LETTER FROM THE BIRMINGHAM JAIL

 

In January of 1963 white supremacist George Wallace took the oath as governor of Alabama. He concluded his inaugural address by pledging, “....I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”  It was a call for a nation of inequality. It was a call for hatred and moral bankruptcy for all future generations. It was a forceful denial of any hope for a better world. And in 1963, as today, that was all white supremacists had to offer America,

...I actually begin this story on Monday, 2 April, 1963, when the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. (above)  from Atlanta, Georgia, arrived in Birmingham, Alabama - “...the most segregated city in America...” - at the invitation of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. Over the previous 80 years there had been 30 documented Lynchings of black men and boys in the surrounding county.  None of these murders was ever solved. There is no indication that anybody ever tried to solve any of them. The city had no black police officers, the county had no black sheriff's deputies, and it had suffered 21 dynamitings of black homes and business over the previous decade - none of them solved - that it had earned the nickname of “Bombingham, Alabama”.

On Tuesday, 3 April, Rev. Shuttlesworth's Bethal Baptist Church filed a request for a parade permit to protest segregation of public services. The self avowed white supremacists City Commissioner Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor (above), immediately denied the permit. On Wednesday, 10 April a state court issued a preliminary injunction against 139 named individuals, including King and Shuttlesworth, baring them from “...participating in or encouraging....boycotting, trespassing, parading, picketing, sit-ins, kneel-ins, wade-ins, and inciting or encouraging such acts." All were peaceful protests. The next day Dr. King announced,, “We cannot in all good conscience obey such an injunction which is... (a) misuse of the legal process”

Then on 12 April, 1963, Dr. King was arrested while attempting to lead a march on city hall. On that same Good Friday both Birmingham papers, the Morning Post Herald and the Evening News, published an open letter signed by 12 white clergymen, repeatedly urging “local” negro leadership to reject “outsiders” Although they never mentioned Dr. King by name, they strongly urged “...our own Negro community to withdraw support from these demonstrations.”

Dr. King was being held in solitary confinement. It would be three days before he read the so-called “Call for Unity”. But when he did his anger and frustration boiled over. He began to immediately scribble a response on the margins of the newspaper. When finally given pens and paper, his counterargument, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, would be one of the most impassioned and yet pragmatic defenses of freedom in 20^th century America. Something 21st America should remind it's self of.

“WHILE confined here in the Birmingham city jail,” he began, “I came across your recent statement calling our present activities "unwise and untimely." Then he added, “...since I feel that you are men of genuine good will...I would like to answer your statement...” He went on to justify his presence by reminding his white colleges he was the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, with 85 affiliates across the south, including one in Birmingham which had invited him to come. 

“Beyond this”, he continued, “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.” As a Christian, he said, he could not “...sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Then he added, unknowingly speaking to future generations, “Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.”

King noted the disapproving clergy called the protests unfortunate. “I would say...it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no other alternative.” He pointed out Birmingham's “...ugly record of police brutality...” 

He reminded the white clergymen, “There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham”, (population of 340,000) “than in any other city in this nation.”

King also reminded the clergymen that promises had been made the previous September by local business to remove “humiliating racial signs from the stores.” But, “As the weeks and months unfolded, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. The signs remained.... So we had no alternative except that of preparing for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national community.” 

He assured the doubtful clergymen the black community of Birmingham had asked themselves “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" Only when they could affirm that position of non-violent confrontation, did the Birmingham campaign begin.

Even then, they postponed their non-violent protests to avoid municipal elections. “This reveals,” wrote Dr. King, “we did not move irresponsibly...”.  However, “After this we felt that direct action could be delayed no longer.” 

He then explained to his critics, “You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action...(to) dramatize the issue (so) that it can no longer be ignored.” He then added, “Too long has our beloved South land been bogged down in the tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue.” And he pointed out that “...privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light...but...groups are more immoral than individuals.”

King then made it personal. “For years now I have heard the word "wait." It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never." Blacks had 350 years of waiting to be treated as equals, he wrote,  “But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will...

...when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity...when...you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park...

...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"...then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait”.

He reminded the clergymen that St. Augustine had written, “An unjust law is no law at all”. And he defined an unjust law as one which, “....a majority compels a minority to follow”. Thus, “ All segregation statutes are unjust because...(they give) the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.” Segregation always, wrote King, "...ends up relegating some persons to the status of things.”

He reminded the sneering clergy of what they themselves had admitted in their “Call for Unity.” “Throughout the state of Alabama,” wrote Dr. King, “all types of conniving methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties without a single Negro registered to vote, despite the fact that the Negroes constitute a majority of the population.” 

To drive the point home, he added, “An unjust law is...inflicted upon a minority which...had no part in enacting or creating because it did not have the unhampered right to vote.”  In defending his methods, King reminded the clergymen civil disobedience was “...practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions...before submitting to certain unjust laws....” Using more recent history, he reminded his fellow Americans, '... everything Hitler did in Germany was "legal...".

Then he added, “ I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is...the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice... who constantly says, "I agree with you in the goal you seek...”, but who constantly advises blacks to “...wait until a more convenient season.”

And he questioned the white clergymen's logic in admitting civil disobedience was peaceful but,

“...must be condemned because they precipitate violence.” King asked, “...can this assertion be logically made?” In answering that question he stated the obvious. “Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.” 

He then chastised the clergy, saying, “We will have to repent...not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” And he reminded the whites citizens of Birmingham of an historical fact. “The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations...If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of violence.”

King admitted because  civil disobedience  invited confrontation, it might be considered an extreme position. But he asked, “Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? -- "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist? -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but...Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?”

And finally he felt compelled to call out the hypocrisy of the clergies' support for the racist Birmingham police, saying, “... if you would watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls...

...if you would see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys, if you would observe them, as they did on two occasions, refusing to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together...(then)... I'm sorry that I can't join you in your praise for the police department.”.  He told these leaders of the white churches of Birmingham, that he had always preached that the greater sin was “....to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.”

And he closed by commending the demonstrators for “...their willingness to suffer, and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation.” And he predicted, “ 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.”

And he signed the letter, as he signed all his letters, “Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.”

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SMOKE AND MIRRORS

 

I miss the old smoke filled rooms – sometimes. In the old days there were no passionate amateurs willing to bring on a political doomsday, just to muck things up. The process was dispassionate, calculated and handled by people who saw politics as a job, aided, of course, by political writers who supplied the passion in print. From such combinations, legends were born, such as this one I shall now relate.

On April Fools Day, 1920, bland faced Ohio political manager Harry Daugherty (above) was hastily packing his bags in his room at the old Waldorf Astoria hotel on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Into the room sauntered two reporters seeking a quote. 

They taunted Daugherty on his boastful support for the turgid and mediocre Ohio Senator, Warren G. Harding (above) for President.  Nobody else thought Harding stood a chance. Just who were these senators that Daugherty claimed would support Harding at the Republican Convention, come June? 

When Daugherty refused to take the bait, the reporters suggested he must be expecting Harding to win the nomination in some hotel back room with a small group of political managers, “reduced to pulp by the inevitable vigil and travail” of a deadlocked convention. 

Daugherty said nothing, so a reporter suggested further that Daugherty must be expecting the managers to collapse about 2:00 A.M. in a smoke filled room. Weary of the dialog, Daugherty responded off handedly, “Make it 2:11,” grabbed his bags and rushed out to catch the train back to Ohio.

The reporter turned that conversation into this quote, which he stuck into Daugherty’s mouth; “I don't expect Senator Harding to be nominated on the first, second or third ballot, but I think we can well afford to take chances that about eleven minutes after 2 o'clock on Friday morning at the convention, when fifteen or twenty men, somewhat weary, are sitting around a table, some one of them will say, "Who will we nominate?" At that decisive time the friends of Senator Harding can suggest him, and can afford to abide by the result.”

And amazingly, that is almost exactly how it really happened. Except that the back room was a suite of meeting rooms in Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel (above) at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Balboa, room numbers 408 through 410, with Room 404 set aside as the reception room.

The suite had been rented by Will Hays (above), the big-eared big-talking “mighty little ear of corn” from Indiana.  He was the Republican National Chairman, and had hopes of being President himself in 1920. And maybe the greatest compliment you can pay the professional politicians of that era is that they did not let Will Hays become President.

The Republican Convention that June was officially taking place 9 blocks south of the Blackstone hotel, in the old Chicago Coliseum (above) on South Wabash Avenue. This cavern had been home to every Republican Convention since 1904. It is worth noting that the building had originally been constructed to house a prison, Richmond’s Libby prison, bought lock, stock, and barrel by a Chicago candy millionaire and shipped north to form the centerpiece of a Civil War Museum. The museum went bust in 1899, and the owner “re-imagined” the space as a public meeting center.

It was into this den of iniquity that some 2,000 delegates and their alternates marched on Tuesday 8 June  1920, sixty years after Republicans had first met in Chicago to nominate William Seward for President, but instead chose Abraham Lincoln. It was an ominous bit of history to consider if you were General Leonard Wood or Illinois Governor Frank Lowden, as they were considered the front runners for the 1920 Republican nomination.

The dour faced Lowden (above) wanted to be president so badly that when both houses of the Illinois state legislature voted to abolish the death penalty, he had vetoed the bill, proving again that politicians are even willing to kill to win a few votes.

In contrast, Leonard Wood (above) had few political skills. He was a Medal of Honor winner who had then graduated medical school and then risen to Army Chief of Staff, and had even won the New Hampshire primary. And while little Will Hays had not entered any of the twenty primaries held that year, he still had hopes that Wood and Lowden would deadlock, and the convention would turn to the little Hoosier to break the tie.

The convention (above) finally got down to the balloting on Friday evening, 11 June , and immediately things started looking up for Hays. On the first ballot Wood led with 285 votes, Lowden showed 211, Senator Hiram Johnson, of California, a Teddy Roosevelt progressive, was third with 133 votes. Far behind was Governor William Spool of Pennsylvania with 84 votes, followed by New York’s Nicholas Butler with 69 votes and Ohio’s favorite son, Senator Warren G. Harding, who had lost in the Indiana primary and could muster just 65 votes. Six other candidates held the remaining 132 delegates.

On the second ballot Wood gained just ten votes, while Governor Lowden’s total grew by 40. But still nobody was close to the 439 votes needed to nominate. General Wood reached his peak on the fourth ballot with 314 votes, then his support started to slip, and Governor Lowden beat him with 311 votes on the fifth ballot. Still, no one seemed to be gathering enough support to win it all. And the longer this went on, the less confidence actual voters would have in the eventual choice. So the professionals stepped in and the convention adjourned for the night. The negotiations shifted to the infamous fourth floor rooms at the Blackstone hotel.

Actually political junkies were meeting all over Chicago that night, but Hays’ rooms at the Blackstone got all the publicity because that was where Associated Press reporter Kirke Simpson was working. He was there to cover Harry Daugherty, because, as you have seen, Harry was always good for a quote, even if you had to spoon feed it to him.

Also present was George Harvey, who ran Harper publishing, and Republican Senators Wadsworth, Calder, Watson, McCormick and Lodge, Utah Senator Reed Smoot, political fixer Joe Grundy, and Lawyer Charles Hillers, counsel to the R.N.C., as well as his client, R.N.C. Chief, Will Hays. Their problem was that none of them could agree upon who the party should rally around, either.

It was, by general agreement, the original “Smoke filled room”, and the 130 pound Hays was the host. Even though he neither smoked nor drank himself, Hays kept the cigars lit and the booze flowing “Neighbor”, he and once said to Herbert Hoover, “I want to be helpful.”  It was his natural instinct.

Harry Daugherty’s (left) natural instinct, on the other hand, was his drive for his man. He said of Harding (right), “I found him sunning himself, like a turtle on a log, and I pushed him into the water. “

Since the top three vote getters were not willing to compromise with each other, the Senators were now looking for “The best of the second raters.”, and Daugherty suggested that Harding was their man. There is no indication that anybody even mention Will Hays - not even Will Hays.

They dispatched a small delegation to Hardings’ room up stairs, and asked the stunned man in his pajamas if there were any embarrassing episodes in his past. Harding swallowed and said, “No”. He was lying, but that would not come out until Harding was long dead.

It wasn't as if the party managers issued orders and the party regulars fell in line. It would take five more ballots before the crowd at the colosseum would give up and hand the nomination to Harding. But as of 2:15 A.M., the decision has been made, just as Daugherty had predicted; if nobody seems to be winning, we will rally around Harding and make do.  What a way to pick a president! And it worked.

At 5 A.M. on Saturday 12 June, 1920, Kirke Simpston filed a story that included the following phrase, “Harding of Ohio was chosen by a group of men in a smoke-filled room early today.” And that is how the phrase "smoke filled room" entered the vernacular. The connotation became negative because after Warren G. Harding won in a landslide, he and his “Ohio Gang” - his buddies, including Harry Daugherty - moved to Washington D.C.  There, many of them ended up in jail, or disgraced, or at least spending a lot of the graft they had collected on lawyers.

Harding appointed Harry Daugherty (above) as his Attorney General. And after three heady years, Harry was forced to resign when his chief aide, Jess Smith, was caught taking kickbacks from bootleggers. Harry was taking kickbacks too, but the professional politicians decided not to prosecute him, the important thing was that he had retreated from public view.

Will Hays served as Hardings’ Postmaster General. But after only one year he smelled the impending scandals and got out.  In 1922 Hays took another job, running the Hays Production Code office, which set standards for on- screen morality in the Hollywood film industry. 

It was the Hays Commission which gave us forty years of married couples sleeping only in twin beds, no acknowledgement of drug use, no adultery in marriage without retribution, and endless stories with saccharin sweet "Hollywood" endings.  It was the Hays' Commission that turned Rhett Butler’s exit line as he walked out on Scarlet O’Hara into a major social crises, even though the line already appeared in one of the most widely read books in America, "Gone With the Wind".  

It seemed that Mr. Hays had built his entire career selling smoke and mirrors, and he was not going to get out of that business just because he had gotten out of politics.  But can you imagine what a disaster he would have been as President? 

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