Pillar of Fire (88 page)

In Wachtel's presence, the Research Committee discussed the Selma campaign, and King abruptly announced his desire to restore a working relationship with Stanley Levison. The banishment was wrong, he insisted. He had submitted because President Kennedy and his Justice Department had repeatedly called it the price of the civil rights bill, which was now law, and President Johnson had never mentioned the preposterous spy charges. King wanted Levison back. Wachtel urged caution on behalf of the surprised advisers. His advice, for which he later felt foolish, was that King should be slow to upset the FBI now that Wachtel's summit strategy had patched up relations with Hoover.

Wachtel volunteered to assess the dangers of King's proposal directly with Levison, who had been a decisive voice for his sacrificial banishment. King left New York to deliver two Sunday speeches in Massachusetts.When Harvard's Memorial Church filled long in advance, technicians wired remote speakers into nearby Saunders Theater, which also overflowed. Some of those who applauded King's work in the South were nonplussed by his announcement that he would return in the spring to address racial problems of the Boston area.

On Monday, Abernathy and Andrew Young threw themselves against the FBI's wall of innocence. They had asked on Friday to see Hoover, but settled for DeLoach and his assistant. Unaware that surveillances had forewarned DeLoach of their strategy, they demanded candor about scandalmongering and smear campaigns—only to hear an obliging DeLoach draw them out on their “trilogy” attacks over Communism, money, and sex. They danced around the rumors themselves; DeLoach shrugged off their attempts to focus on the source, saying that the FBI had no interest in King's private life or finances. When Andrew Young pointed to signs of malicious, orchestrated leaks from the government, DeLoach assured him that “there were no leaks from the FBI [and] that the Director ran a tight organization….” King's aides left fuming about being patronized. DeLoach's written report, as summarized by historian David Garrow, “gloated to his superiors that he had tried to make the talk as unpleasant and embarrassing as possible….”

That day in Baltimore, King spoke at Johns Hopkins on the obsolescence of war, and news elsewhere trailed scattered clashes around the movement. Leaked stories, which disclosed the existence of a second Klan confession in the Mississippi triple murder (without mention of Doyle Barnette's name), framed hopes in the Justice Department to revive the federal prosecution. A federal grand jury indicted three Greenwood plumbers for beating Silas McGhee the previous July 16. In Los Angeles, two former secretaries failed to appear for a hearing in their paternity suit against Elijah Muhammad, which was a disaster for the survival scheme long constructed by Malcolm X. He had no doubt the women were petrified, as the Nation's enforcements were rippling everywhere. A few days earlier, two lieutenants from Temple No. 7 had carried out instructions from Captain Joseph to tell Benjamin Brown, a New York prison guard, that he could not teach independent, nonpolitical Islam, even with an homage photograph of Elijah Muhammad posted on his window. Unsatisfied by his response, they shot Brown in the back with a rifle. On January 15, the New York FBI office closed an update about Malcolm with a note that he was using a new alias, “M. Khalil,” for hotel registration.

 

I
N
S
ELMA
, beneath the fanfare of announcements about King's anticipated return, staff members passed out leaflets for recruits. By Thursday, January 7, the response justified separate night workshops in each of the city's five election wards, and James Bevel stunned the fifty or so participants at the Ward IV session by shooing the sheriff's deputies out of Brown Chapel.On Friday, at the first Selma youth rally, Bevel showed his well-traveled copy of the NBC documentary on the Nashville sit-ins of 1960, and Hosea Williams sent two hundred students home with provocative questions. “If you can't vote, then you're not free,” he told them. “And if you ain't free, children, then you're a slave.” Eight-year-old children went home to ask their parents whether they were slaves.

By Tuesday, January 12, the first block captains were elected at nightly training sessions of up to a hundred people in each ward. From a downtown storefront, Diane Nash Bevel began to compile maps of voting-age Negroes by street address, tending the daily fears and afflictions of returning canvassers. Staff members worked the wards in pairs—one from SCLC and one from SNCC. The tandem approach was approved by Bernard Lafayette, who had flown in from Chicago to promote cooperation. Well remembered as SNCC's pioneer organizer in Selma, Lafayette retained ties that predated and also bridged frictions between SNCC students and SCLC preachers. Together with Bevel and SNCC chairman John Lewis, he recommended that SNCC strengthen its Selma project. They recruited Silas Norman, the literacy volunteer from the previous summer, to join the SNCC staff as project director. They made Terry Shaw, one of the intrepid high school students who had canvassed for Lafayette in 1962, a co-coordinator in Ward III.

Hungry for manpower, both SNCC and SCLC pitched their self-selected young newcomers into Selma. Charles Fager, a white journalist from Colorado, had moved from curiosity, which drew him to Atlanta, to absorption, after he attended his first mass meeting in December on the Scripto pen strike, then to awe, after he conducted an interview with Septima Clark. In January he joined SCLC's Selma staff. Fay Bellamy, a Negro from Pennsylvania who had searched intermittently for “the movement” since the Birmingham church bombing, made connections to the Atlanta SNCC office independently of Frank Soracco, a twenty-nine-year-old white schoolteacher who drove his Volkswagen from California. Assigned to Selma, both wound up at the SCLC-SNCC joint morning staff meetings, the all-day canvasses, mass meetings, and integrated night socials at the Chicken Shack. “Things are starting to move here organization wise,” Soracco wrote his parents near Sacramento. “It has been calm because the city wants it that way…. Two guys tear gassed our house. No one was home. They got 6 mos.—unheard of 6 mos. ago…. Few things I miss—good food, or place to cook it, clean sheets, friendly girl or two. These here are friendly, but most of their dads would skin them alive if they were around with a white man.”

On Thursday, January 14, cheers greeted King's entrance to the mass meeting at First Baptist and then drowned out his shouted pledge to “be coming back again and again and again until….” He declared that the planned campaign called for parallel registration drives in ten surrounding rural counties, and he announced a triple challenge for Monday. They would march through Selma to the courthouse, he said. They would send volunteers to apply for white-only city jobs, and teams would make the first attempts to integrate Selma's hotels and restaurants under the civil rights law. “You see,” said King, “I am trying to get over to you that Monday will be Freedom Day…. If we march by the hundreds, we will make it clear to the nation that we are determined to vote.” He emphasized the need to “desegregate our minds” and “remove the shackles of fear.” He said they would help the white people, too, “whether they realize it or not.”

President Johnson called King on Friday, with greetings on his thirty-sixth birthday and requests for recommendation on several pending appointments. In Selma, recruitments intensified over the weekend. Ward captains were asked to speak at mass meetings, and block captains to stand. In Ward V, forty teenagers unexpectedly skipped Friday night's Hudson High School basketball game to petition the staff for roles on Freedom Day, and James Orange, who had moved from the 1963 Birmingham children's marches to the SCLC staff under James Bevel, was assigned to devise a program for “students that refuse to remain in school.” Meanwhile, Andrew Young and others continued negotiations with police chief Wilson Baker about what could be done peacefully.

Baker, who confessed that he had petitioned the Justice Department to keep King out of Selma—“begging on my knees for my community”—quoted Scripture on the tests of life, having once considered the Lutheran ministry. While tacitly acknowledging vigilante pressures on the white side of town, he told Young and his own officers that the Selma police would enforce the law as professionals. Staff minutes on the movement side recorded worry about poor organization for Freedom Day. In Ward II, block captains were asked to stretch final recruitments by an extra half block apiece, to cover shortages. In Ward III, on the other hand, “Mrs. Anderson has so many block captains and workers that she is going to help Mrs. Blevins in her block, which is in Ward V.”

 

T
HE FIRST SKIRMISH
began with a Monday morning song service of three hundred, roughly half of them high school students. King led a mid-morning march out of Brown Chapel one block south on Sylvan Street into a police blockade at Selma Avenue. Wilson Baker gave notice of the pedestrian traffic laws, and warned that he would arrest the entire column for violating parade ordinances unless they divided into clumps of five or fewer at intervals of at least ten feet. In compliance, the segmented column marched one more block, turned west on Alabama Avenue, then walked five short blocks to Broad Street, Selma's main thoroughfare, and across toward the Dallas County courthouse on the right.

Those waiting outside included Sheriff Clark, his deputies, his volunteer segregationist “posse,” scores of Selma bystanders, some sixty reporters, and Commander George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party. In the standoff, while Baker transferred jurisdiction to Clark, Rockwell accosted King as a Communist and challenged him to debate. King agreeably offered Rockwell fifteen minutes to address the mass meeting that night, plus directions to First Baptist. That settled, Sheriff Clark's deputies herded the Negroes into the Lauderdale Street side entrance, past the registrar's office and outside again down into a secluded back alley. Reporters, quarantined by the posse on Alabama Avenue, saw King when he emerged to pursue the day's secondary goal of integrating Selma's public accommodations. Seven of eight tested restaurants served integrated groups that day, and King broke the color bar at the celebrated, antebellum Hotel Albert, named for Queen Victoria's husband but modeled after the Doge's Palace in Venice. Once registered, beneath grand carved arches in the foyer, he tried to break the tension of the milling crowd by addressing the white supremacists he had met at the courthouse. “You're still going to be with us tonight?” he asked.

“No, but I'd like to see you a minute,” said James Robinson, of J. B. Stoner's National States Rights Party. When King approached, Robinson slugged him once in the face, knocking him to the floor, and kicked him once in the groin before A. D. King and Wilson Baker pulled Robinson away. (At the flash of violence, reporter Paul Good observed one excited white woman jump on a chair for a better view, shouting, “Get him! Get him!”) Baker arrested Robinson. Stunned, King went off to rooms at the Albert with nine fellow guests, including Fred Shuttlesworth. He soon made light of the attack, but there was serious consternation in the Justice Department over the day's twenty-odd FBI monitoring reports indicating that King actually had invited firebrand American Nazis into an all-Negro mass meeting. When Rockwell appeared that night outside First Baptist Church with a small entourage, Selma police blocked the entrance. One of his followers objected, shouting, “Commander! Commander!”

“Commander, hell,” growled Wilson Baker. “I'm the commander here, and your asses are going to jail.” He arrested Rockwell and two Nazis, including the man who had appeared in minstrel blackface in the House chamber two weeks earlier, along with a J. B. Stoner ally from Birmingham. Stoner himself addressed a small rally that night outside Selma. Rockwell agreed to leave town the next day in exchange for dropped charges.

There was tension that first night of integration at the Hotel Albert. Judge Hare was furious that his injunction had been disregarded, and the Selma newspaper reported “rumblings of discontent that the sheriff and his force were displeased with police handling of the crowds.” The city attorney ordered Baker to arrest Negroes when they marched from the church on Tuesday—not to support Judge Hare, he claimed, but to protect them from Sheriff Clark. “And charge 'em with what?” demanded Baker, who resisted being provoked to make illegal arrests in order to forestall something worse.

Movement leaders called on Tuesday for fifty jail volunteers willing to refuse an expected order to confine themselves in the back alley. When they held at proper intervals along Alabama Avenue, awaiting their turn in the registrar's office, Clark ordered their arrest. Deputies first hauled away SCLC's Hosea Williams and SNCC chairman John Lewis. The sheriff did not use his conspicuous cattle prod or nightstick, but he became agitated enough to seize Amelia Boynton by the neck of her dress coat and shove her roughly down the sidewalk in front of the assembled photographers. After that, deputies used the sharp jolt of cattle prods to herd the line back toward the county jail. In the noise and stumbling, teacher Margaret Moore stayed close to third-grader Sheyann Webb. “Don't be scared…,” she told her. “Just stay close. Don't let go of my hand.”

“It was no surprise to me,” a triumphant James Bevel shouted at the Tuesday night meeting, that Selma authorities simply opened jail doors to free Sheyann Webb and several of the adult prisoners. “You see my contention is simply this,” he said. “…The moment people want freedom bad enough to pay for it, they can get it. Y'all don't believe that.” He predicted the movement would win the right to vote, “probably this year,” and challenged the audience to prepare for hard responsibilities. “We could get the Negroes registered,” shouted Bevel, “and then the white folks buy the votes for a pint of liquor!” Ralph Abernathy jumped up to propose Jim Clark as an honorary member of the Dallas County Voters League, now that the photograph of him manhandling Amelia Boynton was on the news wires.