Parting the Waters (110 page)

C. B. King speedily presented himself at the county jail as Hansen's lawyer and asked to see his client. The sheriff, seventy-six-year-old D. C. “Cull” Campbell, contemplated the legal request sourly, knowing what the lawyer would find, and then ordered King to leave. When he did not retreat rapidly enough, Campbell chased him out. Inside the door was a rack of wooden canes that had been carved by a blind man, and a cigar box of coins from purchases on the honor system. As the enraged sheriff passed the rack, he grabbed a cane and struck C. B. King full force on the head, then again from behind as King fled. Reeling, with blood running down in a stream that quickly soaked his shirt to the waist, King made a startling sight for the full complement of reporters and police officials who just then were presiding over the arrest of another small band of marchers from the Albany Movement. “C.B., who did this?” shouted Chief Pritchett, and King replied with strained dignity, “The sheriff of Dougherty County, D. C. Campbell.” As the newsmen swarmed, Campbell himself emerged from the courthouse wearing a white Panama hat and did not deny King's charges. Campbell was old-school Albany. His son had served as deputy clerk of the U.S. District Court since 1937, and his own career went back to World War I.

An obviously distressed Chief Pritchett ordered a police car to take C. B. King to the hospital. “This is exactly what we've been trying to prevent,” he told reporters. Campbell allowed officers to check on Hansen, who went to the hospital for treatment of a broken jaw, facial lacerations, and several broken ribs, and then was transferred that night to a cell in the city jail, near Martin Luther King. Before that, on the courthouse lawn, FBI agent Marion Cheek interviewed Campbell for his official report on the incident. “Yeah, I hit him in the head,” Campbell told Cheek. “I told the son of a bitch to get out of my office, and he didn't get out.” Cheek sent the interview to Washington.

Word of the Hansen and C. B. King beatings rocketed through Negro Albany with mixed reactions. There was an outpouring of sympathy from an enormous overflow crowd that night at the mass meeting, but only five people came forward to march the next day, despite stirring songs and emotion-drenched sermons on the cumulative outrages of recent days. “You can't fight a war without soldiers,” pleaded Wyatt Walker. When the five marchers presented themselves on the sidewalk outside city hall, Chief Pritchett told them they could pray all they wanted, night and day. Shrewdly, against the urging of some angry whites, Pritchett refused to order arrests. He told reporters that the marchers were too few to disturb anyone.

A gory photograph of C. B. King appeared on the front page of the Sunday Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
. Claude Sitton's account ran on the front page of the Sunday
Times
. Even the Albany
Herald
featured a rare indictment of official behavior, albeit under the sporting headline “Sheriff Campbell Whacks C. B. King.” The sporadic violence in Albany was registering ominously in the news media, creating a vibrant atmosphere for Dr. Anderson's appearance on “Meet the Press.” Spivak bore in relentlessly with questions suggesting that the Negroes lacked support, had achieved nothing, were run by outsiders, were ruining their chances to make friends with Albany's white people, and were not negotiating in good faith. Other panelists raised the central news angle of national politics: was the Kennedy Administration doing enough? Anderson said no. Although “there has been sufficient indication of violation of constitutional rights,” he declared, the federal government had taken no action in Albany. The President had asked the Attorney General for a report after the last King jailing, but so far nothing had been heard of it. “Moreover,” said Anderson, “I feel as though the President can make a firm statement himself as regards the matter.” The FBI was investigating instances of violence and illegal arrest, he added, but the President had directed no response “as a result of this cumulative material.”

President Kennedy was on holiday that Sunday, sailing in his sloop
Victura
off Hyannis Port—not far from Martha's Vineyard, where King had planned to spend the entire month of August. It was Jacqueline Kennedy's birthday. With most of his family and in-laws aboard, the President ran aground near port and suffered the indignity of watching his mainsail collapse into Lewis Bay. Family members teased him unmercifully. No response to Friday's King arrest had yet pushed its way into the President's schedule, but the issue stalked him.

On Monday, Wyatt Walker was talking on two telephones at once when someone interrupted him to say that Governor Rockefeller wanted to speak with him on the third phone. “Me?” said Walker. He said, “Hello, Governor. This is Wyatt Walker, executive assistant to Dr. King.” Rockefeller said he was worried about King and wanted to know what he could do to help. “Governor, you called at a propitious moment,” Walker replied. He said there was staggering press demand from the last few days, more marches to run, and the crush of personal needs from the people already in jail, who numbered nearly three hundred. “I'm really up against it for bail money,” said Walker. When Rockefeller asked briskly how much he needed, Walker closed his eyes, tripled his hopes, and said, “Well, twenty-five thousand dollars would do nicely.” Rockefeller said it would be there in the morning, and that he planned in addition to make a like contribution to the general work of the SCLC. Walker hung up in dazed joy. Hints of Rockefeller's concrete “interest” in the movement found their way to reporters.

At a Tuesday-morning press conference, devoted mostly to the thalidomide drug scandal and underground testing of nuclear weapons, a reporter asked President Kennedy what he proposed to do about Albany. Kennedy stumbled at first in his response, saying that care was needed because of the confused tangle of local and federal jurisdictions. He paused and then added a thought as though getting it off his chest: “Let me say that I find it wholly inexplicable why the city council of Albany will not sit down with the citizens of Albany, who may be Negroes, and attempt to secure them, in a peaceful way, their rights. The United States Government is involved in sitting down at Geneva with the Soviet Union. I can't understand why the government of Albany, the city council of Albany, cannot do the same for American citizens.”

Dr. Anderson instantly seized upon Kennedy's call for negotiations. “We earnestly desire reconciliation in the Albany community, not victory,” he told Mayor Kelley in another telegram asking for a meeting. Kelley declined to talk with “lawbreakers,” and branded President Kennedy's statement “incredible.” Because Kennedy spoke in rebuke of the Albany officials, his remarks raised a howl of protest from Southern congressmen. In the Senate, Richard Russell lamented that the President had given the nation's highest “stamp of approval” to the Negro lawbreakers, saying his statement would “encourage the importation of many other professionals and notoriety seekers and worsen an already bad situation.” Russell speculated that Kennedy's real motive was to win votes for his brother Edward in the upcoming Massachusetts election. Senator Talmadge denounced King for leading “a violent, calculated campaign to damage the United States in foreign affairs and to set race against race.” Picking up on the fact that the President had called for Albany to negotiate with its local citizens, not with King, he declared that the city's racial troubles could be solved if “outside agitators” left town.

In the Albany
Herald
, James Gray eulogized the “Negro-wooing Government,” and wryly mourned the political demise of his friends the Kennedy brothers as “two ambitious Bostonians, who have been as practically connected with the American Negro in their lifetimes as Eskimos are to the Congo Democrats.” Officials of the Kennedy Administration, for their part, believed that King's rivals in the civil rights movement were putting on a show of lukewarm support for him. Just before Roy Wilkins led a group into the Attorney General's office for a summit meeting, Burke Marshall told Robert Kennedy that Wilkins and the others needed to be able to say they were doing something about Albany. Marshall assured Kennedy that they cared very little for the Albany demonstrations, which were “not Roy's style.” The meeting fulfilled Marshall's predictions until the NAACP's Washington lobbyist, Clarence Mitchell, said he was disturbed by posturing within the government. Mitchell called for the Justice Department to take some action in Albany—arrest somebody, file a suit, protect a march, anything. His unexpected bluntness provoked Robert Kennedy. “You know as well as I do, Clarence, that we have done what we can do under existing law,” he said. “We could do a great deal more if our hands weren't tied.”

Stanley Levison, just back from his annual vacation in South America, was sending draft statements to King's cell by mail. The FBI's wiretap overheard him saying that the Wilkins meeting was a substitute for action on both sides. It was “very possible,” he told a friend, that “the NAACP and the Administration would like to see Martin King kill himself. And the tactic, of course, is to let him languish in jail, and then if it doesn't arouse a lot of support, then gradually people will get discouraged and they will win, the city officials will win.” King's job, he added, was to keep the heat on, to make it plain that “this is not the time for the federal government to be weak.” King's strength also was the antidote for NAACP-flavored criticisms appearing in the skeptical white press.
Time
was reporting that King “has failed to convince Albany's Negroes” of the value of nonviolent protest. Suggesting that “too much success has drained him of the captivating fervor that made him famous,”
Time
quoted one anonymous Negro saying that King “doesn't even speak for the Baptist ministry, let alone 20 million Negroes,” and another saying that marching to jail was not an intelligent way to desegregate Albany: “Some of us think we can do the job less wastefully.”

King remained isolated in his cell. Chief Pritchett kept King and Abernathy off work details for security reasons, and allowed them extra food and visiting privileges. Every morning a women's committee of the Albany Movement brought each of them a clean pair of silk pajamas and plates of food to supplement the wretched jail diet. Abernathy relished a lemon pie. The idea of King in silk pajamas was especially galling to
Herald
editor James Gray, but, deciding that any protest against the luxury might belittle him among the whites and enlarge King among the Negroes, he held the information in his craw.

King held devotional services among the prisoners, often reading from the Book of Job. On some days Pritchett's men took them blinking into the sunlight to attend Judge Elliott's hearings on the city's request for an injunction, which had been mandated by Judge Tuttle. Other days King stayed in the cell and tried to work on a new book of sermons, later published as
Strength to Love
. By the end of his first week in jail, Albany's political and judicial authorities began to accept the unpleasant reality that he was not likely to bail out. As it was unfeasible to expel him again surreptitiously, or delay much longer his trial on the charges of obstructing the sidewalk, time dragged them along inexorably toward a grim choice. They could convict King and sentence him to jail. This course risked renewed mass demonstrations and the embarrassment of possible reversal in appeals court. Worst of all, it kept King not only in town but inside their jail, drawing pressure from distant quarters. Or they could let King go, publicly, and take the chance that this breach might crumble the entire wall of segregation.

Chief Pritchett was just as happy that such decisions were beyond his province. On Saturday, August 4, another cluster of brave but trembling marchers approached city hall from Shiloh—nine women and four men. They confronted the police at the usual spot, while the regular reporters watched from their assigned press section on the sidewalk. Pritchett, appearing relaxed, allowed the marchers to hold a vigil for nearly half an hour before he dryly advised them that their repertoire was exhausted. They were just about sung out and prayed out, he said, and when they failed to disperse, he led them off to jail like a tour guide. It was dusk. Inside, for the benefit of the newest prisoners, Pritchett called out for the regular prisoners to sing one of the freedom songs they had modified in his honor, “Ain't Gonna Let Chief Pritchett Turn Me Around.” “I think he really enjoyed hearing it,” King wrote in his diary.

 

Marilyn Monroe died on the night of August 4 in her bedroom across the country. Attorney General Kennedy attended Mass the next morning at the Church of St. Mary in Gilroy, California, outside San Francisco. Already there were reports of mysterious phone calls and gaps in Monroe's last hours, and subsequent decades lent more credence to the Hollywood gossip. Following later disclosures about President Kennedy's associations with Frank Sinatra's friends, as intercepted by J. Edgar Hoover, investigators of various quality unearthed glimpses of Monroe's star-crossed liaisons with both Kennedys.

Kennedy left San Francisco after Mass for the World's Fair in Seattle. At a press conference there, reporters asked him about a scathing think-tank report that accused J. Edgar Hoover of using “sententious poppycock” to exaggerate the threat of the tiny U.S. Communist Party. Although the report accurately expressed Kennedy's own private views, he parried the question in defense of Hoover. The reason the Communist Party was so small, he replied, was precisely that Hoover had been so skillful in controlling it. “I hope he will serve the country for many, many years to come,” Kennedy added.