G-Man, page 83
And yet when an opportunity came to act against Levison, to bring the whole tale out into the open, Hoover hesitated and backed away. In February 1963, the Justice Department floated the idea of prosecuting Levison for failing to register under the McCarran Act. In order to make the case, they needed a witness who could testify with credibility about Levison’s secret party activities. Unwilling to expose SOLO, Hoover dispatched agents to consult with more than a dozen other ex-communists and informants, hoping that they might make the identification. When they all failed to recognize Levison, Hoover chose to protect SOLO rather than move forward, citing the fact that “a highly sensitive source who is not available for interview or testimony” remained the only provider of information.[7]
The aborted prosecution left Hoover stuck where he had been for more than two years: convinced that Levison and O’Dell were part of the communists’ clandestine apparatus, but unable to force a separation from King or to get anyone else to make a move. The one hint of action came from Levison himself, who in March 1963 arranged to meet with Lem Harris, the communists’ point man on finances and fundraising. According to Jack Childs, Levison explained over lunch that he had recently become disillusioned with the party, convinced that “the CP is ‘irrelevant’ and ineffective.” Though he and other supporters continued to contribute money to the party “out of habit and sentiment,” he explained, the time had come for a permanent break. “I was . . . tough . . . and I think I established my firm view, firm position,” Levison told his brother a few days later, in a conversation captured on the FBI’s wiretaps.
Harris came away with a different impression. “The LEVISONS and O’DELL are still Party members, but do not desire to be openly ‘linked up’ with the Party,” Childs reported to the FBI, citing Harris’s interpretation of events. “Although they are ‘disenchanted’ with the Party, they are not quitting.” Jack received a similar report from Isadore Wofsy, another top party-finance official. “The LEVISONS wish to ‘run’ MARTIN LUTHER KING independently, without any interference from the Party,” he told the FBI, “however, the LEVISONS wish to ‘remain Party people.’ ”[8]
How should one interpret these conflicting claims? It seems most likely that Levison was, indeed, splitting from the party. After years of increasing distance, of trying to treat his former comrades fairly, he may simply have decided to throw in his lot with the cause that mattered more. But Hoover believed just the opposite—that the meeting confirmed rather than repudiated his own long-standing theory about Levison’s true loyalties: If Levison had really been distancing himself from the party for years, why on earth did he need to meet with Harris as late as March 1963—some six years after he started working with King—in order to renounce the whole operation? And why, if he had nothing to hide, had he apparently never told King anything about it?
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In the end, the impulse behind Levison’s meeting may have had less to do with any concerns internal to the Communist Party than with the SCLC’s upcoming plans for Birmingham. During the conclave at Dorchester, the SCLC leadership had laid the groundwork for a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience there, hoping to capitalize upon the city’s reputation as “the most segregated city in America,” in King’s words. At that gathering, Levison reminded everyone about what Birmingham had been like during Bull Connor’s early years, when the labor movement had gone up against the police only to be driven back through “forced brutality” and intimidation, just like the Freedom Riders. The plan now was to make Connor’s methods work in the movement’s favor, to produce a spectacle of such moral clarity that it would move both the city and the nation to turn against segregation.[9]
Hoover had his own strategy to work out for Birmingham, where his ability to influence the local authorities remained tenuous at best. After the Freedom Rides, he had made half-hearted gestures toward limiting contact with many Southern police departments, hoping to protect the Bureau from “unwarranted criticism.” Once King accused the FBI of assigning too many Southern-born agents to Southern offices, Hoover had adjusted that policy, too, transferring additional Northern agents into the region “in order that the criticism which has arisen against the Bureau in its work in the civil rights field might to some degree be minimized.” Hoover resented having to make the changes. “I personally do not approve of this policy because I think law enforcement should work as a team,” he explained to Bobby Kennedy. He especially objected to the idea that the FBI had been pressured into action by Black leaders like King. “I think the limit of palliation and appeasement has been reached,” he declared.[10]
Birmingham presented its own special problems. In 1963, National Academy graduate Jamie Moore was still there as police chief, bouncing between his role as Connor’s subordinate and his desire to maintain decent FBI relations. And now there was another ex-FBI man in the mix, a former agent, arch-segregationist, and Connor devotee named Arthur Hanes, elected as Birmingham’s mayor in 1961. Between them, Moore and Hanes represented two sides of Hoover’s legacy: Moore the professional lawman, ostensibly devoted to expertise, local-federal cooperation, and scientific methods; Hanes the passionate conservative and standard-bearer for segregation, willing to stretch and evade the law in order to promote his cause.
One man who was certain the FBI should stay as far away as possible was Alabama governor George Wallace, who had been elected on a commitment to preserve “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” as he promised in his 1963 inaugural address. Wallace had never liked the FBI. As a circuit-court judge in the 1950s, he vowed to arrest any FBI agent who set foot in his territory. Since then, he had often swept the FBI into his denunciations of federal power, demanding resistance from all self-respecting white Southerners. Hoover took notice. When Wallace complained in 1962 that Alabama citizens were being harassed by FBI agents investigating voting rights, Hoover did not afford the governor even the courtesy of a phone call. “To contact him would only take cognizance of his tirades, [and] encourage further unwarranted politically-inspired assaults against the Bureau,” an aide explained. Privately, Hoover labeled Wallace “a rat.”[11]
He found it more difficult to separate from Hanes (the Birmingham mayor), who shared many of Wallace’s views but often bragged about his past under Hoover’s tutelage. During his three years at the Bureau, Hanes had been a standard G-Man: Southern-born, a college athlete turned law student, even “a handsome version of J. Edgar Hoover,” in one historian’s assessment. As an agent in the late 1940s, he had worked briefly in the field offices before taking up administrative work at headquarters. In 1951, he left to become head of security at Hayes Aircraft, a major Birmingham employer, and soon joined the Citizens’ Council. His ability to move between worlds caught Bull Connor’s attention. “He’s the son of a Methodist minister, a football player, and an FBI man,” Connor had said, promoting Hanes as an ideal mayoral candidate.[12]
Once elected, Hanes shut down the city’s parks, pools, golf courses, and recreational facilities rather than desegregate them. In Washington, Hoover took flak for those actions. “Mayor Hanes expressed attitudes with respect to negroes which were extremely insulting to the convictions of most American citizens and which may justly earn the appellation, un-American,” one concerned citizen wrote to Hoover, wondering if the FBI supported the racist views of its progeny. Hoover disavowed Hanes’s attitudes. “His opinions, of course, are his own,” he wrote back. But the questions persisted: How could the FBI have produced such a man? And what did it mean that one of the South’s most virulent segregationist mayors described himself as a great Hoover admirer?[13]
With neither the mayor nor the governor as an appealing ally, Hoover was left with police chief Jamie Moore, the same man who had abandoned the Freedom Riders. While Hoover was now more cautious about working directly with him, Moore’s academy background proved crucial in the early stages of planning how to handle the upcoming protests in Birmingham. Partly through academy circles, Moore had recently made common cause with Laurie Pritchett, the police chief of Albany, Georgia, where the SCLC had staged its last major round of demonstrations. Pritchett, too, was an academy graduate, a true believer in Hoover-style professionalism. Drawing upon those lessons, he had fashioned his own approach to policing civil rights demonstrations.
According to Pritchett, the Birmingham police had made a colossal mistake by allowing the Klansmen to beat the Freedom Riders—not because such violence was wrong, but because it played into the hands of the protesters. Without that spectacular violence, he argued, nobody would have noticed a bus trip by a handful of civil rights agitators. With it, they became martyrs and media darlings. In Albany, he set out to deprive the demonstrators of any such satisfaction. When they protested lawfully, the police stood by and watched. When they broke the law, officers calmly arrested them and took them to jail. Pritchett even helped to orchestrate King’s release from jail, rather than allow him to stay inside and become an object of sympathy. Borrowing Gandhian language, Pritchett described his strategy as nonviolent passive resistance—only in this case, it was a strategy for the police. His approach earned plaudits throughout the Northern press, where he was depicted as a new type of enlightened Southern lawman.
The imperative to get around Pritchett’s tactics helped to bring King and the SCLC back to Birmingham, where Connor seemed likely to authorize an old-fashioned beatdown and thus attract sympathetic attention for the movement. Eager to head this off, Moore invited Pritchett down to Birmingham for a consultation. Pritchett showed up partly out of curiosity about Connor, “expectin’ some big robust man” but instead finding a paunchy senior citizen with a receding hairline and too-thick glasses. Connor described plans to use police dogs and fire hoses to control the protesters. Pritchett advised Moore to “deactivate” the hoses “immediately” but expressed pessimism about whether the Albany approach could succeed with a hothead like Connor in charge.[14]
At first, though, it seemed as if the containment plan might really work. On April 6, when several dozen protesters gathered to pray and march, Moore followed Pritchett’s lead and warned them calmly through his bullhorn that they were parading without a permit. Connor himself instructed the Klan to stay far away from the marchers, for fear of replicating the Freedom Riders debacle. After several days of restraint, however, the Birmingham police departed from Pritchett’s example by arresting King and then holding him in jail. King seized the opportunity afforded by eight days of solitude to compose what would become his famous “letter from a Birmingham jail,” its initial draft scribbled along the margins of daily newspapers.
The differences between Birmingham and Albany grew still more significant over the next several weeks. On May 2, movement organizers launched a “children’s march,” drawing hundreds of students—some as young as six—out of school to walk, sing, and dance in the streets before submitting to arrest. The following day, facing hundreds more young marchers, Connor decided that he’d had enough and issued the order that both sides had long expected. For several minutes on May 3, in full view of photographers and news reporters, the Birmingham police turned their dogs and fire hoses on the children. The resulting images—a high school sophomore fending off a German shepherd lunging toward his chest, children crouching in pain and terror as streams of water hit their fragile bodies—did just what the academy men had feared: they attracted national attention to King and the protesters, and thus made the Birmingham police into symbols of everything wrong with Southern law enforcement.
For all their lasting power and significance, the most dramatic forms of police violence lasted only a short time. On May 4, when the children went out again, the fire hoses and dogs were still there but used with more discretion, less a full assault than an implied menace. On May 5, the firefighters refused to turn on their hoses at all. By that point, Kennedy aide Burke Marshall had arrived in town as an emissary from the Justice Department, hoping to broker a deal between the protesters and the white business owners downtown. Within days, the city announced a historic (if limited) accord, setting in motion the desegregation of its department stores, restaurants, and public facilities.
Less noticed were the changes taking place in law enforcement at the same time. In 1963, Birmingham policeman Mel Bailey, yet another of Hoover’s academy graduates, began a thirty-three-year stint as sheriff of Jefferson County, the start of an uneven move away from Connor’s methods. Both Connor and Hanes were soon out of office for good, having lost a special election. While critics drew a straight line between Hoover’s racism and Hanes’s “rabidly segregationist” mayoralty, it was Hoover’s other disciples, the academy graduates and police professionalizers, who emerged with greater power in their hands. Though it would be remembered as a fearsome example of Connor-style brutality, Birmingham also showcased Hoover’s preferred approach to policing, in which conservative race politics and modern police methods went hand in hand.[15]
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In the early stages of the Birmingham demonstrations, both Hoover and the White House had maintained that there was no federal role to be played. That began to change in mid-May after the children’s marches, when a series of bombings aimed at the city’s civil rights leadership shattered any illusion that nonviolence was destined to carry the day. On May 11, explosions went off in two locations: one at the home of King’s brother, A. D., a local preacher, and a second beneath one of the SCLC’s rooms at a local hotel. King had left Birmingham earlier that day, but a crowd gathered to register its outrage on his behalf, pelting the police with bottles and rocks—in one case even tackling and stabbing an officer. Hoover accepted responsibility for the bombing investigations under the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which allowed the FBI to investigate cases in which either the suspects or explosives were thought to have crossed state lines. Kennedy went well beyond that, into bolder and more decisive action. After months of contemplation, he concluded that a federal civil rights law banning discrimination in public accommodations would be needed to settle the Southern question.
Kennedy delivered on that idea a month later, in an impromptu television address that would come to be seen as the high point of his presidency. On the morning of June 11, in a show of defiance against a federal court decision ordering the desegregation of the University of Alabama, Governor Wallace made a self-described “stand in the schoolhouse door,” a staged confrontation in which he bodily attempted to block the first Black students from entering the university before stepping aside for federal troops. That night, disgusted at Wallace’s insurrectionary posturing, Kennedy appealed to Congress in a somber thirteen-minute television address backing a new law that would guarantee equal access to public accommodations, including restaurants, stores, schools, transit hubs, and universities. “The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them,” he declared. It was a profound shift from where his own presidency had begun, and it presaged greater enforcement activity by the federal authorities.[16]
Hoover had been part of the process by which the president arrived at his new position, if only in indirect ways. In early June, the Levison wiretaps revealed plans afoot for a March on Washington to pressure the White House into supporting a federal civil rights law. “The threat itself may so frighten the President that he would have to do something,” King told Levison, by way of explanation. Hoover sent those words along to the White House. So when Kennedy surprised everyone with his televised address less than a week later, it was in part an effort to outflank King, and to shift the pressure of the march away from the White House and onto Congress.[17]
But new pressures kept emerging. And more and more, they drew Hoover in. Just after midnight on the evening of Kennedy’s speech, Medgar Evers, field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP, collapsed in the driveway of his Jackson home, the victim of a gunshot to the back. He died almost immediately, presumed to be a victim of Klan retaliation against Kennedy’s civil rights stance. Hoover sent agents in to investigate, since Evers’s voting-rights work, combined with the timing of the shooting, made his murder a possible federal violation.
In the meantime, the FBI continued to pursue information about King’s plans as the civil rights movement surged into a new phase, its ambition for a federal civil rights law now backed by the president. By throwing his support behind the law, Kennedy had tied himself to King—and made himself more vulnerable to accusations that might besmirch the civil rights leader. On June 17, less than a week after the president’s speech, Bobby called Hoover to say that he was ready to confront the Levison-O’Dell issue again, and to warn King not to be in touch with either man “directly or indirectly.” In that conversation, Hoover repositioned himself as an ally concerned about the ways that Levison and O’Dell might taint King’s righteous efforts. “If King continues this association, he is going to hurt his own cause,” he declared, adding that “nothing could be worse” for the movement’s future.[18]
