Parting the Waters (141 page)

Back in Birmingham, commanders of law enforcement huddled apprehensively at Kelly Ingram Park. Among them was Chief Laurie Pritchett, who had driven over from Georgia partly to find out whether King truly intended to return to Albany, and partly to warn his fellow officers against the deadly combination of Negro celebrations and Klan rallies. He urgently recommended that Chief Moore station all-night police units prominently around King's headquarters at the Gaston Motel, across the street from the park. Bull Connor vetoed the suggestion, however, saying he refused to “guard that nigger son-of-a-bitch.” With that, Moore took Pritchett aside for a heated argument. As Pritchett's main confidant on the Birmingham force, Moore tried to explain that he was in no position to press a direct confrontation with Connor, since Connor had hired all the subordinate commanders including himself. Pritchett huffily replied that Moore was not fit to be chief if he lacked the authority to deploy his own men. Then he stalked off. By the time the Riverside reporters returned from the Klan rally, Kelly Ingram Park was nearly empty.

Rev. A. D. King, home from a mass meeting at which Bevel had been the principal speaker, was in bed at his parsonage when the first bomb struck at about 10:45
P.M.
He ran through the smoke to find his wife Naomi dazed but unhurt in the living room, and together they were evacuating their five children through the back door when a second, larger dynamite bomb blew a hole eight feet high in the brick façade and sent the front door flying in chunks against the back wall of the living room. The fire department later calculated the damage at one-third of the parsonage value, but the Kings' immediate worry was the fear of more bombs. By the time police and fire officials pronounced the area free of undetonated explosives, upwards of a thousand Negroes had gathered, in various stages of undress. A number of them threatened retaliation against whites, especially against the policemen who were ordering them to go home, but A. D. King grabbed a megaphone and preached nonviolence. He sent some of his church deacons through the crowd to start up freedom songs, and when he went inside to notify his Atlanta relatives of the bombings, he held up the telephone to let his brother Martin hear the reassuring sounds of “We Shall Overcome” in the background.

From somewhere within A. D. King—temperamental, hard-drinking, insecure in the shadow of his famous brother—the shocks of the night drew out his finest moments of the movement years. Just before midnight, the crack of another explosion reached the parsonage all the way from downtown Birmingham, several miles away. This time it was the Gaston Motel, and as the news spread, the crowd around A. D. King's parsonage swelled again until it neared two thousand. Resentment of the bombings boiled into rage. Stones rained down on the police vehicles, and a brick struck one detective. The Riverside reporters got close enough to record a megaphone voice above the shouting: “This is Reverend A. D. King speaking to you! Please put your bricks down!” A trailing voice came behind: “That's your leader! Put 'em down!”

Driving back downtown, the Riverside reporters pushed their way into Kelly Ingram Park. Ambulances were leaving with four Negroes injured by the bomb, none seriously. People strained against the police lines to get a view of the damage: a door-sized hole blasted into the reception area of the Gaston Motel beneath Martin Luther King's second-floor suite, knocking out the main water and electrical lines, and, in a vacant lot across the street, three house trailers twisted and buckled from an explosive that evidently landed farther from the motel than intended. With more than two thousand Negroes jamming the park, the scene was reminiscent of the massive confrontations there over the past nine days, except that now all the Negroes came from the taverns and dance halls of the surrounding commercial district, which had been emptied of their Saturday-night customers. “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth!” shouted one. Rocks flew, and soon a car parked outside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was overturned and set on fire.

Bricks shattered glass storefronts near the park. Inside the motel, Wyatt Walker realized that the danger of further bombs was superseded by the threat of violence that might wipe out the precious gains of the Birmingham movement. He grabbed a megaphone, telling Bernard Lee they had to go out to disperse the crowd. Lee balked after a few steps into the hail of bottles and stones. “We can't do nothing!” he protested, but he followed Walker into the park. “Please do not throw any of the bricks any more!” cried Walker. A brick struck him in the ankle, after which he hobbled back and forth on the sidewalk. Police K-9 units scrambled out of cars to the head of the police lines, and these creatures, made infamous by the mass demonstrations, attracted a hail of missiles. Angry policemen chased rock-throwers into dark alleys; after one foray, an officer staggered back out with three knife wounds in his back. Police commanders and Negro preachers maintained a desperate liaison in the middle zones. They agreed that the preachers should labor to disperse the rioters while the commanders tried to hold back their police lines, but they had more sense than control. A burning grocery store lit up the park, and sporadic looting broke out.

By then the Riverside reporters, stranded amid fire, sirens, rocks, and rioters, were hostages rather than observers. They held their microphone aloft like a torch in a hurricane, and above the megaphone pleas for calm it picked up the voice of a hysterical man nearby, shouting, “How come
we
have to go home every time
they
start violence?” The voices of the Riverside reporters themselves, sounding hollow and stripped of radio polish, could be heard insisting that they were there only to get the news. “Ain't nobody gonna bother you!” someone kept telling them. When the roof of the grocery store collapsed in flames, a male voice moaned, “Aw, man, now see we gone too far.” Another man said, “We gone too far because they don't know
what
to do,” and an angry woman said, “Yeah, but they were
led
to do it.”

A. D. King arrived at the Gaston Motel about 1:30
A.M.
, the uprising near his home having finally died down. He rushed into Kelly Ingram Park with the loudest megaphone, and soon could be heard above the other preachers: “Our
home
was just bombed…Now if we who were in jeopardy of being killed, if we have gone away
not
angry,
not
throwing bricks, if we could do that and we were in danger, why must
you
rise up to hurt our cause? You are
hurting
us! You are
not
helping! Now won't you
please
clear this park.” King's initiative, along with the fatigue of the rioters and the relative restraint of the police, allowed the phalanx of Negro preachers to make headway in dispersing the crowd. Wyatt Walker had limped back to the motel to see his wife, Ann, who had flown in from Atlanta that night with two of their children, then returned to the park. He and the others dispersed nearly all the crowd within the hour.

A. D. King, having lured nearly three hundred unruly laggards into a parking lot, was singing “We Shall Overcome” from atop a parked Cadillac when Colonel Al Lingo landed like the Marines. Leading a force of 250 state troopers and irregular volunteers from state agencies across Alabama, Lingo saw disaster: blazing fires, scores of Negroes throwing rocks from alleys, and brick attacks against the monitor guns that firemen had brought up for their designed purpose. Chief Moore, on the other hand, saw renewed disaster in Lingo's men, who were brandishing carbines and billy clubs. “If you'd leave, Mr. Lingo, I'd appreciate it,” he said as politely as he could.

Lingo replied that he was there on the higher authority of Governor Wallace.

“Those guns are not needed,” Moore said tightly. “Will you please put them up? Somebody's going to get killed.”

“You're damned right it'll get somebody killed!” Lingo exploded in battle heat, raising his repeater shotgun. Within minutes, he led the first group of state troopers in a charge down the street. As police officers shouted ahead that everyone had better get inside, troopers clubbed any Negroes who did not. They beat a begging man to the ground outside a door that he shrieked was locked, then kicked the door open, tossed him inside, and moved on. From the Gaston Motel, some of the Negro preachers cried out that the troopers did not need their guns, and the response was a stampede of Lingo's irregulars into the motel compound itself. Claude Sitton of the
Times
wrote that “the ‘thonk' of clubs striking heads could be heard across the street.” Karl Flemming of
Newsweek
called the violence more sickening than the worst of the Ole Miss riot. Wyatt Walker found his wife on the floor, felled by a trooper's rifle butt.

Lingo's savage attacks swiftly produced the most wanton destruction of the night, as hundreds of Negroes who had been dispersed toward their homes vented renewed rage against targets across a wide area. In Washington, alerted by frantic calls relayed from FBI observers, John Doar decided at 2:30
A.M.
that the crisis was serious enough to begin waking up Robert Kennedy's aides. By dawn, when the riot had spent itself, six businesses, several houses, and a two-story apartment building were burned to the ground, several dozen cars were destroyed, and nearly seventy people had been taken to University Hospital. On leaving his wife's bedside, a distraught Wyatt Walker made the mistake of trying to retrieve her clothing from the Gaston Motel before sending her and the children back to Atlanta. Stopped at a roadblock, he offered to go in on foot, whereupon two state troopers and an irregular beat him, fractured a wrist throwing him into a cruiser, slammed the door on his leg, and dumped him at the motel, which troopers kept sealed off without water, phone, or electricity. Hours later at midday, Walker remained among the disappeared. In Washington, a White House helicopter flew off to fetch Burke Marshall from his farm, where he had just gone to recuperate from the Birmingham ordeal.

 

Emergency strategy sessions consumed Sunday at the Pentagon and Justice Department. As King flew back to Birmingham from Atlanta, Robert Kennedy arrived at the White House in the open air of his Ford Galaxie convertible, accompanied by Burke Marshall, Ed Guthman, Nick Katzenbach, and his dog Brummus. President Kennedy, having just flown in from a weekend at Camp David, waited there in his rocking chair, flanked by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Army Secretary Cyrus Vance, and General Earle Wheeler, the Army Chief of Staff. The Attorney General accurately summarized a treacherously complex political dilemma. After bombings and riots had shaken the goodwill of the movement Negroes, the local police, and the moderate whites alike, he said, the Wallace-Connor forces had moved into the confusion with a decisive show of anti-Negro violence. Their objective was to sabotage the Birmingham settlement in one of three ways: (1) by direct intimidation of the white businessmen who had authorized it; (2) by provoking the Negroes to riot against the state troopers, or to demonstrate, or to renounce the agreement themselves; or (3) by forcing the federal government to intervene, which would put the Birmingham businessmen in a politically untenable alliance with Yankee soldiers as well as Negroes.

“The argument for sending troops in is what's gonna happen in the future,” said Kennedy. “…The governor has virtually taken over the state. You're going to have his people around sticking bayonets in people and hitting people with the clubs, guns, etcetera. You're going to have rallies all over the country…people calling on the President to take forceful action.” However, among the arguments against sending troops was the difficulty of explanation. Unless the Administration was willing to brand the state troopers as the threat to public order—in effect, to declare war on Alabama—it would have to justify the use of federal troops as a means of quelling the Negroes, not the whites. Racially, this would be the reverse of Ole Miss and the Freedom Rides, and with Army troops patrolling the Negro neighborhoods, the reluctant white moderates in Birmingham might take advantage of the federal shield.

President Kennedy did not need to be told the grim conclusion. “They might tear up that paper agreement that they made,” he interrupted quickly. “Therefore, you'd have the Negroes knocked down again without getting an agreement.”

This prospect caused Burke Marshall to speak up. “If that agreement blows up,” he said wearily, “the Negroes will be, uh…” His voice faded away.

“Uncontrollable,” suggested the President.

Marshall nodded. “And I think not only in Birmingham,” he added, as one of the few white people who shared King's premonitions about the outward ripples from Project C.

They drifted toward a preliminary deployment of U.S. Army troops near, but not in, Birmingham. This maneuver would give the nation's liberals the appearance of movement in support of the agreement, while positioning the troops to intervene if, as President Kennedy feared, “there is going to be violence there tonight—that's obviously what Governor Wallace wants.” The maneuver would also warn the Wallace forces without giving them the political leverage to cancel the settlement. For President Kennedy, the principal unknown of these close calculations was Martin Luther King. He was presumed to have enormous influence over the Negroes on the streets of Birmingham, and, to millions of Americans now intently following media accounts of the crisis, his public utterances on the Administration's performance might be crucial. The mystery of King so preoccupied President Kennedy that he interrupted General Wheeler to ask Burke Marshall, “How freely do you talk to King?”