Parting the Waters:America In the King Years, 1954-1963

[Volume One in a 3-Volume Series by Taylor Branch]

Excerpted and annotated by Dr. Nerio

Vernon Johns,Forerunner of the Civil Rights movement

Dexter Avenue Baptist Church

• 1949, Johns placed a sign outside of his church announcing that he would be lecturing on “Segregation After Death”

• The Montgomery, AL police ordered him to the station for questioning

• They eventually allowed him to deliver his sermon

The Segregation Laws:

• Whites and blacks could not:• Play checkers together on public property• Ride a taxi together• Sit near each other on the bus (a floating line

placed whites in the front)• Enter the bus door together (blacks had to pay

their fare at the front and then enter through the back)

• On one occasion, Johns had walked into a whites-only lunch counter and placed an order:

• “His request immediately produced a tense silence in the entire restaurant, but there was something about his size and his fearless manner that caused the attendant to make the sandwich. Then [the attendant] fixed the drink and, perhaps under pressure from the onlookers, poured it slowly onto the counter in front of the minister. Johns ordered another drink, saying, ‘There is something in me that doesn’t like being pushed around, and it’s starting to work.’” (15)

• “With that, a gang of customers ran to their cars for guns and chased him out of the restaurant”

“This was a violent time in Alabama--

• “An era when a judge and jury sentenced a Negro man to death for stealing $1.95 from a white woman…”

• “And when police offers often meted out harsher justice informally…

• “One Montgomery case stuck in John’s mind: officers stopped a man for speeding and beat him half to death with a tire iron.” (22)

Johns Left for a Church in Farmville, VA in 1952

• That same year, Thurgood Marshall began to argue the Brown vs. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court

• When the case was decided, the city of Farmville shut down the school system rather than integrate… It was closed for five years Thurgood Marshall Entering the Supreme Court

Race in the U.S. in the 20th Century

• Social Darwinism was “rising to full strength” • In 1901, the last Negro congressman (before the

1960s) was sent home • Even formerly pro-abolitionist journals began to

publish articles about “the universal supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon” [ex. The Atlantic]

• When T. Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House, he was denounced on the front pages of newspapers “for nearly a week”

Atlanta Race Riot, 1906• Gubernatorial race in Georgia pledged to fulfill the

disenfranchisement of black voters

• Atlanta Constitution began to run vague stories of black misdeeds on the front pages, including a headline: “Negro Menaced Miss Orrie Bryan”

• In the next three days, white mobs killed nearly fifty Negros in Atlanta

• The Atlanta Constitution took blamed the murdered blacks for their own deaths

• The NAACP forms in 1906

• 1915, The Birth of a Nation becomes first major Hollywood film

The Importance of Names

• “For it is through our names that we first place ourselves in the world” - Ralph Ellison

• The terms “black” and “negro” were widely disparaged slave-owners had preferred them

• “’Colored’ was thought to be more inclusively accurate, but it…failed to distinguish former slaves from Asians and Native Americans

• “Colored” also implied that white was not a color…and that “color” was something added

• NAACP adopted “colored”• Other newspapers began to use the term “Race men”

Hate Riots in the North

• 1943, Detroit

WWII

• So many blacks were drafted into war that Morehouse and Spellman colleges contemplated closing their doors

• A. Phillip Randolph calls on Roosevelt to desegregate the military

• Atmosphere after WWII was one of increasing racial tension

1946

• “Mobs assassinated no fewer than six Negro war veterans in a single three-week period that summer”

• “In Georgia’s first multiple lynching since 1918, one of those six veterans died when a group of hooded men pulled him, his wife, and another Negro couple out of a car near Monroe, lined the four them up in a ditch, and fired a barrage that left a reported 180 bullets in one of the four corpses” (64)

• The jury refused to return an indictment against the six men arrested in the case

• Truman exclaimed, on hearing the news, “My God, I had no idea that it was as terrible as that…”

• He promised to send a message to Congress asking for a federal anti-lynching law

• The Atlanta Constitution called the idea too radical

MLK Took his First Public Stand

• “The Purpose of Education”

During this time, MLK was in seminary

• Social Gospel: drawing parallels between the Second Coming and Karl Marx’s vision of a classless, stateless society

• Many seminarians admired the life and work of Mohandes Gandhi, whose use of nonviolence transformed India from colony to independent country

Early Stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement

• March 2, 1955: Claudette Colvin defended her right to sit in the “no-man’s land” between the white and black sections of a Montgomery bus

• She was handcuffed and taken to jail• That same year, Robert Graetz became the first white seminary

graduate to take a position as a minister in a black Montgomery church

• He was breaking the segregation law by doing so• When he and his wife tried to attend a movie with some of the

parishioners, the theater owners would not sell tickets to them• Because the Graetzes wanted to sit in the balcony (blacks only),

the theater owners would be breaking the law

December 1, 1955

• A bus driver sees a white man standing on a Montgomery bus and orders Rosa Parks and three others to move to the back so that he can sit down

• Rosa Parks alone stays in her seat• She was booked, fingerprinted and incarcerated• The Montgomery Bus Boycott Begins, last for

one year and 19 days

During the Boycott Museum Exhibit

• During the boycott, M.L. King’s house was bombed

• His words to his supporters: “Don’t get panicky…Don’t get your weapons. If you have weapons, take them home. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember that is what Jesus said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love.” (166)

Within the Eisenhower Administration

• Attorney General Herbert Brownell had decided to ask Congress for a civil rights bill

• Meanwhile, 90 southern congressmen and all of the southern senators signed a “Southern Manifesto”

• The manifesto equated integration with subversion of the Constitution and pledged the entire region to fierce resistance

During the Boycott

• Ralph Abernathy’s home was bombed and destroyed

• The Hutchinson Street Baptist Church was bombed and destroyed

• The Graetzes’ home was bombed twice• Pastor E.D. Nixon’s home was bombed• People begin to question the principle of non-

violence

• A bomb explodes in front of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church

• The parsonage is destroyed, as well as a nearby taxi-stand

• Police charge seven white men

• They acquitted the men, despite their signed confessions

• On the same day, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled against MLK’s appeal (he had been charged with leading an “illegal boycott”)

MLK and Bayard Rustin Appeal to President Eisenhower

• In a telegraph: “In the absence of some early and effective remedial action, we will have no moral choice but to lead a Pilgrimage of Prayer to Washington. If you, our president, cannot come South to relieve our harassed people, we shall have to lead our people to you in the capital in order to call the nation’s attention to the violence” (213)

• Eisenhower responded: “You can’t legislate morality”

Little Rock

• September 4, 1957: Governor Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to prevent nine Negro students from enrolling in Central High School

Little Rock schools were closed for five years

1958

• Clennon King, a black professor of history, applied to the University of Mississippi

• He was apprehended and placed in a mental institution

• Later, in 1976, he would try to integrate Jimmy Carter’s church in Georgia

• The church had a statute barring all Negroes

• The church officials temporarily closed the church rather than allow King and other blacks to join

MLK Moves to Atlanta

• Governor Vandiver states publicly that he is not welcome in Georgia

• Two Georgia sheriff’s deputies came to his Atlanta church with a warrant for his arrest

• The charges involved disputed taxes in Alabama, which King had already paid

Lunch-Counter Protest Movements

• Movement begins in Greensville• In Nashville, black students try to integrate

stores• “The police allowed some of the whites to

attack [the] unresisting [protesters] with rocks, fists, and lighted cigarettes before moving in to arrest seventy-seven Negroes and five white sympathizers—to the applause of several hundred white onlookers” (279)

• “Rumors of student sit-ins at Montgomery’s downtown lunch counters attracted roving bands of angry white people armed with baseball bats. There were no sit-ins, but exchanges between the white vigilantes and the ordinary Negro shoppers occasionally flashed into violence…

• “While one white man scuffled with a Negro woman on the sidewalk, his companion bludgeoned her from the blind side… The white photographer and reporter at the scene both said that the police had stood by passively”

King Continued to Appeal for Non-Violence

• In Greenboro, April 15, 1960:

“Love is the force by which God binds man to Himself and man to man. Such love goes to the extreme; it remains loving and forgiving even in the midst of hostility. It matches the capacity of evil to inflict suffering with an even more enduring capacity to absorb evil, all the while persisting in love” (291)

1960 National Conventions

• The “networks had blacked out Negro speakers at both conventions for fear of offending Southern stations” (323)

1961• MLK appears at the segregated Magnolia

Room at Rich’s department store in Atlanta• He is the first arrested, and his bond is set at

$500• “I cannot accept bond.

I will stay in jail one year, or ten years”

• Georgia Governor discovers that King had a prior offense

• He had been stopped in DeKalb county for driving with his wife in the same car with a white woman

• They were taking her to the hospital for her cancer treatments

• At that point, the officer discovered that he had not changed his license address from Montgomery to Atlanta

• Because of this prior offense, King was taken in handcuffs, a leg iron, and arm shackles to a maximum security prison in rural Georgia

• As King is assigned to hard labor on a state road gang, many people try to secure his release

AG Robert Kennedy Harry Belafonte Frank Sinatra

Meanwhile…

• John Lewis and two companions sat down at the Krystal restaurant in Nashville, 1961

• “A visibly distressed waitress poured cleansing powder down their backs and water over their food…” (379)

• The manager cleared the restaurant of whites and locked Lewis and the other inside

• He turned on the fumigation machine

• King is released from prison and enters a debate with journalist James Kilpatrick

• Kilpatrick argues that the “real” goal of the sit-ins was sexual, or “universal miscegenation”

• Kilpatrick elaborated that it is necessary to preserve European characteristics

Southern Jurisdictions Regularly Sue the NYT and Other Papers

• The mayor of Montgomery sues the Times for $500,000

• The judge orders strict segregation of the court room

• The judge moves the case quickly to the jury, which awarded an additional $500,000

• Suits begin to pile up

• The intention of southern mayors is to drive to the NYT out of business for reporting on southern violence

The Freedom Rides Begin

• First Freedom Rider bus pulls into the Greyhound terminal at Rock Hill, South Carolina, May 1961

• A mob appears, knocking a few people over• In Anniston, a “large crowd of men bearing

clubs, bricks, iron pipes, and knives” appears• “Enraged, the mob began pounding on the bus

with pipes and slashing tires”

• The bus escapes the station, pursued by 50 cars and as many as 200 men

• The tires were going flat• When the mob caught up to the bus, they

smashed the windows, “sending shards of glass flying among the passengers inside”

• “Finally, someone threw a firebomb through the gaping hole in the back window. As flames ran along the floor some of the seats caught fire and the bus began to fill with black, acrid smoke”

• The mob “was no longer trying to force entry but now was barricading the door to seal them in the fire”

• The mob pursued the injured passengers to the hospital

• The hospital personnel, intimidated by the mob, orders the Freedom Riders to leave

In Birmingham

• Bull Conner orders his men to arrest the Freedom Riders

• They are hauled off to jail

The Next Bus Arrives in Montgomery

• The freedom riders disembark

• “Hemmed against a railing…they stood helpless as the white men barreled into them. Some of Lewis’ group jumped, some were pushed, and some were literally thrown over the railing onto the roofs of cars parked in the Post Office below…reporters who objected were set upon by a small mob whose full fury was now released” (446)

• A white exchange student from Wisconsin was surrounded

• “One of the men grabbed Zwerg’s suitcase and smashed him in the face with it. Others slugged him to the ground…one man pinned Zwerg’s head between his knees so that the others could take turns hitting him. As they steadily knocked out his teeth, and his face and chest were streaming with blood, a few adults on the perimeter put their children on their shoulders to view the carnage” (446)

• “A handful of whites ambushed two stray Negro teenagers half a block from the bus terminal, setting one briefly on fire with kerosene and breaking the other’s leg with a stomping”

• 1,500 Freedom Riders and supporters regroup in First Baptist church. MLK begins to preach

• 3,000 whites surround the church• The mob outside begins overturning cars and

setting them on fire• Someone throws a canister

inside• Molotov cocktails are lobbed

At the church but theyBurn up outside

U.S. Marshalls are Called

• One Marshall is hit with a brick• Gunshots are fired into Negro homes on four

different streets near the church• The Police Commissioner arrives, and white

teenagers pelt his car with bricks• The National Guard arrives, and they “had their

bayonets pointed inward toward the church doors as well as outward toward the departed mob” (463)

When the Standoff is Over

• Governor Patterson announces that he received hundreds of telegrams

• They were 75 to 1 against the Freedom Riders

The Press Turns Against the Freedom Riders

• NYT: “Non-violence that deliberately provokes violence is a logical contradiction”

• A Gallup poll showed that 63 percent of Americans disapproved of the Freedom Rides

• But more and more northern supporters (ministers, professors, and college students) arrive to support the Freedom Riders

September 15, 1963

• A bomb explodes at the Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church in Birmingham

Robert Moses Launches Voter Registration Drive

• Sheriff Billy Jack Caston, of Jackson, MS asks Moses where he is going

• “To the registrar’s office”

• Caston said no he wasn’t and struck a quick, swiping blow to Moses’ forehead with the handle of his knife

Caston and Moses

• “In peaceful surrender, he saw Caston hit him again behind the right temple, saw himself sink to his knees, saw Caston drive his face to the pavement with a crushing blow to the top of the head” (497)

• When Caston is prosecuted, whites drove from all over the county to support the sheriff

• The jury acquitted Caston

Moses Returns to the Courthouse to Register People to Vote

• The registrar hits one of the applicants with the butt of a gun to the head

• The sheriff then arrests the applicant

MLK Sends a Telegram to Kennedy

• The events in Mississippi (the murder of Herbert Lee, the mass arrests, the beating) constitute “an apparent reign of terror”

• The Kennedys take no action

Birmingham, 1963

“Arresting Non-Violent Children Warriors”

Fred Shuttlesworth leading marchers in prayer, just before they were arrested

So Many Are Arrested that the Jails Fill and Police Detain Protesters in the Fair Grounds

Some Birmingham Parents Take Their Children to KKK Rallies

Blacks and Whites Together in Greenwood, MS, 1963

1964, St. Augustine

• When blacks and whites integrate a hotel pool, the owner pours acid in the water

• Closes the pool permanently

St. Augustine, 1964

• Police respond to blacks who try to integrate the municipal beach

St. Augustine, 1964

KKK readies with clubs and chains

Bull Conner in Birmingham

Firehoses

Philadelphia, MS1964

• Three civil rights volunteers are assassinated

1965, Viola Liuzzo Murdered Near Selma

Selma to Montgomery

1980Philadelphia, MS

Ronald Reagan announces his run for the presidency in the town where the three civil rights volunteers were murdered

White Clergy During the Civil Rights Movement

• In 1963, 13 liberal white clergymen wrote a letter to the Birmingham news denouncing the civil rights protests and urging black demonstrators to wait for justice

• They commended the media and the police, but denounced the protests

• These were the liberal leaders who, according to Branch, “were among the minority of white preachers who of late had admitted Andrew Young and other Negroes to specially roped off areas of their Sunday congregations…” (738)

• MLK was in the Birmingham jail when the article appeared in the newspaper

• Out of despair and conviction he wrote to the ministers:

• [Excerpt from the letter from Birmingham Jail next]

• “I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’ But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer…

• “…for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?,’ when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’; when your first name becomes ‘nigger’ and your middle name becomes ‘boy’ and your last name becomes ‘John,’ and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’; when...

• “…you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at a tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness,’ then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait” (739)

• “I have heard numerous leaders of the South call upon their worshippers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law…but I have longed to hear white ministers say, ‘follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother…”

• “I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love”

Letter from Birmingham Jail was twenty-pages long. It also containedthe following passages:

• “One day the South will recognize its real heroes…One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage…” (743)