Pillar of Fire (57 page)

In the shock of the Wednesday morning news, James Lawson addressed the Ohio trainees on the nonviolent philosophy that had guided most of the student movements since the Nashville sit-ins of 1960. Stokely Carmichael, designated project director for the Delta, disputed him by attacking deliberate self-sacrifice as an unnatural philosophy. Dramatized suffering by Negroes was no longer novel to reporters, nor moving to a jaded public, Carmichael argued, though he supported nonprovocation policies such as barring guns from COFO locations.

Remarks by church lawyer Jack Pratt, Bayard Rustin, and others also precipitated conflict. When John Doar warned that the Justice Department would not be able to prevent or punish most crimes against volunteers, James Forman denounced the cowardice and treachery of the federal government. Doar sidestepped what was for him a painful distinction between political and legal limits on federal power. Enduring some jeers, he told Forman that he simply did not want to mislead civil rights workers by overpromising again, as after the Freedom Rides in 1961, and Bob Moses intervened to support Doar's candor. He urged volunteers not to think of Washington as omnipotent, nor as an enemy withholding some magic solution, and later expressed worry that no students had dropped out of training by Wednesday. Something about Moses reassured even those he pushed to confront danger. “He is more or less the Jesus of the whole project,” one volunteer wrote home, “not because he asks to be, but because of everyone's reaction to him. (I forgot to say, he's a Negro.)”

By Friday, Moses told the first groups heading south that Mississippi, like race, could not be discovered in the abstract. Whether terrified by nightmares or giddy with invincibility, volunteers knew from the ardent attentions of reporters that they were sensors for a national exploration into Mississippi. One carload noted with amused bravado that a CBS crew had wired their Corvette for the drive to Mississippi to “record our profound thoughts as we went into battle….” On buses, press-savvy volunteers realized that
Look
magazine was sifting them “for the ideal naive Northern middle-class white girl,” and that
Life
was focusing its coverage on Greenwood. Heading south, asking his parents to “keep your eyes open” for him on television, a Harvard student summarized the week of training: “The workshops were very helpful—getting us used to hearing nigger and white nigger without flinching and so forth. Also how to keep together when getting beaten so that they can't get you one at a time, and all of that jazz.”

 

I
N
S
T
. A
UGUSTINE
, sixteen Reform rabbis and lay administrator Albert Vorspan converged upon First Baptist Church for the mass meeting on Wednesday night, June 17. Martin Luther King announced their entrance to an enthusiastic crowd, then invited Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner to speak from the pulpit. Dresner, as the only Reform volunteer with experience at such events, astonished his colleagues with call-and-response preaching that evoked a tumultuous response. Carried away, he retained his customary long-windedness beyond the endurance of several rabbis who, wilting from fatigue in the Florida heat, discreetly chanted “
genug
”—Yiddish for “enough already.” They all followed Shuttlesworth and Andrew Young on a long march beyond the Slave Market, then dispersed for the night in Negro homes as King debated strategy with his staff. Hosea Williams suffered a ribbing when he refused for once to lead one of his own wild schemes to maintain public momentum at low cost, by trying to integrate a swimming pool. Williams admitted that he could not swim.

On Thursday, Fred Shuttlesworth and C. T. Vivian led the rabbis and some fifty supporters downtown to the Monson Motor Lodge, where owner James Brock blocked the restaurant door at 12:40
P.M.
Normally a bookish and controlled businessman (who routinely showed reporters an office adding machine with his precise tabulation of integrationists arrested at Monson's, standing thus far at 239), Brock lost his temper when the rabbis knelt to pray over his refusal to serve their party. One by one, he shoved the rabbis toward arresting officers until 12:47
P.M.
, according to reporters and FBI observers, when shouted alarms sent the whole mass of spectators on the run to find two white civil rights workers holding room keys in the pool, saying that as registered motel guests they had a right to invite their five Negro friends to swim. While Florida State Police strained to hold back onlookers enraged by the sight of intermingled wet bodies, Brock poured two gallons of muriatic acid into the pool, screaming that he would burn them out. (This was a scare tactic, as the cleaning acid was relatively harmless.) “Hold me, baby, I'm scared,” said a Negro female who dog-paddled beneath shouted threats to shoot, stone, or drown them. Finally, Officer Henry Billitz removed his shoes and jumped in fully clothed to haul them out. An AP photograph captured his leap in midair for the front pages of many newspapers, including the
Miami Herald
and the
New York Times
. By previous order of Governor Farris Bryant, state officers assumed custody of prisoners under the near-riot conditions, but an overwrought local deputy reached over and around a trooper to pummel one arrested swimmer most of the way from the pool to a State Police cruiser.

King watched the two-pronged demonstration of rabbis and swimmers from a waterfront park across the street. He and Brock were falling from opposite ends of a spinning log. At a press conference the previous day, Brock and State Senator Verle Pope had hinted vaguely at white concessions (“a study of the legitimate problems of this community by responsible, local, law abiding citizens”) behind a screen of wounded victimization (“we find ourselves beset by outside forces”). King had responded positively, saying he hoped to move on soon to a voting project in Alabama—only to hear that a special grand jury sensed new weakness in him and was holding out for better terms. Stiffening, King had gone forward with Wednesday demonstrations. Now, the enraged Brock, feeling betrayed on both flanks for his moderation, drained and refilled his pool to purify it of integration. He posted guards and hoisted a Confederate flag over his motel.

Late that Thursday afternoon, a deputy sheriff served King with the grand jury's formal presentment: “…Racial harmony has existed in the past…. This Grand Jury now calls upon Dr. Martin Luther King and all others to demonstrate their good faith by removing their influences from this community for a period of 30 days.” King promptly wrote a press response on the back of the legal papers, rejecting “not only an impractical request, but an immoral one. It is asking the Negro community to give all, and the white community to give nothing.” He reversed the order of the grand jury's minimum terms with an offer to leave St. Augustine for thirty days if a biracial committee were established first.

In convention that evening at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City, the president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis announced the imprisonment of the volunteer delegation to St. Augustine and extended “our prayers and best wishes and our sense of gratitude.” At the St. Johns County jail, parched and miserable after sun-drenched hours in the outdoor “chicken coop,” the prisoners refused an order to come inside to segregated cells. While guards fetched Sheriff Davis, the rabbis formed a protective circle around Shuttlesworth and Vivian, vowing to stand on their constitutional right to remain together with the Negro clergy. Shuttlesworth laughed, saying they did not understand jails, but the rabbis held firm through booming threats and pointed guns until Sheriff Davis had a Negro teenager hauled from the cell block and shocked in front of them with a cattle prod, causing her to scream and shrivel to the floor like an autumn leaf. Then they parted to let the Negro prisoners separate, and marveled when Shuttlesworth veered toward Sheriff Davis to say, “I love you, brother.”

The rabbis talked until dawn about what had brought them from eight different states to such a place. They told of supportive or puzzled congregations, or of blunt warnings from synagogue boards not to cause scandal or neglect their regular duties. Some said they were stung that local Jews avoided them; others confessed a creeping taste for sanctimony among the righteous few. One by one, with Rabbi Eugene Borowitz taking notes on the back of a leaflet about the Ku Klux Klan, each man spoke, and then they composed a lengthy common testament: “…We shall not forget the people with whom we drove, prayed, marched, slept, ate, demonstrated and were arrested. How little we know of these people and their struggle…. How many a Torah reading, Passover celebration, prayer book text and sermonic effort has come to mind in these hours…. These words were first written at 3:00 a.m. in the sweltering heat of a sleepless night, by the light of the one naked bulb hanging in the corridor outside our small cell.” On Friday, most of the rabbis refused their first jail food—small jars of Gerber's Baby Food merrily offered as a “special meal”—and bailed out to fly home for the Sabbath.

 

F
OR THE MOST PART
, movement news trailed on the back pages along with notice that Nelson Mandela and six other black leaders had received life sentences on June 12 for treason against apartheid in South Africa, and were shipped off to lime pits on Robben Island. However, headlines did trumpet stories with a movement subtext. Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania “stunned the nation” by announcing a “stop-Goldwater” candidacy barely a month before the Republican convention. On Monday, June 15, in a decision the
New York Times
called as significant as the
Brown
cases on school segregation, the U.S. Supreme Court required states to apportion their legislative districts to equalize the weight of each citizen's vote, undercutting the preserved advantage of rural areas. On Tuesday, Southerners kept the Senate in session past midnight for a record thirty-four roll call votes on futile amendments to the civil rights bill, with speeches of exhausted defiance that a team of congressional historians likened to “death scene arias of an interminable opera….”

On Wednesday, Senator Goldwater flew to a farm outside Gettysburg to seek the blessing of Dwight Eisenhower for his own vote on the bill. Afterward, fuming that Eisenhower gave him no better than a noncommittal response, the candidate returned to find his Senate office besieged by politicians awaiting the result, including the young chairmen of fledgling Republican parties in Mississippi and Alabama. Goldwater, on the counsel of his legal advisers,
*
stressed constitutional rather than moral or political arguments in his catalytic announcement on the Senate floor, opposing the civil rights bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation of such power…which 50 sovereign states have reserved for themselves.” While renouncing segregation personally, he voted with five other Republicans and twenty-one Democrats against the decisive majority of seventy-three fellow senators on Friday, June 19—exactly one year after President Kennedy sent his original version of an omnibus civil rights bill to Congress.

J. Edgar Hoover reacted to the Senate vote with bitter foreboding, seasoned by bureaucratic caution. In strictest secrecy, he retrieved copies of FBI surveillance photographs showing Martin Luther King together with Stanley Levison, on the remote chance that a leak against King and the bill might become worth exposing the Bureau's hand. Hoover disallowed—“because of the occupations of the individuals using the office”—a detailed plan to bug Harry Wachtel's law office when King met there with his New York advisers on June 22, but he encouraged vigilant surveillance by safer methods. Teams of New York agents followed Clarence Jones in the hope of observing scandalous political activity, while the Director himself supervised an overhaul of selected files at headquarters. Finding the boilerplate description of Bayard Rustin too tame, he called for revision based on “the most pertinent and adverse information concerning him from a subversive standpoint.” Hoover decreed that allegations be updated if they sounded too old, and that “the term ‘noncommunist' not be used.”

President Johnson declared that the civil rights bill “goes further to invest the rights of man with the protection of law than any legislation in this century.” He hailed the Senate vote before a San Francisco crowd of thirty thousand, and continued triumphant motorcades through Los Angeles on Saturday, pausing long enough to make calls about two senators, Edward Kennedy and Birch Bayh, whose private plane had crashed after adjournment Friday night, killing the pilot.
†

Johnson's polls showed him favored to become the first Democrat to carry California since Truman in 1948, and his buoyant speeches against poverty and racial injustice (“I have come to California to ask you to throw off your doubts about America”) attracted what one reporter called “wealthy industrialists, ranchers, and other generally conservative types not recently to be found at California Democratic Party dinners.” His evening fund-raiser at the Ambassador Hotel overflowed with large donors until it displaced the long-scheduled bar mitzvah party of young Lyle Peskin from the Embassy Room. Hotel officials hastily moved the Peskins to a substitute location, and the President himself dropped by after midnight to make amends.

The President already had determined his strategy for the last legislative mile on civil rights. To avoid revisiting the quicksand of the Senate, he resolved to have the House accept the Senate-passed version intact, first by bowling over Howard Smith of the House Rules Committee to forestall the slightest amendment. Johnson immediately called House Republican Leader Charles Halleck to push for assistance. “Y'all want civil rights as much as we do,” he said. “I believe it's a nonpartisan bill. I don't think it's a Johnson bill.”