At Canaan's Edge (69 page)

The glum but dutiful line of officers was a visible result of the latest private tussle between Washington and Governor Johnson along the razor's edge of Mississippi politics. (John Doar was filing a new federal lawsuit against Neshoba County authorities for failure to provide basic law enforcement.) On the movement side, relations were equally charged but more fraternal than supposed. In Philadelphia, Carmichael, Floyd McKissick, and Willie Ricks stood with King once again to face the quivering hostility of armed civilians and officers alike. Ricks had pulled King to safety through the tear gas in Canton, and King knew Carmichael and Ricks had endured many of the toughest movement projects for years, each suffering the death of more than one young friend. In private, King conceded to his advisers that the Meredith march had been a “terrible mistake,” but he insisted that its troubles lay beyond the publicized internal squabbles. While he tolerated the loyal exuberance of subalterns like Hosea Williams, who contested SNCC rivals in everything from card games and water pistol ambushes to shoving matches, King respected SNCC's earned right to an independent voice. “Listen, Andy,” he told Young, “if Stokely is saying the same thing I am saying, he becomes like my assistant.” He teased Ricks over his new nickname, “Black Power,” in a way that Ricks prized as collegial recognition from a lifelong master of striking fire in an audience. When King said he lacked only clothes to make a fine minister, Ricks boldly asked to borrow some, and King surprised him with an invitation to take freely from his closet in Atlanta. When Carmichael confessed that he had used King's fame as a platform to test the black power slogan, King shrugged, “I have been used before.” For all their strategic arguments, which outsiders fanned into a presumption of deep enmity, King and Carmichael discovered a common sense of fun to relieve tedium and tension on the exposed hike through Mississippi. On the last night, King bolted from interminable disputes about overdue bills and the rally program. “I'm sorry, y'all,” he told the collected leadership. “James Brown is on. I'm gone.”

Carmichael hurried with King from a dean's house to musical bedlam on the Tougaloo College football field, where the soul star Brown writhed in French cuffs and a pompadour through a freedom concert arranged by Harry Belafonte. For want of a piano, Sammy Davis, Jr., performed scat songs a cappella. At the microphone, actor Marlon Brando playfully slapped to his sweaty forehead one of the bumper stickers Willie Ricks had been plastering surreptitiously on police cars: a black panther emblem with words adapted from Muhammad Ali, “We're the Greatest.” Brando said he felt “wholly inappropriate,” and fumbled for words: “You can't imagine how I feel, because I haven't really participated in this movement, not in the way my conscience gnaws at me that I should.” He paid tribute to the estimated ten thousand Mississippians who had walked part of the way from Memphis, and to the array of visiting marchers. Ann Barth, granddaughter of Swiss theologian Karl Barth, joined Allard Lowenstein and numerous veterans of Selma, including one-legged Jim Leatherer and Henry Smith of Mississippi, who wore the orange vest given those who had made the whole trip to Montgomery on foot. Unable to push through the crowd, the thirty-year pacifist Jim Peck sent King a note about an early staff purge against white people: “I wanted to assure you that, despite the dirty deal I have received from CORE, I am still with The Movement and shall be as long as I live.”

On Sunday, June 26—three weeks after Meredith left Memphis—the marchers swelled to 15,000 over the final eight miles from Tougaloo into Jackson. Newcomers included Walter Reuther of the autoworkers and Al Raby with ten busloads from Chicago, plus both King's “twin” white lawyers from New York, Harry Wachtel and Stanley Levison. Film crews from the television networks gathered reactions from the bystanders along the way. “I don't like the niggers,” said a typically blunt man. “They stink.” A reporter quoted seventy-eight-year-old Monroe Williams as he hobbled on a cane in his first demonstration: “If my daddy had done this, it would have been a lot better for me.” Investigators recorded feverish anxiety over social norms in flux. A waitress on North Mill Street, confronting integrated customers from Texas, summoned a Negro cook to take the order while she telephoned a gang of segregationists to intervene. The latter arrived almost simultaneously with the Deacons for Defense and agents from the new Jackson FBI office, both called by the Texans, and the FBI agents in turn called local police officers, who resolved the standoff by shutting down the restaurant.

The closing rally gathered at the “rear” plaza of the state capitol, because Highway Patrol officers in gas masks, backed by National Guard with bayoneted M-1 rifles, sternly blocked the southern front where Mississippi governors traditionally took office near a goddess statue to Confederate womanhood. Disjointed speeches wilted in the heat. King preached from Luke on the parable of Lazarus and Dives, then improvised on his dream oratory “that one day the empty stomachs of Mississippi will be filled, that the idle industries of Appalachia will be revitalized.” James Meredith, healed enough to make cantankerous public comments about the reshaped march (“The whole damn thing smells to me”), mis-introduced “Michael” Carmichael, who called upon black soldiers to resist “mercenary” service in Vietnam and declared, “Number one, we have to stop being ashamed of being black.” Short prayers between speeches provided respites of inspiration. “We thank Thee, O God, that Thou hast given us the courage to march these past days,” said Robert Green. Reverend Allen Johnson of Jackson prayed from the thirteenth chapter of Hebrews: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unaware. Remember them that are in bonds as though bound with them, and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in body.”

Gnomish Harold DeWolf, King's theology professor from Boston University, had collapsed of heatstroke near Tougaloo. Negro rescuers urged him to disregard occasional taunts of “We don't need whitey” from black power advocates along roads to the hospital. Finally released, DeWolf heard Andrew Young call his name on the public address system as he approached the capitol, and soon was drafted to give the last prayer captured for the hour-long CBS television special that night. “O God, father of all mankind,” he said, “we see spread out before Thee the red and black soil of Mississippi, an altar on which a great burnt offering has been laid.”

A
New York Times
retrospective said the Meredith march “made it clear that a new philosophy is sweeping the civil rights movement…. It had Mr. Carmichael as its leader and the late Malcolm X as its prophet. It also had a battle cry, ‘Black Power,' and a slogan directed at whites, ‘Move on Over, or We'll Move on Over YOU.'…Reporters and cameramen drawn to a demonstration by the magic of Dr. King's name stay to write about and photograph Mr. Carmichael.” Primal signals compelled action in distant quarters. Within a month, religious thinkers bought space in the
Times
to interpret “the crisis brought upon our country by historic distortions of important human realities.” Their joint composition—“BLACK POWER: Statement by National Committee of Negro Churchmen”—rode the conceptual mix of theology and blackness like a fresh rodeo bull, using the noun “power” fifty-five times. “We are faced now with a situation where conscience-less power meets powerless conscience,” declared the consortium of bishops and pastors, “threatening the very foundation of our nation.”

Stanley Levison downgraded the contagion with a jeweler's eye for politics. To him, the cry of black power disguised a lack of broad support for SNCC and CORE with cultural fireworks that amounted to an extravagant death rattle. “They're just going to die of attrition,” he predicted when King called after midnight on July 1, “and as they die they're going to be noisier and more militant in their expression…. Because they're weak, they're making a lot of noise, and we don't want to fall into that trap.” Levison, perceiving a larger obstacle than the demise of two civil rights groups, worried that the movement's historic achievements were not consolidated enough to resist or reverse what King called a “mood of violence” throughout the country. He deflected King's instinctive response to formulate a warning about the spillover dangers of “defensive violence,” an understandable and prevalent doctrine. When King pressed to “clarify many misconceptions” and to refine nonviolence as “a social strategy for change” in the democratic tradition, Levison gently but firmly said he and literary agent Joan Daves had unearthed no interest. New York publishers and magazine editors considered King's position “well-known and obvious.” They wanted something novel and strong. Black power was hot, whether or not it would last. King was too Sunday School, and he no longer commanded attention at the White House.

“I've heard nothing from President Johnson,” King admitted to reporters in Mississippi. “It's terribly frustrating and disappointing. I don't know what I'm going to do.” Attorney General Katzenbach had delivered the administration's only public comment on the egregious persecutions inflicted along the march, saying he regretted the Canton attack because tear gas “always makes the situation more difficult.” A deputy White House press secretary said the President himself had “no specific reaction.” King had learned from sit-in students six years earlier that the most eloquent sermons alone could not move entrenched habits of subjugation, and that oratory must be amplified by disciplined nonviolent witness. That lesson helped ignite since Birmingham and Selma a chain reaction locked within many meanings of the word “movement,” from small personal inspiration to historic national change. “In the past, he had been able to deliver the power of response in Washington,” wrote Paul Good. “Not now…. The silent rebuff made the Nobel Prize winner just one more put-down Negro.”

T
HE PSYCHOLOGY
of war consumed President Johnson throughout June, when perplexity and frustration over the Vietnam death toll registered in public support numbers declining steadily from 46 percent to 40. The Joint Chiefs long had proposed to bomb petroleum storage facilities near the principal North Vietnamese cities, but Johnson withheld approval, weighing the risks of hitting Soviet ships in Haiphong harbor or diplomats in the capital of Hanoi. Military and intelligence analysts, who doubted that success would reduce supplies significantly to the battlefields in South Vietnam, gave way in policy debates to the charged image of any gallon of fuel spared for the transport of foe or matériel to kill an American soldier. Not to bomb “is to pay a higher price in U.S. casualties,” Johnson told the National Security Council on June 17. “The choice is one of military lives versus escalation.” By June 28, wrestling with final approval for bombers poised to strike, he looked again for positive assurance that “we get enough out of this for the price we pay,” but McNamara confirmed instead the relentlessly circular claims of force. “I don't see how you can go on fighting out there, Mr. President,
without
doing it, to be frank with you,” he said. “I don't see how you can keep the morale of your troops up. I don't see how you can keep the morale of the people in the country who support you up, without doing it.”

“Okay, Bob, go ahead,” ordered the President. That night, he violated a security pact with McNamara not to divulge the imminent attacks to his lone dinner guest. Richard Russell of Georgia threatened “a lot of trouble to us,” Johnson had warned, because the Senate's champion of military strength still grumbled against the war as folly. Russell once proposed covert schemes to install a South Vietnamese government that would invite American defenders to leave, for instance, and had startled television viewers with his pronouncement that free elections would unify Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh. He made headlines that spring by denying the strategic value in Southeast Asia, scoffing at the fabled “domino theory,” and calling for withdrawal unless a Vietnamese survey or plebiscite legitimized an invitation to foreign troops. All Russell's peace flares vanished quickly for lack of interest. War critics showed no inclination to make common cause with the venerable segregationist, even to follow his political lead out of Vietnam, but President Johnson courted him ardently to go in deeper—flattered him, patted his head like a country granddad, assured him yet again that their bosom intimacy from the Senate survived what Russell called “the vast chasm between our views on the misnamed civil rights issue.” At dinner, Johnson described the Meredith march as a kind of penance for his domestic break with Russell. He praised Mississippi authorities for preventing greater violence and claimed to have dispatched Martin Luther King to counteract firebrands such as Stokely Carmichael, for whom the President predicted death by assassination within ninety days.

“He was obviously in high good humor,” Russell wrote that night in a diary memo, “and from my acquaintance with him, I decided that some policy had suddenly resolved itself favorably or that he had finally arrived at a decision on something that had been troubling him. It was the latter.” Russell realized the stakes when Johnson rolled out target maps and confided that bombers were about to take off. As the senator left, resolved to endorse a decisive commitment to arms, the President asked his converted daughter, Luci, whether any Catholic sanctuary would receive him that night. “The monks live in the church,” she replied of a parish order she knew, and called ahead to have St. Dominic's opened to receive a stealthy prayer motorcade. Returning to the White House, Johnson stayed awake to receive ten flash relays before dawn on June 29. Walt Rostow, who had replaced McGeorge Bundy as National Security Adviser, reported black clouds spread over fifty square miles at twenty thousand feet above Haiphong. “So it looks like we burned up quite a bit of oil,” he said. From the Pentagon, Cyrus Vance advised skepticism toward the preliminary estimate of 80 percent damage to Hanoi targets. The President, braced to hear otherwise, cross-examined him about the safe return of all pilots and the strange absence of antiaircraft fire. “Thank you,” he said finally. “Let's go to bed.”