Involuntarily, he glanced sidelong to his left where is wife sat between him and Dr King and his wife, Coretta. Beyond the leader of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, United States Deputy Attorney General Nicholas deBelleville ‘Nick’ Katzenbach stared fixedly to his front. Once it was decided that Katzenbach’s boss, the Attorney General was not attending the ‘Oakland Cemetery Event’, there had been an unseemly scramble to find a full Cabinet member to send down to Atlanta and Stewart Udall, the Secretary for the Interior had drawn the short straw. Udall a former three-term Congressman from Arizona — like Katzenbach another Army Air Force veteran from the forty-five war in which he had flown 454th Bomb Group B-24 Liberators based in Italy — had caviled at being dragged away from Philadelphia at the very moment the House was attempting to salami-slice his department’s budget appropriation for 1965-66. Given that in the US system the Department of the Interior might more correctly have been described as ‘the Department of Everything Else’, that is, everything else nobody wanted to have to worry about; everything from water, land and mineral rights to Indian Affairs, Udall took the view that his ‘office’ needed every cent listed in the 1965-66 allocation, and had long planned to be in Philadelphia over the weekend bending old friends’ ears.
Ivan Allen’s wife, Louise, smiled tight-lipped.
They had discussed the text of the short speech he planned to make in the coming minutes, and agreed that they were doing the right thing. It was one thing for Allen to put his head above the parapet in his own back yard; another entirely to publicly invite the whole South to have a pop at him. Jim Crow’s spirit was alive and well in the surrounding states and the Klu Klux Klan was malignantly resurgent from the Carolinas to Mississippi. If times were not already bad enough there was always room for them to get worse.
Nearly fifteen hundred Georgia State Troopers and National Guardsmen patrolled the perimeter of the forty-eight acre cemetery. Inside it Secret Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents had merged into the huge crowds, and Atlanta PD officers armed with carbines and pump action shotguns stood watchfully in a cordon covering the flanks and rear of the ‘stage party’. In between the front row of that ‘party’ and the swaying waves of humanity stood a single thin line of Dr King’s people, backed up by two dozen police officers in their normal service uniforms but armed only with night sticks — each of which they had been ordered to place on the grass at their feet — and side arms.
At the time of its founding the cemetery had been on land to the south of the city. The original six acre plot situated in the south east corner of the ‘modern’ Oakland Cemetery was one of the oldest surviving historic sites in Atlanta; most of the rest of the Civil War era city having been burned down in 1864. In the last century the burial ground had been subsumed, and surrounded by the growth of Atlanta until in the modern era it sat squarely within the urban sprawl to the south of the great matrix of railway lines and marshalling yards that delineated the central districts of the city from the south eastern suburbs.
About half of the cemetery was a general burial ground — that is, areas undefined by race, religion, ethnicity or the cruelties of history — which lay outside the original ‘six acres’, the Confederate section, the ‘New’ Jewish section, and the combined Potter’s Field and Black sections. Students of such things maintained that the Confederate section, in 1863 and 1864 located within half-a-mile of several hospitals was the last resting place of some seven thousand fallen from that war. The burial count for the ‘New Jewish’ section, which dated to the latter part of the nineteenth century was less certain, but probably similar to that in the Confederate section, while the number of the dead in the Black section was anybody’s guess because unlike elsewhere in the cemetery, its wooden crosses had mostly rotted long ago while the marble, rock and cement gravestones and memorials in the other sections had survived.
Most Georgian historians agreed that between sixty and seventy thousand souls had been laid to rest in the hallowed ground of Oakland Cemetery. Although the last family ‘plots’ had been sold as long ago as 1884, burials continued in them, and in other plots reserved by the city. It was only right that the dead of Bedford Pine Park should lie in honor in this place, forever protected close to the heart of the great city of Atlanta.
Five members of Dr King’s entourage had been shot dead or subsequently died of their wounds that day in February. Three others including Dr King had been seriously wounded. That tragedy had been compounded by the panic in the packed crowds around the stage where one hundred and seventy-nine people had been killed, crushed and trampled in the press and another forty-three badly injured.
Suddenly Ivan Allen was standing at the barrage of microphones gazing out across the sea of faces, black and white intermingled for as far as the eye could see. The pity of it was that it had taken grief and shock, and fear to finally bring people together. Fear and the sickening knowledge that outside the gates of Oakland Cemetery the laws and attitudes of the slave-owning Old South still held sway over great tracts of the same Confederacy that had supposedly crushed a century ago.
“We live in a city forever marked like Cain by the tide of this nation’s Civil War. We live in a city immortalized in the literature and the public imagination of all Americans by tragedies which happened before any of us here today were born. Men from this great city have proudly fought in all of America’s wars, and their blood now lies on foreign fields, courageously shed to guard our freedom.”
Allen was no barnstorming orator. His public speaking ‘gifts’, such as they were, were of the accomplished, competent variety for he had learned his craft among friends and like-minded men and women, rarely stepping off the safe path of least resistance. He had been reluctant to challenge segregationist shibboleths, or to break away from the straightjacket of bigoted Southern Democrat orthodoxy in any way. He had been a businessman, active in the local commercial community, a leading light of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce who basically, had gone along with a lot of things he personally, and morally, found distasteful most of his adult life until he ran for Mayor in 1961. Unfettered by the native racism of his opponent in that race he had found himself, almost by accident, speaking for and with Atlanta’s largely disenfranchised colored people and through his contacts with members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, almost inadvertently confronted the indefensible iniquities of generations of racial prejudice.
“The cost of the Bedford Pine Park atrocity fell disproportionately upon the African-American population of our city.” Until lately he would never have used that term, non-whites were ‘blacks’ or ‘coloreds’, descriptions bandied around like insults. “Elsewhere in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi men who ought to have known better, who ought to have better understood the grace of the merciful Lord that looks over us all that they too profess to obey and worship, averted their eyes. The evil men responsible for the shots that sparked the Bedford Pine Park tragedy knew not what they had done.”
The Mayor of Atlanta had to pause, choked by the emotions of the moment. His prepared script fluttered in a quirk of the sultry breeze blowing across the gathering.
“I have a confession to make,” he continued. “When I ran for Mayor I wasn't an all-fired up liberal. It was only when I saw what the race-baiters were doing to hold back the orderly commercial growth of Atlanta that it infuriated me so much it swung me to the extreme end opposite them. What Christian man or woman can claim that segregation is anything other than the stepchild of slavery?”