The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [365]
Bobby was still interested in dimming the lights and hurrying everyone offstage, but this theater had become irresistible and new players arrived who sought to speak their parts. King had chosen not to join the Freedom Riders on their journey. He knew that he had to speak his lines or in the next act of this drama he might have no lines at all. He saw this as “a turning point and a testing point…. If we can break the back of opposition here, public facilities will be desegregated tomorrow.” Much to Bobby’s discomfiture, King insisted on flying into Montgomery, where he was met at the airport by roughly fifty federal agents who escorted him to the home of the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a civil rights leader. King was a believer in moral witnessing, and he needed dramatic moments on which to make his stand. That evening fifteen hundred crowded into Abernathy’s First Baptist Church, while outside a crowd of whites twice that size stood and jeered and threatened, held off by a cordon of federal marshals. As the night went by, the mob pushed nearer and nearer, heaving Molotov cocktails and trying to break down the church doors. Time and again they were pushed back by the seriously outnumbered federal marshals.
While this was going on Sunday evening, Bobby sat in his sports clothes in his office trying to barter some semblance of peace. His brother wanted his administration’s history to be written on a world stage in a bold, steady hand, not scribbled in blood by a racist mob who would gladly have set fire to that church or bludgeoned King and others to death. In that event, others probably would have also picked up the gun and written their own bloody pages in the history of the time.
Governor Patterson was a segregationist and a savvy politician. The Alabamian was trying by word and act to tell the Kennedys that if they sought to impose what he considered liberal mores on his state, they would have an uncivil war on their unclean hands. Patterson no more wanted bloody streets and marching troops than did the Kennedys, but he could not afford to be seen as caving in to the hated northern intruders. As the governor saw it, King’s arrival on the scene increased the dangers tenfold, for the black troublemakers were now led by the most hated black in the white South.
In the church hundreds of parishioners for whom the church was the sheltering center of their lives sat among the Freedom Riders and other activists. While King stood in the pulpit preaching to them words of faith and moral politics, outside danced a mad mob, dark, malevolent bearers of anarchy.
Late that night Patterson agreed to send in the Alabama National Guard to protect the church. Bobby was immensely relieved, but for King, the sight of Alabama National Guardsmen instead of the hoped-for federal troops surrounding the church deepened his fears and dismay. “You shouldn’t have withdrawn the marshals!” King yelled at Bobby with such force that he pulled the telephone back from his ear. “Now, Reverend,” Bobby rejoined, “don’t tell me that. You know just as well as I do that if it hadn’t been for the United States marshals, you’d be dead as Kelsey’s nuts right now.”
Earlier in the evening Bobby had tried to strike up a rapport by finding a commonality: he talked with King about his grandfather Honey Fitz’s stories of anti-Catholic agitators burning nunneries in Boston. That may have resonated somewhat with the minister, but the obscure reference to Boston Irish history passed right by him. “What are Kelsey’s nuts,” King asked.
Bobby’s night of listening to screaming, ranting players in this dangerous game was not at an end. “You are destroying us politically!” Patterson yelled at him a few minutes later. That was a charge guaranteed to resonate. Patterson had been a Kennedy supporter, and if he was destroyed, what malevolent figures might rise in his place?
“John, it’s more important that these people in the church survive physically