Pillar of Fire (66 page)

For King himself the threats were old and the FBI escorts a welcome novelty. Inspired by Greenwood, he told a large rally at the Jackson Masonic Temple about his 1957 visit to Africa for independence ceremonies in the new nation of Ghana, recalling how much it impressed him to see that “all of those leaders who are now in the cabinet and in Parliament are men who went to prison. In other words, I'm saying to you my friends that often the path to freedom will carry you through prison.” King's homage to sacrifice received a tepid response from the relatively prosperous “city” crowd of Jackson Negroes, who preferred to hear less about jail. “Yes, in a real sense, we are the conscience of America,” King persisted. “We are its troubled souls, and we will continue to insist that right be done because both God's will and the sacred heritage of our nation speak through our echoing demands.”

King's message, while too fiery for Jackson and too theatrical for Greenwood SNCC workers, was a rare fit for Bob Moses. Just before King's arrival, Moses had circulated an “EMERGENCY MEMORANDUM” about the summer project's political ambition to unseat Mississippi's regular, all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Sounding an alarm that movement workers “are not aware of the massive job which remains” to create an alternative party organization called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)—democratic in the sense of open to all persons, and Democratic in the sense of loyal to President Johnson—Moses urgently demanded that supporters “
must
devote all their time to organizing for the convention challenge.” The required groundwork, which amounted to precinct canvassing for a hypothetical political party, ran against the summer project's emotional tides of cathartic inspiration, survival, cultural epiphany, and tests of bravado at the courthouse. Some strategists opposed the entire venture as a quixotic diversion into conventional politics for a summer project that was overwhelmed and nearly spent, but Moses prevailed. With his allies, he saw the shortfall in political preparation as yet another reason no worker could be spared to go to jail over an integrated meal or movie. To make up ground in a desperate hurry, Moses looked to Martin Luther King for raw celebrity leadership on the traditional model, as opposed to the patient, low-key cultivation SNCC had pioneered in Mississippi.

 

K
ING MET
M
OSES
at Tougaloo College on Thursday, July 23, the morning of the wiretapped prediction of his murder. They discussed a host of tactical questions, including the prudence and design of demonstrations in Atlantic City to dramatize the plight of Mississippi. Al Lowenstein, back from Europe, stayed away from the meeting because of the controversy about his overbearing manner, but his traveling speeches and agitations remained fixed on what he called “my obsession with Mississippi.” By telephone, Lowenstein peppered the Tougaloo agenda with suggestions ranging from public relations (“Praise the civil rights act and then proceed to talk about all our needs that it doesn't meet”) to the selection of challenge delegates (“Must be clear that the delegation is in control of its own decisions…”). Of the hasty preparations for the MFDP's own founding state convention, he had forwarded advice from Los Angeles: “Create an atmosphere of representation with placards for all counties. Invitations would go to all prominent Democrats we can think of, even though they can't come….”

King, as had promised, made tape-recorded radio spots urging support for the Freedom Democratic Party. He promised to continue speaking of the MFDP challenge as a national test (“America needs at least one party which is free of racism…”), and discussed with Moses a coordinated strategy of negotiation, lobbying, and demonstrations for the late-August Democratic convention. On Friday, his fourth day in Mississippi, King appeared on television to explain the elementary facts of the MFDP. “What is it?” asked the moderator. “Why is it? How does it work and who can join?” Officials of Jackson's WJTV parried intense viewer criticism of King's appearance by citing a legal obligation to sell airtime to Negroes, but in truth they sold nothing and yielded instead to the faint new risk of catastrophic loss. Acutely aware of the ongoing, church-sponsored petition to strip the crosstown NBC affiliate WLBT of its FCC broadcast license, WJTV's management produced King's panel show as an exhibit of fairness, which observers later recognized as the “first Negro political television program in Mississippi history.”

From the station, King drove eastward in a caravan of more than twenty cars belonging mostly to news correspondents and the FBI. He took extra time at one highway rest stop to snack on a pickled pig's foot from a large display jar on the counter of a rural store. Abernathy and others joined him to gnaw through one foot after another, leaning forward to keep from dripping on their suits, while they enjoyed the queasy abstention of Andrew Young. “Come on, Andy,” prompted King, who often teased his companion for “high white” refinements and limited cultural range.

Additional FBI units from Inspector Joe Sullivan guided them into Neshoba County, leapfrogging ahead to cover highway intersections all the way to the small town of Philadelphia. Of the local citizens who stared grimly at the arriving procession, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Judge Leonard Warren promptly wrote letters demanding to know how the FBI reconciled the presence of “20 to 24 agents” around King with Director Hoover's public disavowal of protective duty for civil rights workers. (“We believe that the protection of King could have been adequately handled by state and local law enforcement officers,” Sheriff Rainey wrote Hoover.) The inconsistency squeezed Hoover's assistants, who could neither disclose President Johnson's explicit order nor ignore Sullivan's reports that Judge Warren and Sheriff Rainey were themselves among more than a dozen people being investigated in the triple disappearance. Eventually, headquarters resolved simply to ignore the letters. Hoover, who often stressed the more salacious angles in his investigative reports, told President Johnson that Bureau agents identified “a long line of Negro women with whom [one of many suspects] has had sexual relations.”

King received a lukewarm reception even in Philadelphia's Negro neighborhoods. There was no organized turnout or church sanctuary for a meeting, and advance criers rounded up no more than fifteen hesitant listeners at street stops and grocery stores on a roving tour. On spreading word that King had challenged a young hustler in a pool hall, more than fifty drifted in to watch the famous preacher playfully lose a game of billiards. Reporter Paul Good winced at the “cornpone evangelism” of Ralph Abernathy's worshipful introductions of King, whose big words and florid metaphors seemed to leave his audience cold until he spoke of fear. King said he had no doubt that the three missing civil rights workers were long since murdered from the jail down the street, or that everyone there lived with reasons to be afraid. “But if we are gonna be free as a people we've got to shed ourselves of fear, and we've got to say to those who oppose us with violence that you can't stop us by bombing a church,” he said. “You can't stop us by shooting at us. You can't stop us by brutalizing us, because we're gonna keep on keeping on until we're free.” These words stirred a response, after which King explained why they should tell their friends and family to register with the Freedom Democratic Party. He said on the walk through Philadelphia that he drew strength from the faces of people who remained human through such visible suffering.

The caravan reassembled for a drive ten miles into the countryside, where King and SNCC chairman John Lewis spoke briefly over the ruins of Mount Zion Church. In late afternoon, when most reporters had dropped away to file their stories, King drank iced tea in the Cole farmhouse nearby, listening to reports on the Klan ambush and arson five weeks earlier. Bud Cole, nearing sixty years old and still recovering from injuries, did not say much as usual, but Beatrice Cole recalled the exact hymns for mercy that had welled up in her during her husband's awful beating. She had King and his party singing prayerfully along, then howling with laughter at her folksy account of the other thing that had seized her mind—a panicky uncertainty about which of two pocketbooks she had brought to the church that night. One was filled with Mount Zion church literature, she said, the other with MFDP leaflets, and she had been petrified that the Klansmen surely would kill them all if they found the leaflets. Fortunately, it did not occur to the attackers that she, rather than the male church trustees, might be Mickey Schwerner's prime contact at Mount Zion.

 

A
T ROUGHLY
the same hour in Washington, legions of reporters strained to find out what was transpiring at the White House, where President Johnson and Senator Goldwater met alone for sixteen minutes to discuss ground rules for the presidential campaign. There had been press reports all week that the two sides were jockeying over a “gentlemen's pact” to exclude the race issue from active contention. Johnson and Goldwater complimented each other as American patriots above all differences, and agreed to avoid emotional appeals that might exacerbate national divisions in troubled times—on both civil rights
and
the military conflict in Vietnam. The President later expressed relief that the Republican candidate did not use the White House as a “launching pad” for campaign attacks. Instead, a bemused Johnson told Nicholas Katzenbach in confidence that Goldwater talked about how much he wanted to fly one of the new military aircraft, “and got on about it like a kid on a toy.”

In Mississippi, King made it safely to a late rally in Meridian that Friday and then to rooms at the E. F. Young Hotel, where he and his travelers stripped to boxer shorts in the humid night heat and sipped beer as they swapped stories of the long day. On Saturday, he flew home to Atlanta only to be summoned promptly to a festering crisis in New York City.

The summer project proceeded without King. Two more churches in McComb had been arsoned during his visit, and on Sunday in Greenwood Silas McGhee decided to return to the Leflore Theater for the fourth or fifth try of the month, this time with his brother Jake. They made it safely through the feature presentation of
The Carpetbaggers
, starring George Peppard, but an angry crowd of two hundred blocked their exit—“cursing and hollering and carrying on,” said Silas—daring them to leave.

Young Greenwood whites clogged traffic from the theater back past the courthouse onto the Yazoo River bridge. From the theater lobby, the McGhees called three Negro taxi companies, which refused to run the blockade, then the police and the local SNCC office. From there, calls for help established that while local FBI agents and most of the Greenwood police department had reached the lobby, the police refused to escort the McGhees through the hostile crowd and the FBI agents insisted their job was to observe. Telephone appeals spread to distant journalists, members of Congress, and to FBI offices in Memphis and Jackson, where agents dodged questions about how the Bureau could lavish protection on Martin Luther King and then leave the McGhees to a mob. (“I'm not going to go into that,” one agent replied.) When two SNCC rescue cars pushed through to the theater entrance about ten o'clock, confusion about which was the decoy slowed the McGhees' escape so that both absorbed blows, and one attacker threw a Coke bottle through the car window, cutting both brothers—especially Silas—with shards of exploding glass.

The blockade promptly relocated to Leflore County Hospital, where the McGhees received emergency treatment. There were fewer cars but more guns by midnight, when Corporal Clarence McGhee, a strapping paratrooper on home leave, darted in to rescue his younger brothers but could not get back out. A call to his commander at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, was among the host of appeals going out on the hospital pay telephones. From Washington, John Doar advised movement callers not to alienate FBI agents, but recrimination ran high on all sides, along with mutterings against President Johnson. Summer volunteers made notes: “Now (12:40 Atlanta) hospital doors are locked. SNCCs are inside. There are 3 FBIs…and highway patrols are back and forth in front.”

After Sheriff George Smith finally escorted the hostages home early on Monday, popular support for the courageous McGhees made project leaders reluctantly undertake a lawsuit on their behalf, and bubbling resentment about helplessness and passive law enforcement made them schedule a mass meeting on nonviolence, at which Clarence McGhee spoke for the doubters: “When a man fights back, he is not attacked.” These detours, plus voluminous incident reports and affidavits, dragged the Greenwood summer project further from the single-minded purpose Bob Moses desired. Still, Greenwood workers managed to assemble the county convention of the MFDP at Friendship Baptist Church that same Monday night. Stokely Carmichael delivered the keynote address, and Laura McGhee, mother of the McGhee boys, was one of eight delegates elected to represent Leflore County at the MFDP's first state convention in Jackson.

K
ING SPENT
M
ONDAY
, July 27, in a crossfire of mediation between Harlem and New York's City Hall. There, far removed from the rural culture of segregated Mississippi, one small incident had flashed into a ten-day crisis of national proportions, exposing political nerves connected through the movement years. Analysts blamed a host of causes, including a school board that assigned citywide summer remedial classes to a school on Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side. A crusty building superintendent exchanged daily criticisms with the passing traffic of unfamiliar teenagers, to the point that he turned his cleaning hose on one unruly group and yelled, “You dirty niggers! I'll wash the black off you!” When a swarm of students drove him into retreat with bottles and trash can lids, an off-duty police lieutenant responded to the commotion and shot to death a fifteen-year-old boy on the sidewalk of 76th Street. Many of the nearly eight hundred summer students in the vicinity gathered around the body in rage, so that it took police reinforcements several hours to clear the neighborhood.

White House aides exchanged fretful memos the next day. Hypersensitive to the northward spread of racial conflict, they worried that “a great deal of the Negro leadership simply does not understand the political facts of life…. They are not sophisticated enough to understand the theory of the backlash….” This was before New York CORE workers organized three hundred student pickets outside the Robert Wagner School with signs reading “Stop Killer Cops,” and well before large crowds gathered outside the Levy and Delaney Funeral Home in Harlem, where James Powell's corpse lay. From the first rocks and bottles hurled down upon police cordons, and the first police gunshots to drive away rooftop attackers, pitched battles and sporadic looting spread through the weekend from Harlem into Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant area. When Bayard Rustin pleaded for calm through a bullhorn, street battlers booed him as an Uncle Tom. “I am prepared to be a Tom if that's the only way I can save women and children from being shot down in the street!” Rustin shouted. “And if you're not willing to do the same, you're fools!” Hooted down, Rustin retreated by escorting a bloodied teenager to the hospital. James Farmer of CORE fared no better when he tried to tell another angry crowd that they were only feeding police violence, not redressing it. “We don't wanna hear
that
shit!” jeered a heckler.

By the daylight lull on Monday, July 20—with fifteen people shot, two hundred arrested, a dozen police officers and more than a hundred civilians injured (mostly by rocks and nightsticks, respectively)—secret consulations had engaged the highest staff echelon at the White House. If Johnson did not respond, aides warned, voters would wonder why he showed such interest in Mississippi and Georgia but not New York, when “too many people up there are ‘scared.'” Bill Moyers recommended “Sending Bourke [sic] Marshall up (he knows most of the Negroes in NYC),” but Johnson decided instead to announce that he had sent in the FBI. Privately, at the same time he ordered him to keep King alive in Mississippi, Johnson confided to Hoover that he had recruited former New York prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey to be a surprise public “sponsor” of the Bureau's future report. Dewey, the Republican presidential nominee in 1944 and 1948, offered bipartisan cover for findings on a treacherous issue, and he fit Johnson's pattern of maneuvering Hoover behind prestigious figureheads.

Plunging into the backroom politics, Hoover called New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller at the Wyoming ranch where he was recuperating from his bitter defeat at the Republican convention. They agreed at first that “left-wing labor groups” seemed to be behind the New York riots, but Rockefeller disclosed that underhanded Goldwater partisans had taunted him with predictions of embarrassing race riots in his state, and therefore may have fomented rebellion. Hoover relayed Rockefeller's suspicions to President Johnson, with assurances that the FBI would look for conspiracy by Communists
and
right-wing extremists. On the burning issue of police conduct in the death of James Powell, he talked his way out of a Justice Department request “to investigate the police lieutenant who killed the colored boy the other night”—as Hoover put it in his personal files—because he did not want to burden the New York police commissioner “by harassing his officers when he is doing everything he can to control them….”
*

No sooner did the street conflict subside in New York City than a similar one broke out in Rochester, New York, then shortly thereafter in three New Jersey cities, and by summer's end in four more Northern settings, including isolated Negro areas in Oregon and New Hampshire. In each case, a street arrest triggered escalating hostility. At the White House, Walter Jenkins told the FBI's Deke DeLoach that the uprisings were the “Achilles heel” of the Johnson administration. Theodore White, in both his book and an award-winning CBS documentary on the 1964 campaign, highlighted them as a stab of danger not only to Johnson but to the future “strategy of domestic tranquility,” exhorting the nation “to ask itself, in agony of conscience, what kind of civilization is being bred in its great and changing cities.”

More than any other mainstream interpreter, White saw in the riots an awakening to race as a national rather than sectional concern. “Starkly put,” he wrote, “the gross fact is that the great cities of America are becoming Negro cities.”
*
He perceived that the passing storm of riots would change the meaning of the new political term, “backlash.” Introduced the previous year among economists predicting a fierce racial competition for diminishing blue-collar jobs, the word had been transformed by the spring successes of George Wallace into a phenomenon among white voters, and now its reference began to shift toward a pathology among city Negroes. White himself recoiled from “not only a physical terror in those streets where the decent are prey for the savages, but an intellectual terror which condemns as Uncle Toms or traitors all who try to participate in the general community or lead the way to better life.” As a New Yorker, he was as much perplexed as startled by riots so close: “Why had the Negroes chosen to disrupt New York first…. No city had made a greater effort to include Negroes in its community life—or succeeded better.” In an echo of traditional segregationist argument, he assumed that the uprisings were at once mindless and contrived. Rabble-rousers, White concluded, preyed on “adolescent troops whose moral restraint had been entirely eaten away by dramatic producers and eloquent intellectuals on television, who somehow persuaded them that revenge for Mississippi and Alabama could be taken by looting and violence in the cities of the North.”

FBI investigators labored to identify any network of rabble-rousers. The New York office proposed Malcolm X as a likely architect—noting that some rampaging crowds had shouted, “We want Malcolm X!”—but theory stumbled on the fact that Malcolm had left the country well in advance. Wiretap intercepts of his few calls home from Africa, including the following excerpt from July 31, hardly suggested an active mastermind of insurrection:

 

M
ALCOLM
: Has there been anything in the papers about me being in Cairo?

A
NSWER
: Yes, in several papers, and when they mention you on tv they say that you are in Cairo…. And also that you're coming back Saturday…. Are you coming back Saturday?

M
ALCOLM
: Answer my questions first. Have things cooled down yet?

A
NSWER
: Yes, they have simmered down. Martin Luther King has been meeting with the Mayor, and all of the leaders are mad at him.

 

While collecting examples of numerous radicals who “took advantage” of riot conditions, FBI analysts backed away from the assertion that anyone had prior knowledge or exerted control anywhere—let alone across nine scattered cities.

On the law enforcement side, FBI agents did discover a pattern of erratic response: “a ‘don't get involved' attitude on the part of many officers” in the early stages, with occasional orders simply to ignore looters, followed by abrupt reversal into military-style suppression. This tendency—a natural hazard of all-white or nearly all-white police forces confronting novel disorder in minority areas—seemed only to exacerbate violence in both phases. To criticize unprofessional conduct would be risky to the FBI itself, supervisors realized, because some police commanders who had been trained at the FBI Academy proved “as incompetent as other police officers to cope with the riot.” When they warned J. Edgar Hoover of inevitable attempts “to wrongly discredit and smear FBI-trained officers,” Hoover responded with orders to “lay the facts on the line irrespective of the consequences.”

Hoover thought better, however, or his legendary command wilted for once as the FBI bureaucracy processed its confidential riot report. There was talk of staging a general White House conference on law enforcement at which the police issue could be surfaced discreetly, but Deke DeLoach could find no acceptable way to exclude two big-city chiefs (Orlando Wilson of Chicago and William Parker of Los Angeles) whom Hoover detested as his rare, outspoken critics. FBI authors would pull back to safety by September, praising police performance except for a hint of passivity that they excused as the result of political interference: “…where there is an outside civilian review board, the restraint of the police was so great that effective action against the rioters appeared to be impossible.” Omitting the fact that such a board existed in only one of the nine riot cities, the Bureau detected a “general feeling” among commanders that they would be “pilloried by civilians unfamiliar with the necesssities of mob control or even ordinary police actions and may lose their posts and their pensions.”

The Bureau's draft would be sanitized again in political screenings at the White House, where top aides objected that use of the word “Negro” three times on one page was “overdoing it.” Dewey told Hoover he did not care whether the report lamented a “moral breakdown” or merely a “breakdown” in cities, and Hoover told Walter Jenkins that he would not make an issue of “nitpicking” his investigation. When President Johnson decreed that the finished product be issued from the Justice Department in Hoover's name—not Dewey's—Justice Department officials discerned that the FBI had developed the entire project on a back channel to the White House. They were “greatly perturbed,” DeLoach noted with satisfaction, and Hoover ordered that the Justice Department be furnished only the report itself without any of the accompanying political communications. “Nothing at all should be said about Dewey, etc.,” he admonished.

The document, released on Saturday, September 26, raised to art form the language of a disapproving, omniscient shrug. “For some reason,” declared the overview, “there suddenly occurred a rupture of the cords that normally bind people to decent conduct and respect for law and the rights of their fellow citizens…. A common characteristic of the riots was a senseless attack on all constituted authority without purpose or object.” The Sunday
New York Times
stacked its front page with headlines: “F.B.I. Says Riots Had No Pattern or Single Leader/Tells President They Were Not Basically Racial, but Attacks on Authority/Finds Some Reds Active.” Mayors and police chiefs endorsed “the broad conclusions,” and Roy Wilkins was pleasantly surprised that the FBI not only downplayed race and conspiracy but “cleared the civil rights movement completely.” A thin tissue of universal relief survived intact, largely because the Warren Commission made public its voluminous report on the Kennedy assassination that same Sunday, burying the riot question under fresh memories of national trauma.

 

T
HIS MARKED
the second time in three months that Kennedy news helped sweep aside unwelcome controversy. On the last Monday of July, as King arrived in New York, President Johnson invited Attorney General Robert Kennedy to the White House that Wednesday to discuss his political future. A political buzz on the intervening day followed Kennedy to New York, where competing rumors had him making or not making deals with President Johnson, reconsidering or confirming his decision not to run for New York's Senate seat in the fall. On Johnson's side, there was a flurry of consultation about Kennedy's larger ambitions and how he might react to a host of scripted rejections. After Kenneth O'Donnell warned Johnson of “a big blowup” in the Democratic party if he did not select Kennedy as his running mate, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy predicted that the risk of schism depended largely on how Johnson handled the face-to-face meeting. Like O'Donnell and Robert McNamara (other intermediaries close to Kennedy), Bundy confirmed that the Attorney General wanted to be vice president, but he thought the threats of open revolt may be a bluff. “My judgment is that when he looks that one in the eye,” Bundy told Johnson, “it's going to be so destructive to him and his brother's memory that he won't do it.”

The President, in spite of approval ratings near 70 percent in the polls, complained of vulnerability and isolation. He fretted that nearly all top officials in his government, like most delegates to the upcoming Democratic convention, were Kennedy holdovers,
*
and said that the race issue wiped out his chief source of political strength from 1960. “If I can't offer the ticket the South, I haven't really got anything to offer,” he lamented. “I don't have any standing in Chicago…or Iowa or Los Angeles or New York City.” Johnson woke up nights in fear that Kennedy could seize
his
job at the convention, on a political tide of Camelot emotion, and he confessed corresponding personal insecurity. “When this fella looks at me, he looks at me like he's gonna look a hole through me, like I'm a spy or something,” the President told his Texas protégé, Governor John Connally. And yet, above the skittering suspicions, the President and the Attorney General cooperated on government business. They talked congenially, for instance, about ideas to move beyond riot control and reach unemployed young people with jobs.