Parting the Waters Read online

  Acclaim for the Pulitzer Prize winner Parting the Waters

  “In remarkable, meticulous detail, Branch provides us with the most complex and unsentimental version of King and his times yet produced.”

  —Robert C. Maynard,

  The Washington Post Book World

  “Endlessly instructive and fascinating, thorough, stupendous. Now the source and standard in its field.”

  —David Levering Lewis,

  The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A compelling story, masterfully told.”

  —Richard John Neuhaus,

  The Wall Street Journal

  “A masterpiece…remarkably revealing…. The past, miraculously, seems to spring back to life.”

  —Jim Miller,

  Newsweek

  “Already, in this chronicle, there is the material of Iliad after Iliad…. There is no time in our history of which we can be more proud.”

  —Garry Wills,

  The New York Review of Books

  “Superb history.”

  —Robert Wilson,

  USA Today

  “A wide-ranging, monumental tapestry. Branch recounts the turbulent era with feeling and insight.”

  —David Anderson,

  United Press International

  “A brilliantly written saga that breathes life into the people and passions of the King years.”

  —Harold C. Fleming,

  The News and Observer Book World

  “A book that excites as the best history ought to…a notable achievement.”

  —Roger Harris,

  Newark Star-Ledger

  “A dense, elegant narrative that ranges from the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to the Oval Office. Branch has reconstructed an era that changed America forever.”

  —Kim Hubbard and Linda Kramer,

  People

  “Branch gives us a canvas as broad, varied and richly peopled as a medieval religious painting. Should be required reading for every black and white citizen of the state.”

  —Garland Reeves,

  The Birmingham News

  “A thrilling portrait.”

  —Ruth Gilbert,

  New York magazine

  “Branch has fit together all the pieces—the people, places, events—to show relationships, the larger picture we may have missed or forgotten. With this ordered, sweeping look at the movement and King, we are able to put things into perspective.”

  —Patsy Sims,

  Chicago Sun-Times

  “Important…a marvelous book about a man and a movement.”

  —Leslie W. Dunbar, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

  “Simply superior in every aspect.”

  —Ray Jenkins,

  The Baltimore Sun

  Also by Taylor Branch

  Pillar of Fire

  Blowing the Whistle: Dissent in the Public Interest (with Charles Peters)

  Second Wind (with Bill Russell)

  The Empire Blues

  Labyrinth (with Eugene M. Propper)

  Simon & Schuster

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 1998 by Taylor Branch

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are

  registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Branch, Taylor.

  Parting the waters: America in the King years, 1954-63/Taylor Branch.

  p. cm.

  Bibliography Includes index.

  1. Afro-Americans—Civil rights. 2. Civil rights movements—

  United States—History—20th century. 3. King, Martin Luther, Jr.,

  1929-1968. 4. United States—History—1961-1969. I. Title.

  E185.61.B7915 1998

  88-24033

  CIP

  973’0496073—dc19

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5868-2

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-5868-3

  We are grateful for permission to quote from "Listen, Lord—A Prayer” in God’s Trombones by James Weldon Johnson. Copyright 1927 by The Viking Press, Inc. Copyright renewed 1955 by Grace Nail Johnson.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For the Choir of

  All Souls Unitarian Church, Washington, D.C.

  And in memory of

  Septima Poinsette Clark

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  1. FORERUNNER: VERNON JOHNS

  2. ROCKEFELLER AND EBENEZER

  3. NIEBUHR AND THE POOL TABLES

  4. FIRST TROMBONE

  5. THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT

  6. A TASTE OF THE WORLD

  7. THE QUICKENING

  8. SHADES OF POLITICS

  9. A PAWN OF HISTORY

  10. THE KENNEDY TRANSITION

  11. BAPTISM ON WHEELS

  12. THE SUMMER OF FREEDOM RIDES

  13. MOSES IN McCOMB, KING IN KANSAS CITY

  14. ALMOST CHRISTMAS IN ALBANY

  15. HOOVER’S TRIANGLE AND KING’S MACHINE

  16. THE FIREMAN’S LAST REPRIEVE

  17. THE FALL OF OLE MISS

  18. TO BIRMINGHAM

  19. GREENWOOD AND BIRMINGHAM JAIL

  20. THE CHILDREN’S MIRACLE

  21. FIRESTORM

  22. THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON

  23. CROSSING OVER: NIGHTMARES AND DREAMS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABBREVIATIONS USED IN SOURCE NOTES

  NOTES

  MAJOR WORKS CITED IN NOTES

  INDEX

  PREFACE

  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. To recreate the perceptions within his inherited world would isolate most readers, including myself, far outside familiar boundaries. But to focus upon the historical King, as generally established by his impact on white society, would exclude much of the texture of his life, which I believe makes for unstable history and collapsible myth.

  To overcome these pitfalls of race, 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.

  The text moves from King to people far removed, at the highest and lowest stations. By seeking at least a degree of intimacy with all of them—old Mother Pollard and also President Eisenhower, Bob Moses of SNCC and also J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, with the Kennedys and also King’s rivals within the black church—I hope to let the characters define each other.

  My purpose is to write a 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.

  The chosen structure—narrative biographical history—has influenced several elements of style. For example, the word “Negro” is employed here in narrative covering the years when that term prevailed in common usage. Far from intending a political statement, I merely hope to recreate the feeling of the times, the better to capture the sweep of many changes including the ext
raordinary one in which the entire society shifted from “Negro” to “black” almost overnight. Because of the length of this work, for which I beg the reader’s indulgence, that shift falls within the span of a second volume.

  On another matter of housekeeping, I regret having to leave the record on Stanley Levison slightly ajar. Since 1984, I have sought the original FBI documents pertaining to the Bureau’s steadfast contention that King’s closest white friend was a top-level Communist agent. On this charge rested the FBI’s King wiretaps and many collateral harassments against the civil rights movement. In opposing my request, the U.S. Department of Justice has argued in federal court that the release of thirty- to thirty-five-year-old informant reports on Levison would damage the national security even now. Almost certainly there is bureaucratic defensiveness at work here—and also, I suspect, some petty spy rivalry with the CIA—but so far the logic of secrecy has been allowed to reach levels of royalist absurdity.

  Other evidence, including David Garrow’s pioneering work on the FBI investigation of King, has convinced me that Levison’s character and historical contributions are established beyond significant doubt. Nevertheless, the material being withheld denies the American public a common ground for historical discussion. This stubborn wisp of mystery allowed President Reagan, even while honoring King with a national holiday, to state publicly that a charge of fundamental disloyalty hangs over him. I deeply regret that a democratic government still labors to keep such allegations alive through state secrecy. It is all the more sad this year, when Soviet authorities canceled history examinations throughout their country on the admission that their national heritage has become lost among the lies and official secrets of the past.

  Baltimore, Maryland

  August 1988

  PARTING THE WATERS

  ONE

  FORERUNNER: VERNON JOHNS

  Nearly seven hundred Negro communicants, some wearing white robes, marched together in the exodus of 1867. They followed the white preacher out of the First Baptist Church and north through town to Columbus Street, then east up the muddy hill to Ripley Street. There on that empty site, the congregation declared itself the First Baptist Church (Colored), with appropriate prayers and ceremonies, and a former slave named Nathan Ashby became the first minister of an independent Negro Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama.

  Most local whites considered the separation a bargain, given the general state of turmoil and numb destitution after the war. Governor Robert M. Patton and the new legislature, in a wild gamble based on Andrew Johnson’s friendliness toward prominent ex-Confederates, openly repudiated the Fourteenth Amendment’s recognition of Negro citizenship rights, only to have a Union brigadier walk into the Montgomery capitol to declare that he was superseding the state government again until its officials saw fit to reconsider. White spirits fell; Negro spirits soared. The town’s population had swelled to fourteen thousand, with Negroes outnumbering whites three to one. Refugees of both races were fleeing the crop failures and foreclosures in the countryside and streaming into Montgomery, where they often lived in clumps on the streets and entertained themselves by watching the outdoor sheriff’s sales.

  Under such conditions, and with the U.S. Congress threatening a new Fifteenth Amendment to establish the right of Negroes to vote and govern, most whites were of no mind to dispute the Negro right to religion. Many were only too happy to clear the throngs from the church basement, even if it meant that their previous items of property would be conducting their own church business at the corner of Columbus and Ripley—offering motions, debating, forming committees, voting, hiring and firing preachers, contributing pennies, bricks, and labor to make pews and windows rise into the first free Negro institution. The Negro church, legal in some respects before the Negro family, became more solvent than the local undertaker.

  Ten years later, a dissident faction of the First Baptist Church (Colored) marched away in a second exodus that would forever stamp the characters of the two churches. Both sides would do their best to pass off the schism as nothing more than the product of cramped quarters and growing pains, but trusted descendants would hear of the quarrels inevitable among a status-starved people. Undoubtedly some of the tensions were the legacy of slavery’s division between the lowly field hands and the slightly more privileged house servants, the latter more often mulattoes. These tensions culminated when “higher elements” among the membership mounted a campaign to remodel the church to face the drier Ripley Street instead of the sloping Columbus, where they were obliged to muddy their shoes on Sundays after a rain. Their proposed renovation, while expensive, would afford cleaner and more dignified access.

  Most members and some deacons considered this an unseemly and even un-Christian preoccupation with personal finery, but a sizable minority felt strongly enough to split off and form the Second Baptist Church (Colored). Although the secessionists shared the poverty of the times and of their race—and held their organizational meeting in the old Harwell Mason slave pen—the world of their immediate vision was one of relative privilege. At the first baptismal services, conducted by a proper British minister, guests included three equally proper white Yankee schoolmistresses from the missionary legions who were still streaming south to educate and Christianize the freedmen. In January 1879, the new church paid $250 for a lot and a building that stood proudly in the center of town on Dexter Avenue, little more than a stone’s throw from the grand entrance of the Alabama state capitol. The all-Negro congregation renamed itself Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Its first minister, a former slave named Charles Octavius Boothe, wrote that the members were “people of money and refinement” and boasted that one of the members, a barber named Billingslea, owned property worth $300,000. This claim, though widely doubted, entered the official church history.

  From the beginning, Dexter Avenue operated as a “deacons’ church,” meaning that the lay officers took advantage of the full sovereignty claimed by each Baptist congregation. They were free to hire any preacher they wanted—trained or untrained, fit or unfit—without regard to bishops or other church hierarchy. The Baptists had no such hierarchy at all, nor any educational requirements for the pulpit, and this fact had contributed mightily to the spread of the denomination among unlettered whites and Negroes alike. Anyone with lungs and a claim of faith could become a preacher. And as the ministry was the only white-collar trade open to Negroes during slavery—when it was a crime in all the Southern states to teach Negroes to read or allow them to engage in any business requiring the slightest literacy—preachers and would-be preachers competed fiercely for recognition. Religious oratory became the only safe marketable skill, and a reputation for oratory substituted for diplomas and all other credentials. For most of the next century, a man with a burning desire to be a saint might well find himself competing with another preacher intent only on making a fortune, as all roads converged at the Negro church. It served not only as a place of worship but also as a bulletin board to a people who owned no organs of communication, a credit union to those without banks, and even a kind of people’s court. These and a hundred extra functions further enhanced the importance of the minister, creating opportunities and pressures that forged what amounted to a new creature and caused the learned skeptic W. E. B. Du Bois to declare at the turn of the twentieth century that “the preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil.”

  Not surprisingly, these powerful characters sorely tested the ability of congregations to exercise the authority guaranteed them in Baptist doctrine. As a rule, the preachers had no use for church democracy. They considered themselves called by God to the role of Moses, a combination of ruler and prophet, and they believed that the congregation behaved best when its members, like the children of Israel, obeyed as children. The board of deacons at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was one of the few to defend itself effectively against preachers who regularly tried to subdue the membership. Indeed, the board’s very identity seemed
rooted in the conviction that the church’s quality lay as much in the membership as in the pastor. And because those same deacons also made it a tradition to choose the best trained, most ambitious ministers, titanic struggles after the fashion of those between European monarchs and nobles became almost a routine of church life at Dexter. Nearly a dozen preachers came and went in the first decade.

  By contrast, the First Baptist Church (Colored) remained a “preacher’s church,” with only three pastors during its first fifty-seven years of existence. The exalted preachers tended to reign in a manner that provoked another mass exodus in 1910, not long after the church burned to the ground. The minister at that time, Andrew Stokes, was a great orator and organizer who had baptized an astonishing total of 1,100 new members during his first year in the pulpit. Stokes made First Baptist the largest Negro church in the United States until the great migration of 1917 created larger congregations in Chicago. He was also a money-maker. If white realtors had trouble selling a house, they often advanced Stokes the down payment, letting him keep his “refund” when white buyers mobilized to keep him out of their neighborhood. Stokes would joke with his deacons about the justice of making the whites pay for their prejudice, and he donated a portion of the proceeds to the church. This was fine, but a controversy erupted when Stokes proposed to rebuild the burned church a few hundred feet to the northeast on a corner lot that he owned and to take title to the parsonage in exchange for the property. Many irreparable wounds were inflicted in the debate that followed. Stokes went so far as to promise to make the new church entrance face Ripley Street, as the wealthier members had demanded more than thirty years earlier, but the unmollified elite among the deacons led a fresh secession down to Dexter Avenue Baptist.