Parting the Waters:
America In the King Years, 19541963
[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 whitesonly 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 nonviolence
• 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 NonViolence
• 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 sitins 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 they
Burn 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, MS
1964
• Three civil rights
volunteers are
assassinated
1965, Viola Liuzzo Murdered Near
Selma
Selma to Montgomery
1980
Philadelphia, 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)
Letter from Birmingham Jail was twenty-pages long. It also contained
the following passages:
• “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”
• “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)