Pillar of Fire (90 page)

King recalled stories of the movement's darkest hours. “It's still midnight in Selma,” he said, but they would persevere no less than their slave forebears who had absorbed to their bones the despairing question “Is there no balm in Gilead?” from the Bible. “They did an
amazing
thing,” cried King. “They looked back across the centuries and took Jeremiah's question mark and straightened it…. In one of their great spirituals, they could sing, ‘There IS a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole….'” He preached to climax from the song.

Then Anderson brought on Ralph Abernathy, who pronounced himself dissatisfied that only half the crowd stood for his entrance. “I don't believe in half doing anything…not even for myself,” he scolded. “Now when I come, you don't have to stand up…but if you're going to stand up, stand up! So everybody stand up!” As usual, Abernathy galloped straight for earthy relief. “You may as well get ready and fasten your seatbelts,” he said. “…They are against us. They are against us because we are black. They are against us because they don't want us to vote.” He acted out a dialogue between a grizzled sharecropper and a plantation owner shocked to be called by his first name after the Freedom Riders came through Mississippi. “No, I am not sick,” Abernathy's sharecropper said finally. “They have told us, John, that I'm just as good as you, and you are just as good as I am. So I want you to know, and I want you to tell Ann, that from now on it isn't gonna be any ‘Mr. John' and ‘Miss Ann.' In fact, it's not gonna be ‘Miss' anything. It's not even gonna be Mississippi. It's just gonna be plain old ‘Sippi'!”

Abernathy's comic delivery had the church howling with laughter as he called for them to send a message to Sheriff Clark and Wilson Baker that “the Negroes are not afraid.” He paused curiously to tap the tiny police microphone attached to the pulpit: “This is the doohickey?” He examined the device, then leaned over to address it intimately. “And I want
you
, doohickey, to tell 'em….” A cascade of guffaws drowned him out. “You go places we can't go!” shouted Abernathy. “And will you tell the good white folk of Selma, Alabama, that we are not afraid?”

Abernathy complained about having to walk downtown in supervised pairs. “Now doohickey, this is not right,” he said archly, and he described how “the man” had separated him from Dr. King that day. “And then they
put
me,” he cried, rising to prissy indignation, “beside somebody I didn't even
want
to walk beside.” Abernathy mined an orator's gold with his prop. He made friends with it (“Now little doohickey, I
hope
these few words will find you well”), engaged it in raucous inquiry about whether “some of the people in Selma are backward and dumb,” and finally shared his messenger with the crowd. “They have a rumor out that only a few Negroes want to be free,” he declared. “And we are
all
gonna talk to this doohickey tonight. You see, we've got to let 'em know…. Now before we'll be slaves we'll be what?
Talk
to the doohickey!”

SCLC's Charles Fager witnessed this mass meeting, a month after his first. “People held their sides and wiped their eyes,” he wrote. “They had never seen anything like it.” Police discontinued church microphones as not worth the embarrassment, but Wilson Baker ordered the arrest of thirty “excess” registration applicants on Tuesday.

 

K
ING LEFT
S
ELMA
for Atlanta, where prospects for his Nobel Prize dinner had lurched back and forth in a hushed civic opera. Addressing reluctant business executives caucused at the all-white Piedmont Driving Club, Coca-Cola president Paul Austin had declared, “Fellas, the boss wants this dinner.” He referred to Coca-Cola chairman Robert Woodruff, who was generally revered and obeyed as Atlanta's “Mr. Anonymous Donor,” and publisher Ralph McGill of the
Atlanta Constitution
confidentially praised Woodruff for recognizing that “he has to sell Coca-Cola all over the world.” Still, ticket sales stalled. When Granger Hansell, an attorney for the
Constitution
, criticized his friend McGill for sponsoring the dinner, McGill tried to deflect suggestions of abnormal interest. “I don't agree with everything about Dr. King,” he wrote, and he denied another correspondent's suspicion of frequent contact: “I have seen [King] only three times and then casually.”

An executive of First National Bank organized a rare revolt within Atlanta's business leadership, urging friends to make sure Atlanta “ain't having no dinner for no nigger,” but this effort backfired with the December 29
New York Times
account of resistance to the King tribute. The city's most prominent banker, Mills Lane, circulated word that he was not the story's unidentified “banker.” The
Constitution
's lawyer, Granger Hansell, changed his mind about buying tickets, and such sales were a hopeful breakthrough for the novel coalition behind the drive: McGill, Benjamin Mays of Morehouse, Rabbi Jacob Rothschild of Atlanta's Temple, and Archbishop Paul Hallinan (who had sponsored King's visit with the Pope), with an interracial workforce mostly of women. “We'd keep meeting down in this basement of this church,” said Helen Bullard, Mayor Ivan Allen's political strategist. Allen confessed bitterness about the temporizing of his fellow patricians about the banquet. “Most of you will be out of town or sick, and you'll send someone to represent you,” he acidly told one group. “Don't let it worry you, though. The mayor will be there.”

FBI officials worked surreptitiously against the tribute. When Ralph McGill attended the Johnson-Humphrey inauguration on January 20, Assistant Director William Sullivan made another clandestine plea for the
Constitution
to brand Martin Luther King a degenerate. Sullivan reported with almost certain distortion that McGill agreed with the FBI position in every respect—“…regrets greatly that a banquet is being given in King's honor…believes that the very best thing that could happen would be to have King step completely out of the movement and out of public life….” In a further Machiavellian twist, headquarters sent a dispatch to the White House that presented the FBI as the passive recipient of an anti-King diatribe on McGill's initiative. McGill “would have liked to convey this message to the President in person,” Hoover wrote on January 22, the day the teachers marched in Selma, but he “asked that his views be transmitted to the President by the FBI.”

In Atlanta, ticket sales to whites remained slow until the NBC
Nightly News
broadcast a preview of the dinner as a test of Atlanta's reputation for flagship optimism in the South. The evening's image flickered from stigma to pioneer bravery, and rumors of scarce tickets caused a stampede. A vice president of First National Bank ordered twenty tickets. Some latecomers tried to buy entire reserved tables to guard against interracial seating, only to be told of a free-mix policy to discourage enclaves. Even so, swamped organizers sold 1,463 tickets—two hundred above capacity for the Dinkler Plaza Hotel ballroom—and turned away nearly four hundred more at the door on Wednesday evening, January 27.

The night's challenge switched from numbers to nerves. Arriving guests kept watch over their shoulders. “We could get shot, bombed, whatever,” recalled Sam Massell, a future mayor of Atlanta. There were fears of Klan demonstrators outside and social disaster inside, until the meal broke tension at mixed tables. “You know how when Southerners have good manners,” said the beaming Helen Bullard, “they
really
have good manners.” Ralph McGill saluted King as one who “helped us all to realize the power in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, resident but unused,” and who “saw clearly…that a studied and sane solution could only be brought to bear by committed and disciplined persons.” Euphoria took hold through songs and toasts. Mama King kept saying to herself, “To think that this could happen in our lifetime!” Rabbi Rothschild presented King with an engraved Steuben bowl, and King lifted the crowd to standing applause with variations on his Nobel homecoming speech: “I must return to the valley.” He did not mention Selma.

“Dear Boss,” wrote an immensely relieved Mayor Allen to Coca-Cola chairman Woodruff, enclosing a positive editorial from Philadelphia as “the type of comment that I think we received over most of the country.” For King, the Nobel interval lasted only until the next night's staff review concluded that the Alabama voting rights campaign was stalled. They had the beginnings of a movement, but all their labors had opened the registrar's office to a mere fifty-seven Negro applicants in January, all of whom were rejected. King agreed with staff recommendations to step up pressures, as in Birmingham two years earlier, and resolved to go to jail Monday in Selma.

H
UYNH
T
HI
Y
EN
P
HI
, a seventeen-year-old Buddhist girl, died by self-immolation on the seventh day of renewed hunger strikes against the anti-Buddhist South Vietnamese military. Within hours, Vietnamese officers overthrew their floundering civilian government in favor of General Nguyen Khanh, carrying out the coup threat that had so infuriated Ambassador Maxwell Taylor in December. Bulletins on these violent disorders flashed across the international date line on January 27, the Wednesday of King's banquet in Atlanta, and landed on the front page of the same day's
New York Times
along with a reaction speech by Richard Nixon. “We are losing the war in Vietnam,” declared the former Vice President, who predicted that “we will be thrown out in a matter of months” unless the United States adopted a strategy to “end the war in Vietnam by winning it.” Nixon prescribed a vigorous application of naval and air power to “quarantine” the battle zone.

America's three top national security officials brought a grim Wednesday morning assessment to the White House residence, where President Johnson, a week after his inauguration, was recuperating from one of his chronic bouts with fever and chills. (Lady Bird Johnson's diary recorded that her husband had “sweated down two or three pair of pajamas” Tuesday, his first night home from the hospital.) Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy handed Johnson what McNamara later called “a short but explosive” joint memorandum, warning that “our current policy can lead only to disastrous defeat.” On that much they agreed with Nixon, but they dismissed as political pabulum his statement that boats and bombs could deliver victory without significant American casualties. Their hope was that U.S. bombing of North Vietnam might rally a unified fighting spirit in South Vietnam.

Secretary of State Rusk narrowly disagreed. He opposed the bombing as a misguided reward for bad behavior by the unstable South Vietnamese government, saying the move would likely draw Americans into greater military responsibility. In December, U.S. policy had promised such bombing explicitly, contingent upon long-demanded reforms, but now Bundy and McNamara proposed to put the bombing first. The South Vietnamese “see the enormous power of the United States withheld,” their memo stated, “and they get little sense of firm and active U.S. policy. They feel that we are unwilling to take serious risks.” As Rusk argued for the advisory status quo because “the consequences of both escalation and withdrawal are so bad,” they argued for bombing to stave off expulsion from South Vietnam “in humiliating circumstances.”

President Johnson heard an hour's debate on his “fork-in-the-road” options, then promptly dispatched Bundy to Vietnam for close-hand inspection. Bundy plunged into a cauldron of political intrigue. The Buddhist demonstrations were the most severe since those preceding the coup against President Diem in 1963. Ambassador Taylor explored ways to overthrow the coupmaker, General Khanh, on intelligence that Khanh was sounding out truce prospects with the Vietnamese Communists. Bundy tried to restrain Taylor, saying Khanh was “still the best hope” for stability, but subordinate generals, led by Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky, were plotting against their chief on the strength of the American disfavor. “The current situation among non-Communist forces,” Bundy cabled the President from Vietnam on February 4, “gives all the appearances of a civil war within a civil war.” Taylor, warned by Senator Robert Kennedy of rumored schemes in Washington to make him the scapegoat for American failure, replied to Kennedy: “No good general should ever get himself in such a situation, but here I am—looking more and more like General Custer.”

 

M
ALCOLM
X flew to Los Angeles on Thursday, January 28, in hopes of reviving the paternity suits against Elijah Muhammad. Gladys Root, the lawyer he had retained the previous year, told him her two balky plaintiffs were at once intimidated by and dependent upon the Nation. They moved from house to house, dodging threats—a bomb had gone off nearby—and yet they still lived off informal child support payments from the Muslim treasury. Malcolm volunteered to support them in open court with testimony that Muhammad had cynically scorned and banished the mothers of his illegitimate children, and asked anxiously whether Root might have told anyone of his visit. He said hostile Muslims were following him already. “If these cases aren't hurried, I'll never be alive,” he told her.

Fearing a stakeout, Malcolm had Evelyn Williams and Lucille Rosary spirited through Los Angeles to meet him at the Statler Hilton Hotel—only to discover Minister John X, Captain Edward X, and a dozen men from Temple No. 27 deployed through the lobby. Malcolm's party bluffed its way into his room, where he tried to calm the plaintiffs. The two former secretaries slipped out well past midnight, and Malcolm X called his ally Wallace Muhammad in Chicago with an urgent request to meet the next day. Wallace opposed the idea as too dangerous. Because he supported the paternity suit against his own father, in part to punish the emotional cruelties inflicted upon his mother, Clara Muhammad, Wallace himself was skirting retribution. With the Nation inflamed against Malcolm and him as leading “hypocrites,” Wallace doubted that it was wise for them to associate on the Nation's home turf in Chicago.

Malcolm made a run for the airport on Friday morning with two carloads of Muslims in pursuit. “They had gotten so insane,” he said later, “that they chased me right down the Hollywood Freeway in broad daylight.” Malcolm pointed a cane out the window as though it were a rifle. He had spurned any thought of asking Chief William Parker or the LAPD for protection, because of mutual hostilities that overrode even this emergency, but he did rush to airport security officers with a plea for help. While they hid him, one of his escorts ventured out with officers and identified Muslim soldiers posted along the concourse—including Robert 20X Buice and other defendants from the Ronald Stokes shooting of 1962, whom Malcolm had stood by ever since. Security officers escorted Malcolm X surreptitiously through the basement baggage room. Once he boarded by way of a hidden stairwell, unobserved from the concourse, airport officials emptied the plane for a bomb search, and TWA flight 26 left for Chicago two hours late. The local FBI had time to place an informant into the adjacent seat, to whom Malcolm straightforwardly explained his dilemma. “Malcolm declared that the teaching of Islam in the NOI [Nation of Islam] is becoming less and less, and that it is becoming a hate organization,” stated the post-flight surveillance report. “…He remarked that if 200 people were guarding him, they will still try to kill him because they are so devoted to Elijah Muhammad they would jump into fire if he ordered it.”

At Chicago's O'Hare Airport, waiting to meet Malcolm's flight, Assistant Attorney General Richard Friedman and an associate were surprised by the sudden appearance of six officers from the intelligence unit of the Chicago police department, who had been alerted to the commotion in Los Angeles. The two groups exchanged enough about their respective missions to join forces, and when they had safely removed their quarry to a hideaway suite in the downtown Sherman House, Malcolm arranged a clandestine meeting with the reluctant Wallace Muhammad. He explained to Wallace that the two lawyers were defending the State of Illinois in the federal lawsuit filed by an inmate named Thomas X Cooper, who, since conversion to the Nation of Islam while serving consecutive one-hundred-year sentences for two murders, had been suing for the right to practice religion inside Stateville Prison at Joliet. Malcolm was bargaining over his potential testimony as a surprise state witness. He wanted protection. He wanted a safe forum to prove his own case against Elijah Muhammad. In return, he would support the Illinois position that Cooper deserved no rights of worship because Elijah's Nation was a bogus religion.

Negotiations consumed ten hours over three days, with Malcolm moving in fits between the lawyers and Wallace Muhammad, who felt betrayed. Wallace said Malcolm's purpose had changed from reform to destruction. Malcolm replied that he and Wallace had been trying to get into court for a year to expose Elijah; this was their chance. They could build Islam without the Nation. Wallace replied that Malcolm himself had come to Islam through the Nation's racial furies, and warned against a trapdoor bargain with Illinois authorities that had confined Cooper to isolation cells since 1957—forbidding him to receive Islamic material by mail, meet with a Muslim chaplain, or even read the Q'uran. The Illinois lawyers, for their part, said Malcolm's desperate plight proved that the Nation was a cult of riot-prone, racist fanatics. They could not understand why Malcolm so valued the opinion of the reserved and unknown Wallace.

On Saturday, January 30, Malcolm broke away to tape a television interview on
Kup's Show
. The host, Chicago columnist Irv Kupcinet, remarked that Malcolm seemed to have changed from the “stormy individual” of previous appearances, who “hated all whites, you said.”

“I've gotten older,” said Malcolm. He answered questions about hatred in race relations and his abandonment of “white devil” theories, saying that while no one could use him as a tool against Elijah Muhammad, he would never shrink from the truth. “To have gotten weak for a woman is one thing,” said Malcolm. “It is human, and it is natural. But after getting weak and completely destroying her reputation, to do nothing whatsoever to protect her as a woman, then he is not a man. And to commit murder and to see followers line up to kill each other and to mutilate each other, then this is not a man.”

Kupcinet asked whether Malcolm wished to apologize for insisting in the past that the Nation practiced true Islam.

“No, I won't apologize, Kup, for this reason,” Malcolm replied. “You see, I don't think the burden is upon any black man in this society to apologize for any stand that he takes…. Most of us are attracted to things extreme, primarily because of the extreme negative condition that we live in.”

Malcolm departed the studios of WBKB-TV in an unmarked police car with two detectives and the two Illinois lawyers. A van swerved to the curb across their path. Two bow-tied Muslims jumped out, and a dozen others converged before the six Chicago policemen from the trail car ran up with drawn pistols to disperse them. The lawyers directed the officers to let them go, intent on resuming talks with Malcolm X, and were soon astonished that the attackers regrouped to chase the official convoy through the streets of Chicago.

Malcolm left for New York on Sunday. The lawyers believed they had his commitment to return for their February 22 trial date.
*
Malcolm promised Wallace Muhammad that he made no such deal. Two nights later, by the count of an FBI report, “nine or ten members” of Captain Joseph's enforcement squad confronted with rifles a like number of Malcolm's escorts outside the
New York Daily News
Building, separated by “a large number of New York City police officers.” The next day, Malcolm escaped into the Deep South for the first time in nearly five years. Newspapers reported his destination variously as Tuskegee, Montgomery, and Selma.

Elijah Muhammad also was maneuvering into Alabama through his lawyer, Chauncey Eskridge, who had won from the U.S. Supreme Court an order for the pending trial on the prison rights of Thomas X Cooper. He sent Eskridge secretly to visit his other client, Martin Luther King, in Selma, with instructions to propose a summit meeting. King was a “hard working man,” Muhammad told Eskridge, but he “just needs to be put on the right track” by someone old enough to “show him the rough and smooth spots.” Muhammad wanted to make news with King before Malcolm did. He offered to pay King's way to Phoenix or Chicago if he was short of cash. Any meeting of the two—even a handshake introduction—would be a “bombshell” upon the white devils, he told Eskridge, like the conversion of Muhammad Ali.

 

N
EWS FROM
S
ELMA
forced Eskridge to cancel his trip. King rallied volunteers in two mass meetings Sunday night, and on Monday morning, February 1, told an assembly at Brown Chapel that nearly seven hundred people were leaving another church to launch the first Freedom Day in Perry County, thereby expanding the movement to a neighboring courthouse. “I think this is most significant,” said King, “and it reveals that we are going all out.” He announced that Selma's young people were gathered in a third church nearby, preparing to follow the adult march with one of their own. “Even though they cannot vote, they have a right to make their witness,” King declared, “…that they are determined to be freed through their parents.” He called forward Reverend Reese among the local leaders, and summoned Bevel to give “final instructions” about how to march together this time in continuous rows. “So we are about to move now,” King shouted above a crescendo of clapping and freedom songs.

“At approximately 10:42,” recorded FBI observers, King led “a group of Negroes, estimated at two hundred sixty four,” out of Brown Chapel and down the middle of a deserted Sylvan Street, in a tactic designed to ensure arrest by Wilson Baker instead of the hot-tempered Sheriff Clark. Baker intercepted the line half a block away. Hoarse with laryngitis, he asked King to break up into small groups as before, and retreated when King insisted that the parade ordinance should not interfere with the right of petition. Two blocks later, Baker placed the entire line under arrest. He permitted a kneeling prayer, herded the prisoners upstairs to intake cells at the City Hall building, then tried to send King and Ralph Abernathy away. Their unexpected reemergence from the building attracted reporters who puzzled over a King arrest story that seemed to be fizzling. “And he said we could not come in,” King told them with a shrug. “They were full and we could come back.” Within minutes, when the potential embarrassment of the sidewalk press conference exceeded his desire not to have King in his jail, Baker sent officers to retrieve the last two prisoners.