Pillar of Fire (2 page)

T
HERE WAS NO
historical precedent for Birmingham, Alabama, in April and May of 1963, when the power balance of a great nation turned not on clashing armies or global commerce but on the youngest student demonstrators of African descent, down to first-and second-graders. Only the literature of Passover ascribes such impact to the fate of minors, and never before was a country transformed, arguably redeemed, by the active moral witness of schoolchildren.

The miracle of Birmingham might have stood alone as the culmination of a freedom movement grown slowly out of Southern black churches. Yet it was merely the strongest of many tides that crested in the movement's peak years, 1963-65. They challenged, inspired, and confounded America over the meaning of simple words: dignity, equal votes, equal souls. They gripped Malcolm X along with President Johnson, buffeted the watchwords “integration” and “nonviolence,” broke bodies and spirits, enlarged freedom.

This is a continuing work, which follows
Parting the Waters
, an account of the King years from 1954 to 1963. To introduce impending elements as well as continuing ones, it begins with five chapters that approach Birmingham from afar, sometimes unconsciously. The characters include Orthodox rabbis, sharecroppers, Muslim prisoners, and a dispirited Vice President, in settings from North America's oldest Christian settlement of St. Augustine, Florida, to its western frontier in Los Angeles. All had reached points of crisis by Birmingham spring, when the young marchers released collateral forces that drew them together. Seekers of the black vote in rural Mississippi, who literally could not move in 1963, rose to dominate the pivotal year of 1964.

I try to employ nomenclature authentic to the historical period. People of African descent are “Negroes” until the prevailing term of self-reference changed, or when characters at the time spoke differently. Muslim mosques appear as “temples” when the members called them so. My mission statement for the trilogy, the last volume of which will be
At Canaan's Edge
, remains expressed by the following words from the preface to
Parting the Waters
.

Almost as color defines vision itself, race shapes the cultural eye—what we do and do not notice, the reach of empathy and the alignment of response. This subliminal force recommends care in choosing a point of view for a history grounded in race. Strictly speaking, this book is not a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., though he is at its heart.

I have tried to make biography and history reinforce each other by knitting together a number of personal stories along the main seam of an American epoch. Like King himself, this book attempts to rise from an isolated culture into a larger history by speaking more than one language.

My purpose is to write a narrative history of the civil rights movement out of the conviction from which it was made, namely that truth requires a maximum effort to see through the eyes of strangers, foreigners, and enemies. I hope to sustain my thesis that King's life is the best and most important metaphor for American history in the watershed postwar years.

 

Baltimore, Maryland

November 1997

O
N
A
PRIL
27, 1962, Muslims gathered for the Friday evening prayer service at Muhammad's Temple No. 27 in South-Central Los Angeles, east of Culver City and west of Watts. Some two hundred followers of Elijah Muhammad sat in folding metal chairs, separated by sex—the women wearing head coverings and floor-length dresses, generally white, and the men in distinctive dark suits with suspenders and bow ties, their heads closely shaved. Facing them from the podium, a blackboard posed in large letters the thematic question of the Nation of Islam: “WHICH ONE WILL SURVIVE THE WAR OF ARMAGEDDON?” To the left, framed by a cross, an American flag, and a silhouette of a hanging lynch victim, the blackboard offered a grim choice labeled “Christianity, Slavery, Suffering, Death,” in pointed contrast to the alternative proclaimed on the right: “Islam, Freedom, Justice, Equality.” Thus, explained the quick-witted Minister John X Morris, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad answered one of the central puzzles of all religion—how to reconcile unmerited suffering with the existence of a benevolent God. Allah had permitted the Christian nations to bring Africans into slavery—“chewing on men's bones for three hundred years,” as Muhammad put it—to test the will of the victims to reestablish their religious dignity.

Muhammad's Nation of Islam demanded that followers assume full responsibility for their own rehabilitation, and give whites due respect for enterprise if not for morals. “You are the man that is asleep,” Elijah Muhammad scolded through his new newspaper,
Muhammad Speaks
. “The white man is wide awake. He is not a dummy by any means. He has built a world. His knowledge and wisdom is now reaching out through space.” Even Assistant Minister Arthur X Coleman, who spoke that night, acknowledged the human cost of following the Nation's exacting discipline. His own wife had left him for home back in Tennessee not long after he had thrown all the sweet potatoes and pork products out of their refrigerator to follow the Muslim diet. Although Coleman scoffed at some teachings from the beginning—he told his grandfather he doubted claims that Mr. Muhammad had conversations directly with God—he struggled toward a new identity through an eclectic regimen that included Dale Carnegie public speaking courses, military-style fitness exercises, a program of readings on ancient civilizations, and what amounted to a second job selling Muslim newspapers and “fishing” for prospects on the streets.

The typically rough, streetwise membership of Temple No. 27 included few with any higher education. Among these, Delores X Stokes was a minor celebrity as a lifelong Muslim who had actually seen and talked with Elijah Muhammad himself. Her father, though far too old to serve in World War II, had entered federal prison voluntarily with Muhammad to protest the white man's wars, and then in 1945, when Delores was a girl of ten, had gone to Michigan to establish one of the Nation's first farms, always sending a portion of the crops to feed the membership in the cities. Delores remained frail after a severe case of childhood rickets, with a small soft voice and tentative movements, but she excelled first as a student and then as a strong-willed teacher, married to one of the first college-trained men in the Nation of Islam, Ronald X Stokes of Boston. After their wedding in August of 1960, they had come west to help shore up the Nation's outpost in Los Angeles, both of them working days for the county government but spending many of their off-duty hours at the temple, where Ronald served as secretary. Within the tiny colony of Muslims, the young couple were admired for serene, spiritual qualities that transcended the hard fixation upon vengeance more common among the regular members. Ronald Stokes was taking lessons in Arabic, the better to appreciate the poetry of the Q'uran in its original tongue.

The prayer service went past ten o'clock that Friday, after which fiscal “Lieutenant” William Rogers, a parking lot attendant who aspired to become an accountant, counted cash donations that ran to some $500, mostly in small bills. Men were required to bring cars around to the door as a protective courtesy for women, who supervised children during temple events. Mabel Zeno wondered what was taking her husband, Charles, and their three grade-school children so long. Not knowing they had stopped to buy gasoline for their Ford station wagon, she left Delores Stokes at the women's waiting area and walked to the front entrance, scanning the Broadway traffic. Although most of the congregation had dispersed, Monroe X Jones stayed on to complete a clothing sale. As a delivery driver for S&M Dry Cleaners, he had occasional access to abandoned or discarded items, for which the temple was a good resale outlet because even the poorest Muslim had to dress formally in public. About eleven o'clock that night, he invited Fred X Jingles, who shined shoes at Ward's Shoe Shine Stand in Long Beach, two inspect an old suit with a hole in the pants. Jones had obtained two repair estimates: one for a cheap patch, another for a reweaving job that might cost a few dollars more than the suit itself.

Officers Frank Tomlinson and Stanley Kensic were driving south on Broadway when they passed two Negro males standing behind the opened trunk of a 1954 Buick Special, examining what appeared to be a plastic garment bag. Their first night together as partners was special for both young policemen—the eve of Kensic's wedding and Tomlinson's last shift of the one-year rookie probation. Given their good moods, only an afterthought prompted Kensic to suggest that Tomlinson back up for a burglary sweep. Tomlinson double-parked, turning on the cruiser's flashing lights, and as they exited Kensic asked the two men if they were Black Muslims. “Yes, sir,” came the clipped, businesslike response, which matched the intelligence reports passed along lately at roll call about the dangerous new cult. The officers frisked the two suspects for weapons and compared the Buick's tag number with those on the stolen car hot sheet, coming up negative. Before calling in their names to check for outstanding warrants, they asked where the clothes came from. The two Muslims had only begun to tell of the reweave-or-patch choice on the suit when Kensic decided to split them up for individual accounts. According to subsequent conflicting testimony, his approximate words to Jingles were either “Come with me” or “Let's separate these niggers.”

The commotion was attracting a small crowd. Roosevelt X Walker, a city garbage worker and escort lieutenant, on post to escort unattended women from the service, ducked inside the temple to call Clarence X Jingles, saying, “Your brother is in trouble,” and they ran down Broadway. Officer Kensic later conceded that he detected no belligerence in Fred X Jingles while walking toward the front of the Buick, and certainly no flight or resistance, but Kensic did object to a take-your-hands-off-me attitude, or gestures, which so challenged his sense of command that he swiftly put Jingles into the police hold, twisting his arm behind him and wrapping an elbow around his neck to lift him in the air and fling him facedown across the Buick's hood. Instead of going limp in submission, Jingles surprised Kensic by screaming and writhing. He managed to twist out of the hold and fought upward to get off the hood. Just then, Monroe X Jones bolted from Tomlinson and pulled Kensic off Jingles. A fistfight broke out, and as a stunned Tomlinson ran from the back of the Buick to assist his partner, Roosevelt X Walker raced up with fellow Muslims and grabbed him, too. Tomlinson would retain an indistinct memory of being twirled above their heads like a trophy.

William Tribble, who was driving home from a moonlighting job as a doorman at the nearby Club 54, double-parked near the police cruiser and jumped from his car, alarmed by the sights of a street brawl. Kensic was down, trying to ward off attackers who darted in to hit him before he could get up or draw his gun. When they ignored shouts to leave the officers alone, Tribble ran behind his own car, unlocked the trunk, fumbled for his special deputy's .38, pulled out an old box of cartridges, loaded the gun there in the middle of Broadway, then ran around near the curb behind the Buick and fired a warning shot into the air. Its loud crack silenced the frenzy for an instant before the Muslims, their belligerence loosed by a sense of victory over the police, turned upon the none-too-confident Negro who had once aspired to be a policeman. When Tribble's gun misfired on a second warning shot, they inched toward him as he backed up, his gun trembling visibly.

This became a moment of regret for Tomlinson, who found himself freed on the sidewalk behind the Muslims while their attention was riveted upon Tribble in the street. Training told Tomlinson to stand clear, draw his gun, freeze everyone, and then radio for help, but he pulled out his sap instead and lunged toward the nearest Muslims from behind, aiming to get even for having failed to land a single blow. Just then, however, Tribble fired into the crowd, hitting Clarence Jingles in the side, and Tomlinson joined his adversaries scattering in headlong dives away from the bullet. Monroe X Jones landed on the pavement close to Kensic, who was so dazed that Jones was able to pull Kensic's gun from its holster. Before Tomlinson could jump up with his gun, Jones shot him—the bullet tearing a path from the back of Tomlinson's left shoulder, down his arm, and out through his elbow. Then Jones danced along the curb to face Tribble, and in a wild panic they emptied their guns at each other from a range of some ten feet. When the terrible noise ceased, each man was amazed to find himself still standing. Jones, discovering blood from a gunshot wound in his shoulder, threw Kensic's gun down a sewer and ran blindly through the streets until he stopped exhausted at a phone booth to call his mother for help.

When Officer Paul Kuykendall passed by just after Tribble's frantic departure, the excited looks on the faces of the gathering crowd made him snap into a U-turn and park his Ford Falcon station wagon across from Tomlinson's cruiser, a block south of the temple. A fifteen-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)—blue-eyed, burly, and so light-skinned that many of his colleagues did not know he was a Negro—Kuykendall was famous among the Negro officers as the first nonwhite ever to win assignment “on motors,” as cruiser patrol was called, back in the early 1950s. For a long time he had patrolled alone, or paired with one of his Negro successors, as the department's policy against interracial partnerships had been reversed only the previous year, in 1961. To protect his ambiguous identity, or escape from it, Kuykendall carried himself as a loner and for a number of years had managed to avoid assignments most likely to make race a blatant issue in daily police work.

Extraordinary events began to conspire against camouflage when the off-duty Kuykendall leaped from his car in civilian clothes, transfixed by the sight of a bloodied police officer weaving unsteadily in the middle of Broadway surrounded by angry Muslims. This was Kensic, whose first shocked thought after the gunfire had been to tackle anyone who might have taken his revolver. Now in a helpless rage, like a baited bear, Kensic went down again. The assailants—among them an athletic teenager named Troy X Augustine—paid no attention to Kuykendall's shouts to desist until he drew his own revolver and fired into the air. The shot refocused all their adrenaline instantly on Kuykendall, who backed them down with the gun until he could get close enough to Kensic to hear that his gun was lost and his partner shot over on the sidewalk. A Negro woman was kneeling there, comforting Tomlinson and wailing about why on earth did anyone shoot a policeman. Kuykendall kept his gun and one eye on the Muslims, who were beginning to melt away, as he backed to the driver's door of Tomlinson's cruiser, reached in for the radio, and sent out the department's most urgent message: officer in trouble.

A moaning Roosevelt Walker was among the first of the fleeing Muslims to reach the temple. He limped through the closer of two entrances and collapsed at the foot of the stairs leading up to private offices above the assembly hall. His cries for help brought Minister John X Morris and other officials hurtling down to find their escort lieutenant bleeding profusely, yelling, “I'm shot!” A stray bullet from the Tribble-Jones exchange had pierced his crotch. Morris shouted for Secretary Ronald Stokes to call an ambulance. Some Muslims began to carry Walker upstairs for comfort; others thought they should take him to the hospital themselves. Walker became stymied cargo halfway up a jammed stairway, with some trying to take him up, others down, and still others bursting in with news from the fight.

A horn blast and loud shouts for Minister John X Morris came from a carload of Muslims who pulled up outside yelling that they had Brother Clarence inside with them, shot, and what should they do? Morris signaled from the window that they should wait, but chaos overtook him before he could find out about the ambulance. The car lurched off, carrying a hysterical debate about whether they should speed home, to the hospital, or back to the temple to await definitive orders from Minister Morris. With the sounds of police sirens rising, Morris pushed his way outside and up the sidewalk to the main entrance—where Mabel Zeno was still waiting for her husband—herding everyone he could into the assembly hall.

Officers Donald Weese and Richard Anderson, in the first cruiser that roared up to the fight scene a block south of the mosque, scarcely slowed down as they caught sight of the two downed uniforms and Kuykendall in the street windmilling them with one arm as he pointed with the other toward the men in Muslim dress who were running for the temple. Some of these were stragglers from the fight; others, like Ronald Stokes, who was hoisting Roosevelt Walker's feet, were spilling out of the office entrance. Anderson yelled for Weese to let him jump out of the cruiser in foot pursuit. This small delay allowed Officers Robert Williams and Robert Reynolds to barrel around them in the second crusier to a screeching, skewed halt north of the temple. Just before then, from the opposite direction, Charles X Zeno pulled up looking for his wife. A small bit of the emergency registered quickly from the faces and sirens, whereupon Zeno told his three sons to wait in the car while he ran to get their mother before there was trouble.