Pillar of Fire (87 page)

“But now,” said Malcolm, “when the time comes for
our
freedom, you want…somebody who's nonviolent and forgiving and peaceful and long-suffering. I don't go for that. I say a black man's freedom is as valuable as a white man's freedom.” He called for an American Mau Mau, modeled on Kenya's feared warriors, to go as vigilantes where the government refused to secure justice. He took it as a sign that the nonviolent SNCC Freedom Singers sang a song about Odinga of Kenya, saying violence worked there for the Mau Mau. “He's not humble. He's not nonviolent,” Malcolm said of Odinga. “But he's free.”

Malcolm presented Hamer and the Freedom Singers to his own rally that night at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. There he elaborated on the Mau Mau formula with a story, almost certainly apocryphal, of a Mau Mau leader who asked three hundred followers how many were willing to kill for freedom, and when fifty stepped forward, ordered them first to kill the other 250. “I go for that,” said Malcolm, but he recognized that the suggested purge of assimilationist “Uncle Toms” applied more aptly to the Nation's internecine wars than to likely vengeance against white authorities in Winona or elsewhere. He also predicted, accurately, that his Mau Mau comments to the church audience would dominate the next day's news.
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Facing representatives of the nonviolent movement, Malcolm hedged. “If you're going to get yourself a .45 and start singing ‘We Shall Overcome,' I'm with you,” he told Hamer at the Audubon. But a few days later, he subordinated all questions of method to the goal. “I'm not interested in either ballots or bullets,” he said. “I'm interested in freedom…. If Negroes can get freedom nonviolently, good. But that's a dream. Even King calls it a dream.”

In Atlanta, King was debating how to cooperate with the controversial MFDP congressional challenge. He knew most members of the House would scarcely welcome a vote to bar their Mississippi colleagues. Moreover, he retained bruised memories of being scorned by movement students for having the high-level connections they now wanted to borrow, and he was aware that SNCC and MFDP were virtually paralyzed with dissension since Atlantic City. Bob Moses was opposing the challenge as a surrender to “glamour” politics (VIPs, lobbyists, and lawyers) and withdrew from deliberations; Hollis Watkins and other young SNCC veterans went back to college courses. On December 21, as MFDP chairman Lawrence Guyot announced in Jackson that an insolvent Mississippi movement was awaiting a promised donation from King, Clarence Jones told King that leaders of the congressional challenge were wary that he would “steal the show.” Still, Jones urged, the petitions were sound and creative. On December 24, when Rep. William Ryan revealed that seventeen co-sponsors would offer a preliminary resolution for Mississippi members to “stand aside” pending review of election credentials, King agreed to send House members a letter of support. The novel challenge, he wrote, addressed “the root cause of Mississippi injustices—the total denial of the right to vote on account of race.”

In Boston, Leon 4X Ameer took refuge on December 25 in the Sherry Biltmore Hotel. Ameer had served the Nation of Islam as a trained pugilist, assigned as bodyguard to heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali until he had defected to Malcolm. “It was he,” Malcolm said publicly, “who heard Elijah Muhammad, Jr.,” tell enforcement squads “that I should have been killed, that my tongue should have been put in an envelope and mailed back to Chicago by now.” Marked as Malcolm's agent, lured to the hotel lobby with a pretext call from a French reporter seeking the inside story, Ameer stepped off the elevator into an ambush by Captain Clarence X and three subordinates from Muhammad's Temple No. 11. An armed detective arrested the four attackers before severe damage was done, but a follow-up squad broke into Ameer's hotel room that same Christmas night and left him battered, brain-damaged, and unconscious in the bathtub, to be discovered by the morning housekeepers.

At year's end, the
New York Times
reported on its front page that influential Atlantans were agitating against a January dinner planned to honor the local Nobel Prize winner. Integrated social gatherings remained controversial in many cities,
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but this exposure stung Atlanta's boosterish civic pride. The
Times
story forced the
Atlanta Constitution
to publish its first acknowledgment of controversy that had been stewing in high circles since the announcement of King's award in October. Anonymous business leaders grumbled that King was picketing a local pen factory over segregated labor practices. Former mayor William Hartsfield answered that he would “certainly hate to see my town held up as a city which refused to honor a Nobel Prize winner,” and other supporters offered statements of pinched or brave hospitality. Ralph McGill, the
Constitution's
outspoken publisher and one of four sponsors behind the King tribute, deflected his own newspaper's questions with a formal “no comment.”

King himself, tired of being the honored leper at a forced celebration, told family that he did not care whether or not Atlanta pulled off the testimonial, and the FBI wiretaps on his home picked up no comments on the subject. They revealed King to be depressed instead about the lingering effects of the Oslo trip. Ralph Abernathy was refusing to go to Selma. He did not see the need for a new movement there, and in fact was instructing the SCLC staff not to disturb any of his numerous relatives in the Alabama counties nearby. When publicity about the Nobel banquet erupted from the
New York Times
article on December 29, wiretaps overheard Coretta King worrying about King's depressed mental state and the fight with Abernathy, seeking advice from Andrew Young about how to relieve pressure on her husband.

Late Monday night, December 28, a New York FBI agent took notes on a talk-show appearance by Malcolm X: “He said he considered himself a true Muslim who believed in brotherhood of all people, whereas NOI [Nation of Islam] Muslims do not believe in brotherhood of anyone but Negroes. When asked why he preaches that Negroes should take arms to protect themselves, Malcolm said that just because he believes in brotherhood does not mean that he should not protect himself.”

On Tuesday, Malcolm went by train to Philadelphia, where he told a group of black reporters they were “almost as bad” as the white press about distorting news from Africa. Philadelphia FBI agents fielded a report that Malcolm would be shot that night. He took ten bodyguards to tell an audience of thirty that he was forming an alliance with Elijah Muhammad's son Wallace. Outside the Sheraton Hotel that night, a dozen members of the Nation's Temple No. 12 jumped from cars and brawled through the entourage, knocking three to the ground before two Philadelphia detectives drove them off. Malcolm called home when he reached radio station WDAS. “Be careful,” he told his wife. “Keep those things near the door, and don't let anyone in until I get there.” The detectives posted officers with shotguns outside the studio for his midnight appearance on the Joe Rainey talk show.

Two days later, on New Year's Eve in Harlem, Malcolm X received a delegation of thirty-seven young people from McComb, Mississippi. Northern supporters had raised funds to bring members of the summer project's extraordinary Freedom School to New York for a broadening tour, which included a stop by the Hotel Theresa to visit the man with ferocious reputation and X for a last name. Malcolm talked to them at first of civics. “This generation, especially of our people, has a burden,” he told them. “…The most important thing that we can learn to do today is think for ourselves.” He ranged at length over World War II history and the importance of Africa, until exchanges on the summer siege in McComb distracted him. “Excuse me for raising my voice,” said Malcolm, “but this thing, you know, gets me upset. Imagine that. A country that's supposed to be a democracy, supposed to be for freedom, and…they want to draft you and put you in the Army and send you to Saigon to fight for them, and then you've got to turn around and all night long discuss how you're going to just get a right to register and vote without being murdered. Why, it's the most hypocritical government since the world began!”

He told the Mississippi students that their elders in civil rights organizations had failed them—failed to protect them, failed to stand with them, failed to respond vigorously to the murders of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. “That's what split the Muslim movement,” said Malcolm. Almost offhandedly, he stretched a link from the McComb students, heirs to the first rural foray by Bob Moses in 1961, to his own troubled quest for stand-up sectarian vigilantes in Los Angeles. “Some of our brothers got hurt, and nothing was done about it,” said Malcolm. “And those of us who wanted to do something about it were kept from doing something about it. So we split.”

O
N A
S
ATURDAY MORNING
drive from Atlanta to Selma, King mollified his sullen and reluctant companion with ruminations on the line of succession. He told Ralph Abernathy that President Johnson had worried out loud about dying in office before Hubert Humphrey became vice president on January 20, because until then a vacated presidency would fall first to the failing House Speaker, John McCormack, and second to the frail Senate elder, Carl Hayden. He recalled that Johnson had explored various remedies. “If he had sense enough to do it,
I
should have sense enough to do it,” King added, saying he wanted to make formal arrangements for Abernathy to succeed him as SCLC president. Abernathy scoffed and protested, short of refusal. He said he had no ambition beyond shared leadership, and figured to be killed along with King anyway, but he did accept the argument that no one else stood a chance to hold together the contentious personalities on the staff. King said he had not expected to live through his summer trip to Mississippi. As he and Abernathy traded raucous snippets of imaginary orations for each other's funeral, a common amusement among SCLC preachers, King parlayed the White House analogy into a promise from Abernathy to accept formal designation as his heir.

Spirits were improved by the time King and Abernathy pulled into the driveway of their Selma hosts, Sullivan and Jean Jackson. The Atlantans made a show of inspecting their joint quarters in the guest room, and the Jacksons made a fuss over King's new Norwegian wristwatch. The four friends shared many ties. Jean Jackson's great-aunt, Ethel Dinkins,
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had been Coretta King's childhood music teacher; her best friend had married Ralph Abernathy's college roommate, Rev. Howard Creecy, and she had grown up with Juanita Abernathy. Her husband, Sullivan—“Sully” to King and Abernathy—had testified with Sam Boynton at the 1958 federal hearings on the exclusion of professional Negroes from the Selma voting roles. Since then, chastened by hostile and enduring reaction from local white people, Jackson had confined himself to dentistry and a supporting role in politics, playing straight man for the running jokes of movement preachers. His sister and dental hygienist, Marie Foster, ran the tiny literacy and citizenship classes in Selma, funneling students to Septima Clark's SCLC workshops near Savannah. Foster worked in the Dallas County Voters League with Margaret Moore, the intrepid schoolteacher who had offered lodging to the lone SNCC registration worker, Bernard “Little Gandhi” Lafayette, in 1962.

Andrew Young moved into the guest room of Amelia Boynton, who lived across the street from the Jacksons. On this Saturday, January 2, a concerted movement was scheduled at last to take up two distinct appeals that had ripened from the Birmingham church bombing sixteen months earlier. One was the grand strategic plan for a “nonviolent army” to win minority voting rights throughout Alabama, which Diane Nash Bevel and James Bevel had proposed as a monument of justice to the four murdered girls. The other was a plaintive local request from Amelia Boynton about Dunn's Rest Home for the aged. For attending the first Selma Freedom Day, three weeks after the church bombing, two Dunn's employees had been fired, photographed (to warn prospective employers), and roughed up so badly that sympathetic colleagues walked off jobs paying $18 per week. The result was that “forty colored ladies of Selma…cannot get employment in their hometown,” Boynton had written Martin Luther King. “We need your help very much, and we are asking that your organization please give us ONE HIGH POWERED SEWING MACHINE.” Boynton and the Dallas County Voters League undertook to sustain the former Dunn's attendants as home seamstresses.

The first step in January tested the most basic power to move. There had been no regular Monday meetings of the Voters League for six months, under Judge James Hare's sweeping injunction that forbade discussion of racial issues at any gathering of “three or more persons.” The blatantly unconstitutional order remained in effect during leisurely review by the federal courts, but King's scouts in Selma saw a crack in the wall. Like Birmingham two years earlier, Selma's local government was in factional transition. In October, the first mayor from outside the agrarian gentry—Joe Smitherman, a young refrigerator salesman without college education—had assumed office as a moderate, image-conscious segregationist, pledged to seek industrial jobs to replace farm belt losses. Smitherman had installed a police and fire chief, Wilson Baker, who had narrowly lost an election to the reigning sheriff, Jim Clark, and the Smitherman-Baker town crowd advocated the polite, jail-'em-with-kindness approach that had stymied Martin Luther King in Albany, Georgia.
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They claimed jurisdication within the Selma town limits against the county hard-liners of Sheriff Clark, who had enforced Judge Hare's meeting ban everywhere—to the point of breaking up a strategy session in the Negro Elks Hall of enlisted men from nearby Clark Air Base. Hushed negotiations addressed details down to the control of Selma sidewalks outside Sheriff Clark's domain in the Dallas County courthouse, where aspiring voters must attempt to register. In a small story on New Year's Day—“Dr. King Due to Head Alabama Vote Drive”—the
New York Times
had reported that Wilson Baker considered the Hare injunction to be suspended in Selma during legal challenge by the U.S. Department of Justice. King's campaign, noted the
Times
, “is expected to last about six months.”

For King and Abernathy, the first promising break was agreement by several leading churches to house a forbidden mass meeting—not just Tabernacle Baptist, where the embattled Rev. L. L. Anderson rallied the deacons, but also First Baptist and Brown Chapel AME. Their congregations had divined that the ruling segregationists across town were divided enough to make the gamble worthwhile—so confirmed Jean Jackson for her Brown Chapel and Sullivan Jackson for First Baptist, where he and Amelia Boynton belonged. They also delivered a flash report from the interracial listening posts: Sheriff Clark was expected to spend the weekend in Miami, where the national champion Crimson Tide football team—pride of Alabamans, including many fans of archrival Auburn—lost Friday night's Orange Bowl to the Texas Longhorns, 21-17, despite the heroics of the Alabama quarterback, Joe Namath. This news offered hope that Clark would not be rushing home to blockade or tear up a church in front of the reporters who followed King.

Later, after elaborate grooming and goodbyes at the Jackson home, King and Abernathy made an entrance to the imposing, double-towered Brown Chapel, where a standing, cheering crowd of seven hundred heard King decisively challenge Judge Hare's injunction with a reprise of his 1957 “Give Us the Ballot” speech on the Washington Mall. “Today marks the beginning of a determined, organized, mobilized campaign to get the right to vote everywhere in Alabama,” he declared. “If we are refused, we will appeal to Governor George Wallace. If he refuses to listen, we will appeal to the legislature. If
they
don't listen, we will appeal to the conscience of the Congress…. We must be ready to march. We must be ready to go to jail by the thousands…. Our cry to the state of Alabama is a simple one. Give us the ballot!” When the thunder died down on his departure, James Bevel asked volunteers to sign on for work in the movement.

 

T
WO DAYS LATER
in Washington, a pilgrimage of some five hundred Mississippians arrived in a convoy of Trailways buses, tattered farm vehicles, and straggling hitchhikers. Although rules did not permit them to carry signs or lobby inside the Capitol, they stood in silent vigil along the underground corridors between office buildings and the House floor, where the representatives-elect passed by to open the 89th Congress. During a standoff at the front door, as Capitol police blocked the three MFDP challengers—Victoria Gray, Annie Devine, and Fannie Lou Hamer—a member of the Nazi Party slipped by into the House chamber and ducked aside to paint himself in blackface with burnt cork. He burst in upon astonished lawmakers, dancing a jig and shouting, “I'se de Mississippi delegation! I wants to be seated!” before police hauled him away to pay a fine of $19.

With order restored, ceremonies proceeded until Speaker McCormack called for the swearing in of Thomas Abernethy from Mississippi's First District, whereupon Rep. William Ryan of New York called out an objection. More than fifty representatives-elect cried out for the Speaker to recognize Ryan, which he did. In the ensuing parliamentary crisis, House leaders countered with a move to seat the five Mississippi representatives on condition of a full House investigation. Rep. James Roosevelt of California, son of FDR, urged colleagues to hold out for vacating the contested seats during the inquiry, saying Mississippi elections manifestly excluded Negro voters. Rep. Edith Green of Oregon demanded and won a roll call vote. The bipartisan leadership prevailed,
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276-149, and the Mississippians were sworn in provisionally, but MFDP supporters deliriously celebrated the day's accomplishments. Not only had they won a hearing, but more than a third of the House had supported them in a straw vote before they marshaled their evidence on Mississippi voting practices. “Back to work!” cried Lawrence Guyot at a victory rally.

The commotion in the Capitol was a minor issue at the background press briefing before President Johnson's State of the Union address. A White House reporter asked whether the President had any specific action in mind for the general endorsement of voting rights in his advance speech draft. Bill Moyers replied carefully. He knew Johnson wanted voting reform, and had long wished the
Brown
decision had been grounded in the right to vote rather than in school integration. He also knew that John Doar, Burke Marshall's replacement in the Civil Rights Division, sought new legal tools after five nearly fruitless years in county-by-county litigation.
*
On the other hand, Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach wanted time to absorb the shocks of the 1964 law, and there were two obvious drawbacks to the constitutional amendment favored by Justice Department lawyers: the Southern states could block ratification, and the Fifteenth Amendment already guaranteed minority voting rights. Therefore, Moyers said, the administration planned “to do something.” He emphasized Johnson's more specific urgency to send five legislative packages to Congress even before the January 20 inauguration, beginning with health and education, and to define a Great Society concept he knew was “corrupted in certain circles.” Outside critics viewed it as “a Communist five-year plan,” said Moyers, while some bureaucrats perceived merely an excuse “to raise postal rates.”

For America, which he defined that night in his address as “the first continental union of democracy in the history of man,” Johnson proposed “a new quest for union” beyond 1965, a century removed from 1865 and the Civil War's “terrible test of blood and fire.” The next day, Tuesday, January 5, White House officials basked in the impact of a record 75 million viewers, nearly triple the estimated audience for the 1964 State of the Union address. In Atlanta, a stricken Coretta King called her husband home that day, having routinely opened a piece of SCLC's haphazard, accumulated mail. She had assumed that the reel of tape was another of King's road speeches, which admiring collectors often recorded and mailed to Atlanta, until she read the accompanying letter from the FBI's November 21 suicide package. She was accustomed to written threats, but this one conveyed the chill of an anonymous purported Negro spouting hatred mixed with flowery phrases: “You are finished…. Satan could not do more. What incredible evilness….” With apprehension, she played the tape.

King himself listened to the tape three times before Abernathy was rushed in on summons. For his inner circle—Abernathy, Andrew Young, Joseph Lowery, Bernard Lee—King played the tape over and over. They examined the wrapping and Miami postmark for clues. They analyzed the muffled contents as a familiar mixture of seductions, sex cries, and raunchy, Amos ‘n' Andy-style hotel banter,
†
which seemed chosen for its power to cause public humiliation. King heard at least three different background settings, which he accurately took to mean the sender had access to hotel bugs in scattered places. The group interpretation was unanimous: the package came from Hoover's FBI, with a letter demanding that King commit suicide before Oslo or be exposed with the “highlights” tape.

They were too rattled to reflect on the tactical ironies—that Hoover, assuming King would have opened the package before their December summit meeting, must have been undone by King's calm demeanor that day, or that Hoover could not have counted on the extra sting of discovery by Coretta. Nor did they realize how quickly the Bureau could catch up with the delayed impact of the hostile message. Wiretaps provided enough advance notice for headquarters to have the New York office install bugs at the Park Sheraton before King and his advisers checked in for an emergency meeting over the weekend of Friday, January 8. Although King now worried about spies and microphones to the point of whispering, the surveillances rewarded headquarters with signs of his anguish. “They are out to break me,” King said. He raged against Hoover, but he also reproached himself that the tapes were a sign of his own failure.

King kept word of the suicide package from Harry Wachtel. His minimal disclosures to Wachtel before the Barbizon meeting had been painful enough, and on the flight to Oslo he had solemnly promised to give up any affairs. There was too much at stake, he had told Wachtel, especially since the frightful warnings that Hoover's spying might injure the movement. Now King did not have the heart to revisit the issue over the explicit, sexually focused revelation of the suicide package. He sought legal advice more comfortably from Chicago lawyer Chauncey Eskridge, with whom he had once shared a lover, knowing Eskridge was toughened in such matters by his work for Elijah Muhammad.