At Canaan's Edge (34 page)

Hulett presented a separate breakthrough to Mt. Gillard: posted notices that Lowndes County was taking applications for “freedom of choice” assignment to high school. Some argued from the floor that a second front was unwise, but families of nearly fifty children answered the agreed policy of volunteers. Daniels accompanied several to the courthouse for the required forms, which turned out to be nonexistent until Superintendent Hulda Coleman typed her own version. Staff members preserved details of swift, widespread reaction, punctuated by nearby Klan rallies on July 10 and 16, in sworn affidavits collected for the Justice Department. “Buster Haigler sent for me to his house,” Cato Lee said of the county's largest private financier. “He took his book out of his pocket, and asked me did I have any children enrolled to go to Hayneville High School.” Eli Logan said a white teacher twice advised that “the Ku Klux Klan would be through here next Tuesday” unless Logan took young Stephen's name off the list for twelfth grade. Martha Johnson affirmed that the teacher's son—“the same man who measured my land last year”—said she would “be in a squeeze” if her daughter tried to switch schools. Jordan Gully told how a creditor for farming loans warned that white people were fed up over his daughter's application. “Then he said, ‘We didn't bother y'all about registerin'. We didn't bother y'all about goin' to mass meetings,'” recalled Gully. “He told me, ‘I'll be goddam if this shit is going over this time…. We going to stop it. Don't you ask me for no damn help for nothing.'”

P
RESIDENT
J
OHNSON
frantically avoided inertia toward war from the moment in July when he announced the nomination of Henry Cabot Lodge to return as U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. He moved Bill Moyers to White House press secretary simultaneously, the better to present foreign upheavals ahead, and Moyers dazzled reporters by calling the President right in front of them to resolve a question. To drive the domestic agenda in place of Moyers, Johnson added to his staff Joseph Califano from the Pentagon and Harry McPherson from State. He ordered a verbatim transcript of Califano's first encounters with education officials over the running daily count of delinquent school systems, and then, unsatisfied that Califano was lashing them forward vigorously enough, sprang upon them without warning. “Get 'em! Get 'em!” the President shouted at Commissioner Keppel. “Get the last ones!” Keppel had approved desegregation plans for less than a quarter of three thousand Southern districts, with Lowndes County among a majority of pending new submissions, but Johnson cared most about the four hundred holdouts by late July. He was possessed to break the psychological barrier by inveigling every last district to give up segregation in its own words—almost any words. While this one priority nearly crushed the emergency teams at Temporary S (“We were going absolutely nuts,” Keppel recalled), Johnson yanked aides to other tasks. The second time Califano momentarily missed a presidential buzz, an abashed secretary knocked to alert him that Signal Corps technicians were there with orders to install a telephone in the bathroom of his new office.

Johnson shocked former NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall with an offer to become Solicitor General of the United States. That same day, the first for Moyers as press secretary, he tried to answer Senator William Fulbright's complaint that the intended nominee to replace Harry McPherson would mean too many senior Negroes at the State Department. “They won't have
any
if I don't name this fella,” countered the President. Fulbright narrowed his objection to the particular job, which included managerial control of the prestigious Fulbright scholar exchange program in foreign countries. “It never occurred to me that they were outstanding in the cultural field,” he told Johnson. “I mean, after all, they're not. The big universities are not predominantly colored.” Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that participating universities more than governments would recoil if his namesake endeavor were administered by a Negro. “I wouldn't object at all if you made him
Secretary of State,
for that matter,” he stressed in a quavering voice, “because I have a rather personal interest in this program.”

Fulbright managed to block Johnson's choice for the assistant secretary post, but a bigger appointment commanded public attention upon the sudden death in London of U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson. Within hours of an emotional eulogy at Washington Cathedral, the President called Abe Fortas for drinks on the Truman balcony, where he passed along a novel suggestion that Justice Arthur Goldberg might be enticed to leave the Supreme Court for a chance to catalyze a Vietnam settlement at the United Nations. Johnson completed one phase of maneuvers by July 20, the day after Stevenson's burial in Illinois. He announced Goldberg's U.N. appointment in the morning, then called to thank Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith for the idea. Ebullient, Johnson said Goldberg was the perfect choice to shatter a political taboo that no Jew could represent the United States at the world body, and he told Galbraith flatly that he would name Thurgood Marshall to a future vacancy on the Supreme Court “after he's Solicitor for a year or two.” By then Marshall would have added to the twenty-nine tough cases he had won in the highest court as an NAACP attorney, the President observed, which would make him more than eminently qualified to become the first Negro Justice. “I think we'll break through there like we're breaking through on so many of these things,” he said.

K
ING TESTED
another potential northern site on Saturday, July 24. “If you want a movement to move, you've got to have the preachers behind you,” he told an Interfaith Breakfast of 220 clergy in Chicago. Among sixty whites present for the kickoff event were Jews gathered before sabbath services, including the national president of the conservative synagogue association, Rabbi Jacob Weinstein of Temple KAM, who had just returned from an interfaith mission in Saigon with Vietnamese peace petitions directed to King. The Negroes featured a minority of local Baptists thus far willing to defy Rev. J. H. Jackson of Olivet Baptist, the “Negro pope” who in 1961 had branded King an apostate, driving him with two thousand pro–civil rights pastors from the National Baptist Convention. To those familiar with the hidden world of pulpit politics, Rev. Jackson in Chicago loomed a daunting obstacle for his proven exercise of machinelike powers in tandem with Mayor Daley.

King exhorted the religious leaders to “sacrifice body and soul” for the cause astir, then rushed an hour behind schedule into a three-car motorcade bound for Carver Park in far Southside Chicago, with a police escort and a fleet of trailing reporters. The approach of sirens soon released the team of advance SCLC speakers—Abernathy, Bevel, citizenship teacher Dorothy Cotton, Fred Shuttlesworth—toward the rally ahead, where they in turn released the warmup Freedom Singers. King followed with a twenty-minute address on the challenge of de facto segregation. “The Negro is not free anywhere in the United States,” he said from the back of a flatbed truck. Al Raby brought a neighborhood leader to brief King on the Robert Taylor Homes project en route to a brick-strewn field at 48th and State Streets, where a second crowd of five hundred was gathered. Uniformed Cub Scouts waited to pass collection buckets.

On through eight speech stops in the lead car, covering 186 miles of city streets before dark, King had the rare extended company of his adviser Bayard Rustin. Always entertaining, sifting rascals and tactical conundrums in his high-spirited Caribbean accent, Rustin addressed King's confluent pressures from experience. He had practiced nonviolence in Northern cities for more than two decades. He knew well the raw methods that Harlem Representative Adam Clayton Powell was using to hamstring competition from King on urban turf, having been driven off King's advisory staff himself in 1960 by Powell's blackmail threats over his homosexuality. From prior work on four continents, Rustin also helped interpret nonviolence in a context of pell-mell slide to distant war. Less than a month before, King had supported the interfaith mission to Vietnam: “Let me commend you…. America must be willing to negotiate with all parties…. Our guns and our bombs do not prove that we love democracy but that we still believe that might makes right.” More than this cablegram, or the stature of Pastor Martin Niemoeller of Wiesbaden, president of the World Council of Churches, Rabbi Weinstein reported that King's nonviolent instructor James Lawson, the only black person among the fourteen delegates, “gave us great prestige and opened many doors to us.” Chief among their discoveries in Vietnam was the monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who had sent King a letter on the meaning of self-immolation. The sensational fires were not acts of despair, suicide, or even violence, he argued. Mahayana Buddhism, while abhorring self-destruction, teaches that life is immortal. Candidate monks burn small spots on their bodies at ordination to signify devotion, and immolation expresses merely the extreme degree of constructive hope for a people's salvation above the nihilism of war. “To say something while experiencing this kind of pain,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “is to say it with the utmost courage, frankness, determination, and sincerity.”

This communication taxed even Rustin's nimble mind for adapting nonviolence across cultures. Witness by flame was “difficult for the Western Christian conscience to understand,” the monk's letter conceded, and the interfaith delegation found realistically that the two Vietnamese governments themselves were locked into opposing rationales for conventional terror. Still, from his study of the nonviolent movement against caste in Alabama, Thich Nhat Hanh challenged Americans to reciprocate in Vietnam by applying parallel Buddhist belief that war from any quarter is a greater evil than Communism, capitalism, or colonialism. They should “not allow American political and economic doctrines to be deprived of their spiritual element,” he wrote King, quoting a Christian theologian in his personal plea: “You cannot be silent since you have already been in action, and you are in action, because, in you, God is in action, too—to use Karl Barth's expression.”

The nonstop Chicago relay ended late Saturday at Friendship Baptist, the former grand Russian synagogue of Anshe Kneseth Israel in Lawndale. When King complained of exhaustion after preaching at two churches Sunday morning, the Freedom Singers improvised an extra hour to cover a breather before motorcades rolled toward six afternoon stops. At a shopping center in Chatham, then in Calumet Park, he urged large middle-class crowds to remember those behind them in the struggle from desperate poverty. “Dives didn't go to hell because he was a millionaire,” King explained from the parable in Luke. “He went to hell because he passed Lazarus by.” Until dusk, outside Scatchell's BBQ on Pulaski Avenue, King pleaded with listeners to march with him in numbers. “Take a day off on Monday,” he cried. “You know, we don't make much money anyhow.” Leaving behind most of the entourage to scatter in recruitment, hoping to silence press jibes that recent downtown protests had mustered fewer than a thousand, King ventured seventeen miles north along Lake Michigan to one of the country's wealthiest suburbs. Brown-shirt Nazis were picketing the village green of Winnetka, and police guards had thrown up protective fencing after a bomb threat. Few at the night rally of ten thousand people knew any freedom songs, but Rev. C. T. Vivian, SCLC's director of affiliate chapters, had been holding them with preacher riffs and choruses of “America the Beautiful.” King spoke for nearly an hour on the moral imperative to overcome fearful hatred at home and abroad. From dead collapse, he startled Vivian on the way back into Chicago. “You don't think I know what I'm doing when I talk about Vietnam, do you?” King asked.

Vivian muttered questions to stall, then smiled, realizing that King was reading his staff again for unguarded reaction, the way he sampled crowds and cities. King let it go, and Vivian changed the subject. “I just heard that Vernon Johns died,” he said.

King sagged. “Johns died?” he asked. “You sure of that?”

Vivian said he was. Like much about the vagabond scholar who had preceded King at Dexter Avenue Baptist in Montgomery, his demise weeks earlier was passing from rumor through fact to legend. It was said that the old man had appeared from somewhere at storied Rankin Chapel of Howard University, without laces in his shoes, to deliver without notes a last sermon entitled “The Romance of Death,” then wandered off again to be discovered prostrate by strangers weeks later. A recording survived. “I'm almost afraid to say this, but I can prove to you in less than a second that it's true,” Johns had growled to end his lyrical reflections. “Unless a person comes to the place where he wants to die, he has been licked by life.”
*
Vivian knew King had modeled his thematic speech on Lazarus and Dives after the mischievously profound Johns sermon of 1949, “Segregation After Death.” From common association, they shared in the car a flood of memorial stories on Johns the peddler and irascible prophet, who once announced a watermelon sale as the chastening benediction for a wedding ceremony that joined two of Dexter's proudest families.

Chicago reporters confronted King after a canceled event early Monday as he emerged pasty and feverish from a doctor's office, diagnosed with bronchitis. “I need to rest,” he told them, then lagged two hours behind. At lakefront Buckingham Fountain, King climbed a blue truck to address roaring, restless marchers numbered at some twenty thousand. “We sang
Going to Chicago
until there were as many of our people in Chicago as Mississippi,” he cried, reviewing the half-century of exodus. “Now we see the results. Chicago did not turn out to be a New Jerusalem…but a city in dire need of redemption and reform.” With Al Raby, Dick Gregory, and John McDermott of the Catholic Interracial Council, King led a walking mass the full width of Balbo Drive that stretched forward an hour to State Street, Madison, and up LaSalle to City Hall. He offered there a formal prayer for “a greater vision of our task,” vowed to be back when needed, and flew to his next trial movement in Cleveland. Mayor Daley, reappearing in Chicago from a hasty trip, adroitly minimized differences with King. “There can be no disagreement that we must root out poverty,” Daley announced, “rid the community of slums, eliminate discrimination and segregation wherever they exist, and improve the quality of education.”