At Canaan's Edge (43 page)

Minnis responded positively to Carmichael's task ten days after the Daniels funeral. “Here's what I've been able to glean from the Alabama Code,” he wrote. “Alabama Law says it is possible to bring into existence a totally new political party.” Ironically, the obscure provisions were holdovers from late Reconstruction, when white “redeemers” had fashioned laws to facilitate slates of local candidates by county. The statutes spelled out exactly how, where, and when in the election cycle a new organization must meet to organize, Minnis reported, adding that its official symbols “could not resemble, in any way” existing ones such as the emblem (a white rooster) or motto (“White Supremacy for the Right”) of the Alabama Democratic Party. “IT IS ABSOLUTELY VITAL” that every participant have valid proof of registration, he stressed, warning that many technical faults would allow a judge to invalidate the entire effort. If the rules were followed scrupulously, however, and if any member won its nomination for county office with at least 20 percent of the total vote in the previous general election, Minnis discerned that the new group “would become a political party, in Lowndes County,” local but protected under state law, independent of the courthouse Democrats. “As you can appreciate, Stokely, there's a bit more to it,” he wrote. “There are provisions [for] appointment of poll watchers, vote counters, election clerks, etc., that will have to be thoroughly understood by the people.” Excited, Minnis closed his long letter with a promise to bring law books for the next SNCC staff meeting in Alabama.

T
HE
H
AYNEVILLE
shootings brushed fault lines that ran deep beneath faith and culture, touching the fundamentals of modern knowledge. By coincidence, Klan Klonsel Matt Murphy died in a highway accident a few hours before Gloria Larry called St. Paul's in Selma, and Rev. Francis Walter happened to be making a courtesy visit at the rector's study when Rev. Frank Mathews received her news about Daniels. The two badly shaken priests masked polar anxieties by sharing liturgical words of peace from the Book of Common Prayer. Walter, apprehensive even beforehand about whether to take the place of the seminarian he met in the Hayneville jail, asked for a memorial service at St. Paul's, which Mathews awkwardly refused on the ground that it would degenerate into “another civil rights demonstration.” When an Episcopal priest did preach the funeral for Matt Murphy two days later, at a service dotted with solemn Klan insignia, conflict at the root of church practice again reached Bishop Carpenter of Alabama, the senior Episcopal bishop in the United States. Carpenter defended the local prerogative of both priests. He had long straddled a line between procedure and doctrine—denouncing the Selma marches as meddlesome while endorsing integration as a Christian goal. Rev. John Morris of ESCRU reproached him as one of the leading “chaplains to the dying order of the Confederacy.” Yet Carpenter also suffered Klan threats for his statements of brotherhood, and Bishop Will Scarlett of Maine hopefully reminded his friend “that the sight of the great Bishop of Alabama ridden out of his State on a rail…would be one of the greatest events of many years. I still think so: I think you have an opportunity of a hundred years.”

A dozen years earlier, Bishop Carpenter had helped the aspiring priest Francis Walter secure scholarship money to attend seminary in Sewanee, Tennessee, where a crisis simmered over the all-white student body. Carpenter knew Walter's mother as a prominent Alabama Episcopalian with a rebellious streak, who had dropped out of MIT to compete in a women's boat racing league. One day in the late 1940s, she came upon a solitary “costumed” Negro in the church vestibule and would not rest until, against fervent counsel, she paid a social call and returned home satisfied that the rector's garb and library were genuine, amazed that neighboring Negro Episcopalians had existed all her life in Mobile. She repeated as epiphany the wife's gracious first words at the rectory door: “May I rest your coat?”

In 1957, her son Francis Walter had secured Bishop Carpenter's permission to serve the missionary Negro parish of Good Shepherd, but family objections centered on the anticipated details of his new wife's social duties at church functions, perhaps alone among Negroes, and Walter painfully withdrew under veiled hints that a distant relative would pull investments ruinously from his father's business. Carpenter, accustomed to such padded turmoil since the
Brown
decision, reassigned Walter quietly to a white Eufaula parish with instructions not to mention civil rights. They came to differ over what compliance meant when anxious parishioners asked how to treat a hypothetical Negro worshipper, and Walter relocated to New Jersey in 1961.

By August of 1965, Walter felt compelled to come home to Alabama at the risk of succeeding Jonathan Daniels. He knew Bishop Carpenter had turned hard against the civil rights movement in the intervening four years of upheaval and recrimination, which were transforming the nation in echoes of the Civil War exactly a century before. Carpenter sanctioned not only the refusal of a Daniels memorial service but also orders to lock St. Paul's and have Wilson Baker arrest anyone with civil rights contacts who approached a worship service. Rector Frank Mathews thanked Carpenter for heading off “spiteful retaliation” by Francis Walter and John Morris, saying they would have used the aura of St. Paul's to praise Daniels as a martyr. “If I antagonize them they'll get vicious,” Mathews confided in a sardonic repost, “and then I may have to call on Tom Coleman to get them off my back…. Keep the Maalox flowing.”

Bishop Carpenter denied Francis Walter even pro forma recognition as unpaid, unattached clergy, like a retiree, so long as ESCRU and the National Council of Churches sponsored his continuation of the Daniels interracial ministry. “I am not able to grant your request to license you to officiate as a Priest of the Church in the Diocese,” he wrote after a dismissive audience. This meant Walter could not preach or otherwise hold himself to be an Episcopal priest anywhere in Alabama, including churches of other denominations, on pain of being defrocked under canon law. When Walter appealed to Carpenter's kindly heir for mediation, Bishop Coadjutor George Murray instead closed ranks against his proposed mission as a “direct insult” to all who labored “under proper authorization from their churches.” Shifting ground from Christian conscience to the chain of command, he said Walter was not qualified for the task. “One of the heartbreaking things about the kind of undertaking in which you are engaged is that you may well be killed,” Murray added, “and the killer will simply feel that he is removing an offending object.”

Subsequently, as Walter persisted on his own, both bishops hounded him directly and indirectly to the point of opposing his pending application for parenthood by adoption. They argued that an integrationist couple in Alabama was inherently unstable and bereft of friends, therefore unfit to raise even a white child. Legions of contending psychologists and lawyers would build a massive government file before the Walters adopted a girl four years later.

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Angeles, King made his way to Montreat, North Carolina, near the home of Billy Graham. His anticipated address there to a church retreat had become newsworthy since the 105th General Assembly of the Southern Presbyterian Church in April, when delegates had debated and voted down a motion to rescind the invitation to him as “unwise under the present circumstances.” Running behind as usual, King traded places with another Negro speaker scheduled later on the program, and spoke formally. “The ultimate logic of racism is genocide,” he said, “and every Christian must take a stand against it.” Preoccupied, King made plans from the road to reevaluate “our whole programmatic thrust” in light of widespread reports that Negroes were turning violent since Watts. “If you don't go North, we're damned,” he told Stanley Levison, “but if you do go, we've got some problems.” FBI wiretappers soon overheard Levison say goodbye to his son for the last weekend of August. “Martin called a quick meeting,” he said.

On Wednesday, August 25, the House of Representatives passed the immigration reform bill by a vote of 318–95, with nays concentrated among subdued Southern members. President Johnson teased Attorney General Katzenbach about whether “you'll ever get that damned immigration bill past the Senate, if you'll ever get Teddy Kennedy to catch up with old man Celler. Here he is seventy years old, and he's already got his bill passed.” Exhorting Katzenbach to help the Senate manager match the legislative performance of Judiciary Chairman Emanuel Celler, the President envisioned a wildly grand ceremony to repeal the national quota system among children of immigrants. “And we'll bring Edgar Hoover to scare everybody” like a Halloween mask, he said with a zany chuckle, “and then we'll go up there to Ellis Island with old Manny and get a picture in the paper with him and salute him and click our heels. Does that suit you?”

King's gathering convened Thursday in Atlanta. Northern advisers, including Bayard Rustin, Norman Hill of CORE, and Don Slaiman of the AFL-CIO, caucused separately from the staff for rambling debates on the movement at a crossroads. Most of them emphasized the disadvantages of a move north. They presumed an adverse shift in press coverage once demonstrations hit the home cities of newspapers that crusaded for integration in the South. Levison predicted a decline in fund-raising. Rustin strongly recommended that King not abandon Southern black churches as the proven recruiting base for nonviolence. SCLC should work to consolidate freedoms just beginning to be won under the landmark civil rights laws, he argued, and on Friday harsh news from Natchez, Mississippi, underscored the primitive obstacles still faced by traditional movements. A bomb exploded when the local NAACP chapter president George Metcalfe turned his car key at the end of a work shift in the Armstrong tire plant. Through the previous year of terror across southwest Mississippi, Klansmen had abducted and whipped four of Metcalfe's co-workers, killing Clifton Walker with a shotgun, and they also bombed the popular, arch-segregationist mayor John Nosser, either as a Jew or because he once suggested that Natchez might have to consider the NAACP's mildest demands. Governor Paul Johnson sent the elite Cattle Theft Division of the Mississippi Highway Patrol to investigate the attacks on Nosser. Metcalfe survived with mangled legs and a damaged eye.

King sent staff members to support the Natchez movement. Hosea Williams pushed at the weekend retreat to help across the South with a revamped SCOPE project, conceding that delay in passing the Voting Rights Act had truncated his summer work. Williams was on his best behavior—even praising rival Alabama SNCC workers for superior efforts to develop basic electoral skills among the people—but he could not overcome raw allegations that circulated privately within King's inner circle. “In my candid opinion,” wrote SCLC staff director Randolph Blackwell, “the project has degenerated in the main to an experiment in liquor and sex, compounded by criminal conduct, no less than a series of reported rapes.”

Drawbacks plagued every option, including the Northern cities King had toured since Selma. He originally preferred familiar Boston, but backed off because he found its Negroes too divided and whites too insulated by patriotic heritage. New York meant subterranean jousts with the master, Adam Clayton Powell, who whispered mischievously that he might fire Wyatt Walker, his assistant minister at Abyssinian Baptist, to sting King a little for thinking he could ever help Harlem. Andrew Young once favored Rochester because of its manageable size and Kodak funding, but decided that a city that lacked a good movement choir must be too small to make an impression. King's Los Angeles base was too middle-class, the city too freighted by colliding images of Hollywood and Watts. Bevel offered at a mass meeting to spare California the expense of its McCone Commission to investigate the Watts riots, with the simple observation that a majority of L.A. Negroes were migrants from Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, unschooled and untrained, dismayed to find conditions too much like home.

King cast his decisive vote for going north. “In the South, we always had segregationists to help make the issues clear,” he said. “This ghetto Negro has been invisible so long and has become visible through violence.” Unless the movement could establish that the race issue was national—not a deviation peculiar to the Bull Connor stereotype—the promise of nonviolence inevitably would shrivel. King chose Chicago for the music of Mahalia Jackson, the transplanted heartland of Mississippi, and in part because the Al Raby coalition pushed hardest for his help. Among many dissenters, Bevel objected that the Chicago movement lacked strategy beyond the primitive goal of ousting School Superintendent Willis. “In Selma, we didn't organize to get rid of Jim Clark,” he said. “We organized for the right to vote.” Its Negroes needed to “pick up their souls” to define a movement that could engage the country, he said, and by the end of the meetings on Saturday King assigned Bevel to lead a preliminary staff of twelve to help Chicago do just that.

On Sunday, August 29, King surfaced into the white lights of national television on CBS's
Face the Nation.
The first reporter asked if he worried about charges that his Vietnam “peace initiative” would encourage the enemy, the second why he had not yet sent his letter to Ho Chi Minh, the third whether he intended to undertake negotiations in violation of the Logan Act. A series of Vietnam questions gave way indirectly to Watts. “Have you read the Moynihan Report, so-called?” asked Rowland Evans. King replied that he had read newspaper accounts but not the report itself, which he understood was still confidential. Evans asked, in light of Moynihan's sensitive findings on the illegitimate birth rate among Negroes, whether King favored a new government birth control program. Another reporter asked if such programs should be “addressed specifically to the Negro segment of the population,” which led to a series of questions about what city King thought had “the greatest potential to erupt in the manner that Los Angeles has just done.” He managed to endorse Johnson's Howard University speech before inquiry shifted to signals of violence beyond Watts, specifically a report from Natchez “the other night where it is alleged that Negroes at a rally shouted ‘Kill for Freedom.'” King defended nonviolence. The program closed with “one quick question” on politics: “Do you favor a separate Negro party in the South now that Negroes are registered to vote?”