Pillar of Fire (81 page)

In Biloxi, Inspector Sullivan's task force obtained sealed indictments from the grand jury at three o'clock Friday afternoon, October 2, and Justice Department lawyers generated national headlines suggesting imminent results in the triple murder case: “Judge Orders Secrecy on Identity Pending Arrests in Mississippi Deaths.”

In California, negotiations were consuming a second day with CORE's Jack Weinberg still unmoved from the squad car at the center of a giant demonstration on the Sproul Hall plaza. Sheer numbers of exuberant young people magnified the event on the Berkeley campus, where enrollment was just shy of 30,000.
*
A campus dean had solicited the aid of fraternity students, and all Thursday night huge throngs of demonstrators and anti-demonstrators gathered from dormitories, pubs, and athletic halls to cheer competitively for the rights of Weinberg or the police car, with volatile scrums on the fringes. Choruses of “We Shall Overcome” echoed against derisive renditions of the Disney television jingle “M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.” Late Friday, marching reinforcements from the California Highway Patrol raised police strength to five hundred. Some demonstrators melted away and others tensely passed conduct instructions for arrest (“remove sharp objects from pockets…”), before University President Clark Kerr signed a six-point truce agreement at 7:20
P.M.
“Let us agree by acclamation to accept this document!” Savio cried ten minutes later. “I ask you to rise quietly and with dignity, and go home.” Beneath him, Weinberg submitted to arrest after thirty-two unbroken hours under the now-flattened car roof, and some four thousand students dispersed from an event that began to shift the student movement out of the Negro South.

On Saturday morning, FBI agents arrested Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, and three other Neshoba County officers on assorted charges of beating Negroes in their custody. Although newspapers with a hint of pique noted that the accusations concerned “Violence Not Linked to Triple Murder,” the jailing of such powerful local figures achieved the desired psychological effect within the besieged White Knights klaverns. Informants reported that several overwrought conspirators took flight beyond the region, where FBI agents enjoyed a rare advantage over the tight-knit Klan in tracking them down. They traced one to Louisiana and located Jimmy Jordan in the Mississippi coastal town of Gulfport, where he headed on Monday, October 5. Agents John Martin and Tom Van Riper found the thirty-eight-year-old Jordan a jumble of contradictions—fatalistic, saying he expected to have been caught long ago, yet remorseless, fitfully defiant of Klan retribution and the FBI alike. When three long, tantalyzing sessions yielded no breakthrough, John Proctor petitioned Inspector Sullivan for a crack at Jordan, one of Meridian's binge-drinking drifters. “I know that son of a bitch,” said the agent who had found the burning COFO car in June. “If he did this, I can make him talk.”

 

I
NQUIRIES CLOSED
on the enormity of Freedom Summer. While FBI agents pressed Klansmen for facts about its first night, movement participants sifted the aftermath. First in Atlanta, then in Hattiesburg and at a retreat in the town of Waveland not far from Jordan's hideaway in Gulfport, the veterans and inheritors of the student Freedom Rides debated the issues that had brought their leaders home early from Africa: “affiliations, the black-white problem, who should be on staff, who should not,” and “Why do we organize…how are decisions made?” Some argued that the movement could not afford to sink into critical reflection, saying, “After the election, win or lose, the forces behind Goldwater will gain strength,” or, “Well, shit on your personal feelings!” Others protested executive tyranny (“Who made that decision?”), pleaded moral exhaustion (“I have begun to split up”), or vented frustrations of youth snatched from campus life to the edge of martyrdom: “One reason guys fight on projects is [they] feel others are using the girls they are bitching about during the day.” The internal contest was widely defined as a struggle between the power “hard-liners” of Forman and the “floater” existentialists of Moses, but Moses sat silent, refusing to use his own personal influence to rebut the power faction. A student took the floor with a silent pantomime of SNCC's characteristic hand gestures, which earned applause for anguished expression and snickers for burned-out absurdity. Dov Green, one of many SNCC poets, composed a wry stanza on the crisis:

“We've got to stop being Muslims during the day and integrationists at night,” declared a staff worker in Hattiesburg. “Rivals are not enemies,” warned another. One memo writer focused upon governance within SNCC: “If we assign a quota on whites, or even eliminate ‘them' entirely, what will we prove?” Another asked whether “we really believe what the white man tells us, that the Negro is really too stupid to vote. You know there are some Negroes in SNCC who believe that.” A movement conceived in biracial sacrifice toward voting rights warred over the internal franchise. Dissenters asked why Freedom School teachers of both races were not invited to the deliberations at all, and a prophetic paper, written anonymously for fear of ridicule, raised by racial analogy an intercutting issue of gender: “Assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep-rooted and every much as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro.”

Student shock troops who had helped punch their stupefied country out of segregation confronted the perennial snares of democratic practice. If binding popular rule carried inside SNCC, it threatened to swamp the Negro pioneers with white votes, and all of the veterans with newer faces (“The new people are naive…I cannot really be honest with them…”). Voting came to suggest either dead rules and parliamentary tricks, which made Atlantic City loom as decisive betrayal, or classical “mobocracy” in the form of Mississippi's broadly representative white rule. “I was sure that we were closer to the truth than anyone else,” wrote a staff member from Atlanta headquarters. Privately Dennis Sweeney and others took up a curdling slogan about the ballot itself—“the best way to keep someone a slave is to give him the vote and call him free”—while still declaring in public that elected authority must “be made to come forward with some sort of answer to all of this.”

During the October emergency meeting in Atlanta, controversy spread from the rare—some said unprecedented—demand for a binding vote on whether to grant voting status to post-summer volunteers. It was rejected as smacking of bourgeois liberalism, which “tried to give equal weight to all shades of opinion when there were two hundred people in a room.” In a harbinger of future decades, insiders glossed over racial implications to develop the word “liberal” as an epithet for shallow understanding and preoccupation with democratic norms. Al Lowenstein emerged as the prototype bad liberal only a year after bringing some of the original ideas for the summer project to Mississippi from South Africa. Bayard Rustin, Joseph Rauh, and Roy Wilkins joined Lowenstein in categories of scorn that shaved kinship into smaller circles of trusted allies—radicals, pacifists, nationalists, Marxists. Paradoxically, social forces on the brink of militant explosion reverted to preoccupation with enemies and niches. SNCC's Waveland meeting, wrote James Forman, “finally broke down on the question of firing people.” About that time, asked whether Mississippi had reached a “pre-revolutionary situation,” Bob Moses told a Stanford audience that any revolution most likely would break out in the North instead, where “the cities are our jungles.”

In Gulfport, FBI agent Proctor patiently visited Jimmy Jordan every few days through October. Jordan neither disputed nor confirmed reports that he had talked to friends about “shooting a nigger.” Full of hardship, he expressed feelings of abandonment against the Klan, which Proctor cultivated on the FBI's tavern tab. The agent kept up his matter-of-fact warning that one day he would bring an arrest warrant, and when Jordan began to mention the likelihood of doing some prison time, Proctor assured him that the Bureau could arrange for him beforehand to visit his dying father in Georgia.

Jordan's confession, and another soon to follow, looked back through the eyes of astonished Klansmen into the heart of the Mississippi movement at the peak of its conviction, only four months earlier. From word that Neshoba County had locked up the White Knights target known as “Goatee”—Mickey Schwerner—with two civil rights friends who “needed their asses tore up,” there had been furtive recruitments at homes and parking lots, errands for sandwiches and protective gloves, plus logistical mix-ups in the rendezvous between Jordan's Meridian Klansmen and the Philadelphia klavern of Billy Posey, whose 1955 Chevrolet broke down with carburetor trouble in the night caravan that overtook the newly released civil rights workers. Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price took them to the isolated Rock Cut Road in his cruiser, with Jordan riding shotgun.

Of a thousand details to the hasty lynching, such as securing a spare key to the bulldozer, only Schwerner's last words confounded the Klansmen themselves. Jordan and others preserved them verbatim for agents who passed them to Inspector Sullivan as indelible signs. The Klansmen heard nothing fearful or defiant, nor anything practical to escape the moment of terror, but they could not forget the spark of supremely disciplined faith that reached across the last human barrier. Alton Wayne Roberts exploded past more hesitant Klansmen to yank Schwerner from the cruiser next to a ditch. He jammed a pistol into his ribs and screamed from a face of animal hatred, “Are you that nigger lover?” Schwerner had an instant to reply, “Sir, I know just how you feel.”

T
HE MIRACLE
C
ARDINALS
, who overtook the collapsed Philadelphia Phillies in the last twelve days of the season, represented the National League partly by adapting to integration and speed, with a team built around Bob Gibson's fastball and two fleet outfielders, Lou Brock and Curt Flood. They were World Series underdogs to the New York Yankees of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Whitey Ford, whose corporate management stood on its astonishing record—thirteen pennants and nine championships since 1949—to resist Negro players beyond their pioneer Elston Howard, as an unnecessary risk to the patronage of white ballpark customers.
*
Neither adverse odds nor racial subtext mattered to St. Louis fans, who welcomed the surprise gift of fall pageantry on Wednesday, October 7, cheering Dixieland bands that marched in the Busch Stadium outfield. The crowd howled with delight when a goofy reserve player named Bob Uecker impulsively caught pregame fly balls in the throat of a borrowed tuba, then roared when the blithe and limber Cardinals unexpectedly thumped the Yankees in the first game, 9-5.

That evening in Washington, Walter Jenkins stood in for President Johnson at an office-warming cocktail party given by the editors of
Newsweek
. He departed alone on foot to the nearby YMCA, where at 8:35
P.M.
police officers accosted him in a basement pay toilet together with an elderly resident of the U.S. Soldiers Home. Jenkins quietly submitted to his second stakeout arrest from this rendezvous spot on the charge of “disorderly conduct (pervert),” giving his true name and occupation. Booked and fingerprinted, he obtained release on $50 forfeit bond and returned to work past midnight at the White House, very likely in catatonic denial.

Unaware for days, President Johnson campaigned obsessively right into Barry Goldwater's hometown of Phoenix, where more than once he abruptly halted the entire presidential motorcade, seized a bullhorn, and “verbally caressed” a handful of gawking pedestrians. On October 9, he rode
Air Force One
through stops at Louisville and Nashville, then in New Orleans walked half a mile down track number two to greet the incoming
Lady Bird Special
at Union Station. A predominantly Negro crowd cheered him to the obvious discomfort of straddling Democrats such as Louisiana governor John McKeithen, who tacitly supported Goldwater behind a stated posture of “nonparticipation, but just short of being neutral.” As toastmaster, Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana tried to smother the palpable tension among nearly two thousand influential donors that night by embracing the Johnsons as kindred Southerners. He praised Lady Bird as one who “knows the sound of the wind in the pines and the song of the mockingbird in the morning.” The President himself, with a nod to Senator Russell Long at the dais, reminisced beyond his text about hearing the controversial speeches of Long's father, Huey, during the early Depression. “I thought he had a heart for the people,” said Johnson, playing on fond local memory of Huey the Kingfish as a champion of schoolbooks, roads, and other instruments of common opportunity. He played further to the regional sense of victimization by national economic powers since the Civil War. “And all these years they have kept their foot on our necks by appealing to our animosities, and dividing us,” he said.

“Whatever your views are,” Johnson added with a significant pause, “we have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, and we have the law of the land. And two-thirds of the Democrats in the Senate voted for it, and three-fourths of the Republicans. I signed it, and I am going to enforce it, and I am going to observe it….”

Having hushed his audience in the coded language of Southern politics, without mentioning the new civil rights law by name, Johnson pushed on. “I am not going to let them build up the hate and try to buy my people by appealing to their prejudice,” he vowed, and leaned forward to tell “you folks” a tale of deathbed lamentation over a wasted political career. Johnson recalled how an old senator—“whose name I won't call”—once beseeched Speaker Sam Rayburn for encouragement to make just one speech toward the common good of his despoiled state. “‘I feel like I have one in me!'” Johnson quoted the senator. “‘The poor old state, they haven't heard a Democratic speech in thirty years. All they ever hear at election time is, Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!'”

“The audience gasped,” recorded one historian. An eyewitness called the shock in the Jung Hotel banquet hall “a physical thing—surprise, awe—ears heard what they plainly could not hear.” A president of the United States had shouted the word three times, in a context that at once revealed and rejected a racial core of politics. The initial grudging and scattered applause grew into an ovation that lasted fully seven minutes, but the next day the reporters lacked the nerve to quote him exactly. From
Jet
magazine to the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
, the President's climactic phrase was rendered “Negro! Negro! Negro!” The
New York Times
dodged the word choice by omitting the passage altogether, and book accounts later modified it to “Nigra! Nigra! Nigra!” It was not until Johnson wrote his memoirs that the word “nigger” was put into the mouth of a president of the United States.
The Vantage Point
was famously selective about war and race—without a word, for instance, about the MFDP challenge at the Democratic convention—but Johnson claimed the raw truth of New Orleans as another Gettysburg moment.

His boldness did gain sympathy in news outlets that shied away from the actual words. “Johnson Hits at Hatred as Southern Vote Bait,” proclaimed the
Atlanta Journal
, and White House aides privately reported a wave of “respect and admiration” within a previously skeptical traveling press corps. While many reporters remained “tired and negative” about quirks such as “your interest in the polls,” Horace Busby advised Johnson, “the New Orleans (Negro, Negro, Negro) speech captured them…. Thus, overnight, they are speaking of you—as once of FDR—as ‘the master,' ‘the champ.'”

Johnson's campaign rose on extraordinary national tides, lifted by fear and remorse that converged from the Kennedy assassination, threats of nuclear war, and from incidents of bared racial hatred. William Stringfellow, who at the 1963 Chicago conference had advised religious leaders to “weep” over lost hope for racial justice, now collected signatures from seven hundred Episcopal bishops and priests protesting Goldwater's “transparent exploitation of racism.” Republican newspapers rallied to Johnson, most notably New York's
Herald Tribune
, which had been founded in 1840 expressly to oppose Democrats. “Travail and torment go into those simple words,” the
Herald Tribune
editors wrote of their groundbreaking endorsement, which the
New York Times
quoted as front-page news, “…but we find ourself as Americans, even as Republicans, with no other acceptable choice.”

In a series of confidential October reports, campaign manager Lawrence O'Brien predicted that Johnson would win a landslide “without too much difficulty,” and conceded only Alabama and Mississippi to Goldwater. Nevertheless, he identified the undivided Negro vote as a tricky new valve in political mechanics. “It is becoming more and more apparent to me that we need to make a special effort to get out the vote in Negro precincts,” O'Brien wrote Johnson, after campaign inspections revealed practically no working relations among Democratic politicians to turn out the vote across racial lines. Separate political structures were axiomatic in the South—“Dependence upon the Negro vote is a new experience…. Before this year they never had encouraged the Negro to vote—or particularly wanted him to vote”—but prevailed elsewhere, too. In New York, Adam Clayton Powell was still bargaining for his promise to deliver constituent votes, demanding intervention to fend off the Esther James judgment. Democrats, lacking a unified political apparatus, labored to invent “safe” public appeals for the Negro vote, and O'Brien's state-by-state reports on resistance alarmed Johnson about party realignment in future elections.

Democrats pursued vital Negro turnout with some care. “Obviously,” O'Brien advised Johnson, “we must see this is done by passing the word without fanfare to avoid further backlash.” Pressure fell upon Martin Luther King to mount specialized campaign tours designed to generate Negro votes for Johnson while minimizing spillover pressures on local white candidates. King held out for assurance that Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young would pull their share of the load, signaling Johnson that he could not look to King at the ballot box and still ascribe prime Negro leadership to more comfortable patronage figures. Besides, King told aides, campaigning alone would make it “look like Johnson has me in his pocket.”

On his own grueling schedule to raise money for SCLC, King delivered four speeches in three East Coast cities over the weekend of Sunday, October 11, then two speeches on Monday in St. Louis before collapsing at home of viral fever and exhaustion. Dr. Asa Yancey, the first Negro staff physician licensed at St. Joseph Infirmary, managed to admit King on Tuesday for overdue bed rest. Yancey delivered a lecture on the medical need to abandon fried chicken and lose twenty pounds, then prescribed sleeping pills that left King groggy Wednesday morning when Coretta King called to say he had been chosen for the Nobel Peace Prize. Until security barriers were improvised, photographers overran the hospital on its first day of integration to shoot the next day's front-page pictures of King propped up in bed.

An early
Jet
reporter noticed as bedside reading
The Prize
, a celebrated novel about international intrigue behind the Nobel awards. The book confirmed King's awareness that he was being considered, but its plot scarcely prepared him for domestic repercussions ahead. In a vain attempt to head off what he rightly feared would be contending claims among dear ones to shares of the bounty, King instructed his assistant Bernard Lee to issue an unequivocal statement that he would donate to the movement “every penny” of the $54,600 gift accompanying the Nobel Prize. Within hours, hints reached King that the prize had dissolved the political objections that had kept him off the board of Morehouse College. Roman Catholic Archbishop Paul Hallinan appeared in person to celebrate the news, kneeling with dramatic humility to ask King for a reciprocal blessing. King chuckled over reports of disgusted reactions from Bull Connor, who said the Nobel committee was “scraping the bottom of the barrel,” and from St. Augustine police chief Virgil Stuart, who called his selection “the biggest joke of the year.” Incoming wires of congratulation filled boxes. Duke Ellington, who had composed
King Fit the Battle of Alabam'
in tribute to the Birmingham demonstrations of 1963, hailed the announcement as “a beautiful bright shining light of hope,” and Robert Kennedy called King's “richly deserved” honor a global inspiration for “the greatest of American ideals.”

Kennedy received the news while campaigning in New York with President Johnson, whose telegram warmly commending King would be delayed two days because of hysteria over Walter Jenkins. By late afternoon, press inquiries about Jenkins's YMCA arrest the week before put him into George Washington Hospital under heavy sedation. Johnson's legal advisers Abe Fortas and Clark Clifford pleaded privately with news editors to withhold the ruinous story until facts were tested. Jenkins in turn pleaded with the lawyers not to tell the President, sadly insisting that he could remember little of his arrests. With an early evening statement that “the White House is desperately trying to suppress a major news story affecting the national security,” Republican national chairman Dean Burch prodded the Jenkins scandal onto the UPI news wire at 8:09
P.M.
A tearful George Reedy soon confirmed to reporters in New York that his friend Jenkins—upstanding Catholic, father of six, Johnson's closest aide since 1939—had been hospitalized for “extreme fatigue,” and at 10:15 there was a follow-up announcement that Jenkins had resigned.

From Washington, Lady Bird Johnson issued an independent statement of personal sympathy that night: “My heart is aching….” President Johnson doggedly continued his speeches in New York: “And if Lincoln abolished slavery, let us abolish poverty….” Privately, he insisted from then on that the Jenkins tragedy was a Goldwater plot to steal the election. He had the Pentagon retrieve Jenkins's spotless personnel file from an Air Force Reserve unit commanded by Barry Goldwater, and he ordered his lawyers and the FBI's Deke DeLoach to run down suspicions, including a wild hunch that the waiters for the October 7
Newsweek
party had been Republican operatives trained to use mind-altering drugs.

Inside FBI headquarters, confronting the coincidence of two men hospitalized on the same day—one dropped from the White House into scalding humiliation, the other raised from servile inheritance to a pedestal of global honor—J. Edgar Hoover mobilized his bureau. He sent Walter Jenkins a bouquet of get-well flowers with a card marked “J. Edgar Hoover & Associates,” and he denounced the new Nobel laureate to those same associates as “top alley cat,” pushing them to generate against King the kind of publicity that had struck Jenkins. Only a tiny portion of the crusade surfaced in public. When William Loeb, James Kilpatrick, and other prominent conservatives complained that the flower gesture betrayed Hoover's own bedrock principles by coddling a homosexual security risk, the Director claimed to have sent the Jenkins bouquet before realizing the nature of his affliction. This fabrication helped insulate Hoover from suggestions of bias when the FBI “cleared” Jenkins—“No Evidence Is Uncovered That Ex-Presidential Aide Compromised Nation,” blared the
Times
headline—only a week later. To prove a national security negative so swiftly was a feat of convenient service to Johnson, especially since investigating agents secretly pursued a host of extraneous political angles, such as whether any of Barry Goldwater's aides had homosexual tendencies.