At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch Page B

Ellington also warned of a duplicitous streak to Wallace’s folksy manner (“You can’t trust him…you talk to him, you don’t know what he’s gonna say that you said…there’s an element of danger in talking with George”), but Hill made essentially the same point. “That damn little Wallace,” he warned Johnson, would find a theatrical way to magnify himself, just as he had stood in the schoolhouse door against integration “to show the people of Alabama that he fought to the bitter end.” Wallace would maneuver to make Johnson appear the instigator of federal tyranny and racial chaos, Hill predicted, so that “the people down home gotta think well, my God, he [Johnson] just moved in there and took over for this King.”
    Hill offered Johnson sympathy but no advice. Johnson likened his razor’s choice to Vietnam. “I had to send the Marines in yesterday,” he said.
    â€œIt’s a helluva dilemma,” said Hill about Alabama. He bemoaned his home crisis as though the Asian conflict did not yet register for him.
    Johnson disclosed reports already reaching the White House that the wave of protest against Wallace was strong. “This fella’s sent out wires all over the United States, King has, askin’ everybody to come in there for the march tomorrow,” he said. “And they’re fifty Protestant ministers from Washington, D.C., for instance, chartered an airplane, and they’re gettin’ ready to go, and they’re flying in and coming by bus and everything else from all over the country.”

    T HE W ASHINGTON charter was the work of glacial church bureaucracies accelerated to lightning speed. One of King’s telegrams calling for a “ministers’ march to Montgomery” * scarcely arrived on Monday at the New York office of the National Council of Churches before ten church executives vowed to be in Selma by 8:30 the next morning. The board of the Council’s Commission on Religion and Race (CORR), which had been created after the breakthrough anti-segregation marches of 1963 by Birmingham’s Negro children, voted to buttress King’s appeal with its own press release and mass telegrams, and by midday, the council’s chapter in the greater Washington area chartered an airplane to accommodate the prominent clergy whose instant mobilization attracted notice from the White House staff.
    Reporters bombarded the Washington archdiocese wanting to know whether Roman Catholics would be permitted to go on the charter flight, since the hierarchy had forbidden participation of priests and nuns in all previous demonstrations, including the 1963 March on Washington. In a frenzy of church politicking, amid rumors that fervent clergy might break church discipline if refused, Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle reluctantly granted an exception “just this once,” and astonished Catholics rushed to join Protestants at the airport. At least two of them, Monsignor George L. Gingras and Father Geno Baroni, either missed or evaded calls from Auxiliary Bishop John Spence trying to revoke their mission on the ground that the Bishop of Alabama was withholding the required consent. Once word flashed through the diocese that Vatican protocol was breached, a helpful secretary at one Baltimore parochial school buzzed the classroom intercom with a message for a sympathetic teacher: “Sister Cecilia, do you want to go to Selma?” She did.
    National officers of the Episcopal Church responded to King’s telegram on Monday by voting to sidestep their ecclesiastical rules. Presiding Bishop John Hines notified Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter of Alabama that Tuesday’s march in Selma qualified as a “recognized ecumenical activity” in light of previous resolutions of support for the voting rights movement, and therefore needed no sanction by the local bishop. “By nightfall,” Hines reported to his