity, with sixty-five Negro men jammed into one large cell for sixteen, and fifty-seven Negro women in a smaller cell with only four beds. When Peabody appeared in the hallway, and paused to speak with Esther Burgess on her way to a cell for white female prisoners, a hush fell over the incarcerated Negro women. By social standing and seniority, most of them looked to Katherine Twine to say something. Going to jail had more than healed the year's humiliation since she had backed out of the Lyndon Johnson dinner the previous Easter, letting her husband attend without her. This time, Twine the postman had to stay home to protect his federal job. The sight of Peabody through the cell bars—“every inch the Boston blueblood,” according to one arrest story, wearing sensible shoes and what the
New York Times
called “a muted pink suit”—reduced Katherine Twine to momentary awe. All she could say was, “You look just like Miss Eleanor Roosevelt.”

“We are cousins,” Peabody replied.

Fifty reporters clamored outside for jail interviews. Within two hours of the booking, their news bulletins stimulated demands for briefings by the Justice Department and the FBI from U.S. senators concerned about Peabody's welfare, and St. Augustine sprang up instantly among the leading national news stories, alongside the death watch for a comatose General Douglas MacArthur and reports of a United States-favored military coup in Brazil. The
New York Times
noted that Senator Hubert Humphrey formally commenced final debate on the civil rights bill with a speech of three hours and twenty-six minutes, opening with the Golden Rule quotation from St. Matthew (“Do unto others…”), and the
Times
placed on its front page a large photograph of Mary Peabody in custody, flanked by Sheriff Davis with a cattle prod in his hands and a cigar in his mouth.